Paying for a New Heating System in Onondaga County

The federal Energy Efficient Home Improvement Credit, section 25C of the Internal Revenue Code, no longer applies to property placed in service after December 31, 2025, so a system installed in 2026 does not get it. What is still running is state, utility and county money: NYS Clean Heat through your electric utility for heat pumps, NYSERDA's income-eligible programs, and the HEAP heating equipment repair and replacement benefit through Onondaga County. This page names each one and links its administrator, and deliberately prints no figures.

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The federal credit ended with property placed in service in 2025

Section 25C of the Internal Revenue Code, the Energy Efficient Home Improvement Credit, now ends with a termination subsection providing that the section shall not apply with respect to any property placed in service after December 31, 2025. That text reflects the amendment made by Public Law 119-21, enacted July 4, 2025, which replaced the previous end date of December 31, 2032. The Internal Revenue Service page for the credit says the same thing from the other direction: it is allowed for qualifying property placed in service on or after January 1, 2023 and before December 31, 2025. The test is when the equipment was placed in service, not when it was ordered or paid for, so buying equipment earlier and installing it later does not reach back. This matters because a good number of pages in this metro still advertise that credit as though it were live, and a homeowner building a 2026 budget from one of them is budgeting for money that is not there.

Why you will not find a dollar figure anywhere on this page

Because a stale incentive number is the most damaging kind of wrong: specific, confident and budget-shaping. Look at how the current program is actually structured and you can see why no single figure would survive. The New York State Clean Heat Heat Pump Program Manual, version 1 dated December 12, 2025, publishes the 2026 to 2030 incentives as flat per-project amounts by category rather than per unit of capacity, with a separate table for each utility, so National Grid, NYSEG, RG and E, Central Hudson, Con Edison and Orange and Rockland each have their own numbers. Each of those tables then splits by single family against apartment or small single family home, and by whether the project sits in a Disadvantaged Community. So the honest answer to what is it worth is a question back: which utility, which category, which address. Your contractor pulls the current figure for your utility zone as part of putting the paperwork together, and that is the number to build a budget on.

NYS Clean Heat, and who actually administers it

It is a utility program, not a state check, and knowing that saves a phone call to the wrong place. The Clean Heat program manual names the New York Electric Utilities as the program administrators: Central Hudson, Con Edison, Niagara Mohawk doing business as National Grid, NYSEG, Orange and Rockland, and RG and E. The utilities run the program from 2026 through 2030 under a May 2025 Public Service Commission order, and it offers incentives for air source heat pumps, air-to-water heat pumps, heat pump water heaters and ground source systems. NYSERDA's role in this one is workforce development, codes and standards, technical assistance, demonstration pilots and consumer education, while the utilities administer the end-user incentives. For 2026 through 2030 the manual states the program addresses building electrification for customers in residential one to four family homes, with each participating dwelling unit owned or controlled by an electric customer holding an active account that contributes to the System Benefits Charge, and with units that have already received full-load electrification incentives excluded.

Two villages in this county where the power does not come from National Grid

Worth checking before you assume anything, because it is easy to miss. The Village of Solvay operates its own municipal electric utility, with its own electric department, its own tariff page and its own service garage on Charles Avenue, and Village Hall on (315) 468-1670. The Village of Skaneateles does the same: Skaneateles Electric operates and maintains the village's substation, poles, transformers, cables, street lighting and metering, funded entirely by customer rates, with billing on (315) 685-3440. The Clean Heat program manual names its administrators as the six investor-owned utilities above, and a municipal system is not among them. We are not going to tell you what follows from that for your address, because the eligibility answer belongs to the program and to the village rather than to us. What we will say is that if you live in either village, the call to the village electric department comes before the conversation about which heat pump, not after it.

The heat pump money has a sizing condition attached to it

This is the part of the incentive conversation that connects straight back to whether the system will work. The Clean Heat Heat Pump Program Manual states that to be eligible for incentives all heat pump systems must be sized in compliance with applicable state and municipal code, and that residential heat pumps shall be sized in accordance with ACCA Manual S based on design loads calculated in accordance with ACCA Manual J, or an alternative method approved by the authority having jurisdiction. It goes further and says program administrators may perform additional review or request written justification where projects select non-default or otherwise unusual values for load calculations and system sizing. So the same load calculation you should be asking for anyway is also a condition of the money. If a contractor tells you the incentive paperwork is handled but cannot produce a load calculation, those two statements are in tension, and it is a fair thing to raise before signing.

NYSERDA's income-eligible route starts with an assessment, not with equipment

If household income is part of the picture, this is the door to knock on and the order of operations is different. NYSERDA operates income-eligible residential programs including EmPower+, under which income-eligible New Yorkers can get funding and support to make energy improvements at home. NYSERDA states that EmPower+ customers receive a home energy assessment at no charge that identifies where a home is wasting energy, flags safety or health issues and identifies energy-saving improvements, and that where air sealing and insulation are completed, contractors can make recommendations to upgrade heating and cooling equipment through the program. Eligibility is determined against NYSERDA's published household income guidelines or participation in a utility payment assistance program, and the current thresholds live with NYSERDA rather than here. There is a practical reason the sequence runs that way and it is not bureaucratic: air sealing and insulation reduce the load, and a smaller load means smaller equipment, which is a cheaper machine that will run better.

HEAP, the program a company selling systems has no reason to mention

We have no commercial reason to raise this either, which is precisely why it is here. The State of New York describes the Heating Equipment Repair or Replacement benefit as covering a furnace, boiler and other direct heating equipment necessary to keep a home's primary heating source working. Applicants must own and live in their home, be age 60 or older, and meet HEAP income and resource requirements. Onondaga County Department of Social Services administers it locally, describing HEAP as four components: Regular HEAP, Emergency HEAP, Heating Equipment Repair and Replacement, and Cooling. Regular HEAP can be applied for online or in person at 421 Montgomery Street, 2nd floor, Syracuse, but the county states that the Emergency, repair and replacement and Cooling components must be applied for by telephone or in person, on (315) 435-2700. There is a Cooling Assistance benefit as well, one per household for the purchase and installation of an air conditioner or fan, where the household has not already had a HEAP funded air conditioner within the past five years.

With HEAP the season matters more than the paperwork does

This is the trap, and it catches people who were otherwise eligible. Onondaga County states that the HEAP year generally begins in November and closes when funding is exhausted, which can be as early as mid March. For the 2025 to 2026 program year the county records that Regular HEAP and the Heating Equipment Repair and Replacement component closed on April 10, 2026, that Emergency HEAP ran from January 2 and closed on April 24, and that the Cooling Assistance benefit closed in early June with a tentative reopening in spring 2027. Where HEAP cannot assist, the county points to Emergency Temporary Assistance on the same number, and to 211CNY for after hours heating emergencies. Set against that calendar, the median date of the first fall freeze in Syracuse is October 14, with a one in ten chance it arrives by October 1. If a heating system is on borrowed time, the useful month to be making these calls is September, not the week the furnace gives up.

What to have the contractor do before you sign

Three things. Have them pull the current incentive figure for your utility zone and your project category, in writing, dated. Have them confirm the project is documented the way the program requires, which for heat pumps means the Manual J and Manual S paperwork described above. And have them tell you when the money is paid and by whom, because a utility incentive that reaches you months later is a different cash flow from one applied at invoice. One thing nobody on this site can do is tell you what you qualify for. We do not administer any of these programs, the thresholds and the amounts sit with the agencies that do, and anyone who tells you on a first phone call exactly what you will receive is guessing. If you want quotes from contractors who handle this paperwork routinely, tell us about the house and we will make the introduction.