Here in the UK, I think the cost of installing a new heat pump, bearing in mind that it's an installation from scratch, starts at about £10k ($12k as today's rate) to several tens of thousands. A ground source heat pump (which seem to be the ones pushed by the gov?) is probably £15k to £30k if you can install one at all. Replacing an existing gas boiler, which is what most people have, is probably around £2k or even less in simple cases. I had mine replaced 2 years ago with the new one installed on a different floor so a fair amount of plumbing was required, and it 'only' cost me £3k.

There are government subsidies but it's still much more expensive in the end. I think they are simply too expensive and impractical to install for most people.

FWIW, I just installed two heat pumps in a 3100sf house in the US northeast this summer. We already had ducted AC. The main unit was US$17K and the mini-split for the master bedroom was US$6K. There a US$10K state rebate, but we'll probably only get 70% of that because we've retained the old heating system as a backup and for water, so total cost is US$16K. These are cold-climate units, both rated down to -4°F but I haven't actually made them work below 20°F yet. Next year I'll probably set the aux cutover temperature to something lower and see how it goes. Year after that we'll probably install solar (plus wind if the technology for that has moved along far enough) and switch to all-electric everything.

BTW my town has an all-electric mandate for new construction already, and there's a lot of that. There's also a bylaw that takes effect in 2025/2026 banning gas-powered landscaping equipment.

I think prices have spiked. Two years ago I installed a new heat pump to replace an old failing 5-ton air conditioner (which was paired with a high efficiency natural gas furnace; I kept the furnace as backup instead of relying on electric strips). It was $6K altogether. Was just going to replace the A/C with a new one, but the differential was $1500 and so I figured why not.

OTOH, a few months ago my stepmother installed minisplits after getting quoted $22K to install a whole-home forced air heat pump (going from no forced air at all, so part of that cost was ducting, though it's a single story ranch house so not terribly difficult).

Somewhere between those two points, prices went insane.

What heat pump did you get? I wanted to get a heat pump, but I ultimately ended up just buying AC. I was told it was not possible to pair with an existing furnace because heat pump control systems were proprietary and incompatible with a standard furnace control.

I've just signed up to the Scottish government subsidized scheme for air source heat pumps, so I'll report back to HN on this.

Which I absolutely don't get. I just had a mini split unit installed at our house here in North East, paid £1500 total with installation, and damn that thing throws a lot of heat - I literally stopped using our gas boiler, it's more efficient(and cheaper!!!!) to use this unit for heating than to burn gas. It uses like 800W of power when running but produces ~4kW of heat.

I imagine the "proper" heat pump costs a lot because it has to integrate into your central heating - heat and pump water etc. But I also imagine for a lot of people in this country 2-3 mini splits like this one would be absolutely sufficient, wouldn't cost a fortune, and would save them money(plus they can be used for cooling when needed).