Would you pay more for a house with a heat pump?
You can bet I would.
I’d rather spend more money to bypass a gas or oil furnace, which—unlike an electric heat pump—it does not vomit toxic combustion productsruns the risk of poison my family and carbon monoxide, and it contributes to climate change. And time heat pumpswhich provide heating and cooling, usually cost more upfront than conventional furnaces two to four times as effectiveand so it can save me money for a long time.
Apparently, I’m not alone in appreciating the comfort, safety and economic benefits of these devices.
Heat pumps provide home values, based on a new report and non-profit organization Smart Energy User Partnershipwhich studies consumer behaviors, interests, and concerns in the energy transition; 257a client intelligence platform that focuses on the United States. properties of residential property for contractors, services, and others; and the trade group of the National Association of Realtors. Their analysis showed that homeowners who install a heat pump can recoup up to a quarter of its cost simply by listing it in real estate listings when they are ready to sell.
While some homeowners may invest in a heat pump for its environmental merits, for most people, economics trumps all, said Scott Rosenberg, co-founder and chief executive officer of 257. “A homeowner who warms up their garage, redoes their bathroom, upgrades their kitchen, is always thinking, ’Am I going to get this value back?’”
By analyzing the sales of more than half a million U.S. homes with heat pumps from 2024 to 2025, the authors found that those with real estate listings that mentioned a heat pump typically enjoyed a 0.6 to 1 percent increase in sales price over homes that did not advertise their heat pump. This modest lift translates to $2,300 to $3,900 per home, given the median sales price of $399,000.
“Just shy of $4K doesn’t seem like a lot of money for a home sale,” Rosenberg said. “But it’s a meaningful part of the investment you made to get the heat pump in the first place.”
In 2026, an installed heat pump system costs an average of approx $15,400for each EnergySage energy market—although prices vary widely by location, home size and electrical service, and local contractors, to name a few variables. A comparable gas furnace combined with a central AC system can be costly half that, according to the home services platform Angi. Listing a home heat pump in a sales listing, assuming the cost of the device is close to the average price, can return about 15 to 25 percent of sales.
Now, every home is different, and people willingly pay premiums for a variety of features, such as floor plan, views and neighborhood vibes.
But Rosenberg is confident that when it comes to listing real estate, the price of a heat pump is realistic, because of method used by his team and the amount of data they analyzed. 257 used a machine learning technique to group homes across hundreds of properties to identify those that are nearly identical, he said. Then, within those groups, sales prices were compared for those homes where a heat pump was or was not mentioned in the ad.
Yueming “Lucy” Qiu, an economics professor at the University of Maryland, called the report “invaluable” for helping measure the premiums people place on heat pumps. “I’m actually very happy that this has happened,” said Qiu, who studied the issue years ago on a small geographic scale.
In 2020, Qiu and colleagues published a peer-reviewed research in Nature Energy that looked at home sales in 23 states from 2000 to 2018 to find out if the presence of a heat pump improved the sale prices of the property.
