Colorado's heat pump rebate is closed. Its FAQ says it is open.

Colorado ran the federally funded heat pump rebate roughly the way the program was designed to work. Households applied through a registered contractor, the money came off the invoice as an upfront discount rather than arriving later, and the state published a dashboard showing how much was left.

Then the money ran out, and the state’s pages did not all find out at the same time. The notice at the top of the program page says the single-family program is closed in both regions. Elsewhere on the same site, the FAQ tells readers that HEAR rebates are now available to single-family homes and that the program runs through 2029, and the contractor page invites contractors to train up for the program that closed.

So the honest answer to “can I get a heat pump rebate in Colorado” is no, not this one, not anywhere in the state. There are two other things you can still reach and one of them is worth a few hundred dollars rather than a few thousand. Seven pages were read for this article, all of them the Energy Office’s own, all on the verification date at the top.

The four layers, and which of them is paying

Two of those six rows can pay a Colorado household today, and only one of them is open to a household at any income. Neither is the one people search for.

Both regions read $0, and $13.7 million is stranded

The Energy Office publishes a funding dashboard, which is more than most states do, and it is the clearest document in this article. It splits the HEAR money into two regions by population. Region 1 is the Front Range, fourteen counties including Denver, Boulder, El Paso and Larimer. Region 2 is every other county in Colorado, and the page lists them all by name.

The dashboard stamps itself Last Updated 08/3/26 and says it is refreshed on Mondays by the end of the day. It also gives the shape of the allocation. Approximately $45.6 million is available for HEAR rebates in total, of which about $31.9 million is for single-family households and $13.7 million is dedicated to multifamily buildings smaller than 50,000 square feet. The page adds that the amounts are approximate and subject to change, so treat all three as the state’s own rounding rather than as an audited balance.

Read those two halves together and the situation is not that Colorado has run out of federal rebate money. It is that Colorado has run out of the part households can apply to, while the other part sits in a bucket that has never opened. The dashboard’s note on that bucket is not a warning about demand. It says the rebates are not yet available.

The program page dates that promise. Rebates for small multifamily buildings will be available in 2026, it says, and HER rebates for manufactured and mobile homes and large multifamily buildings will be available in 2026 as well. That is three separate openings promised before the end of a year that is already into August, on a page whose only opened program is shut. The dashboard is slightly less committal about the same thing, saying only that small multifamily rebates will not be available until later this year.

The state says it is closed and open on the same site

The closure notice appears on the program page, the FAQ and the contractor page, and all three head it Important Program Update with the parenthetical Updated August 2026. That stamp is worth noticing before anything else in this section, because it is the freshest dated thing the Energy Office publishes outside the dashboard, and it says the HEAR single-family program for Region 1 and Region 2 is closed, and that any household applications and project proposals submitted after August 1, 2026 for Region 2 will not be reviewed and will be denied.

The three copies are near-identical rather than word-identical. The contractor page compresses the regions to Region 1 and 2, and its version of the reservation warning says you are not guaranteed a rebate until you receive a formal reservation notice, where the other two say until you and your registered contractor receive one.

Then the FAQ carries a timeline section further down, headed with the question of when rebates will be available. Its answer states that the initial phase launched through the Weatherization Assistance Program on October 30, 2024 and that HEAR rebates are now available to single-family homes. That sentence is on the same page as the closure notice, below it, in the section a reader goes to precisely because they want to know whether they can apply.

Two answers further down, the FAQ is asked how long the program will last. It replies that the Energy Office is launching both HEAR and HER statewide in winter 2025-26 and that the rebates will be available for an anticipated four-year period, through 2029 or until funds are spent, whichever occurs first. The last clause is the state warning readers in advance that exactly this could happen, which is more than most program pages manage. It is also, read today, a page telling a Colorado household that a closed program has three more years to run.

The contractor page fails in a different direction. Below its copy of the closure notice, it tells contractors to email the implementation team for the HEAR single-family on-demand training as a required step toward becoming a registered contractor, and it opens by promising registered contractors increased customer demand. Training for HEAR multifamily and for HER, the two parts that have not opened, is what it says will be available at a future date.

None of this is hidden. It is a set of pages that were each updated in one place and not in the others, which is the ordinary way a government page goes wrong, and it is the exact reason a status claim on this site carries a date.

What HEAR would have paid, for when it is quoted at you

These caps are still printed on the program page and they will keep circulating in contractor quotes and aggregator articles for months. They are what the program pays when it is open. Right now, for a single-family household, it is not.

That last row is a ceiling and not a sum. The rows above it add to considerably more than $14,000, and the page’s own wording is total maximum rebate. Households below 80% of their county’s area median income were covered at 100% of the qualified project cost up to those caps, and households between 80% and 150% at 50%. Above 150% there was no HEAR eligibility at all.

The state credit is open, and it is smaller than the headline

The Colorado Heat Pump Tax Credit is a different pot with different rules, and it is the one route on this page that any Colorado household can use today. It is not a replacement for HEAR and nothing on the state’s pages presents it as one. The FAQ describes the two as stackable, saying HEAR or HER rebates may be combined with the heat pump credit for an eligible installation as long as your contractor is registered with both programs. What has happened is that one of the two layers has gone, and the smaller one is what is left.

It is also not a rebate, and you do not claim it. A contractor registered with the state claims it and is required to pass part of it back as a discount on the invoice.

Two things about that table matter more than the numbers in it.

The first is the gap between the columns. The contractor may retain up to two-thirds of the credit and must pass the rest on, so the number a household is actually promised is the right-hand one. An air-source installation carries a $1,000 credit and a $333 floor under the discount, and anything above that floor is between the household and the contractor.

Set that against the closed rebate carefully, because the two are not measured the same way. HEAR’s nearest equivalent row is the $3,000 cap for a heat pump for space heating and cooling, with $8,000 reserved for a cold climate heat pump. Those are ceilings on a rebate that was income-tested to 150% of area median income and, in the program’s own words, never guaranteed until a formal reservation notice arrived. The $333 is a floor, on a credit with no income test at all. So the comparison is not $333 against $8,000. It is a guaranteed few hundred dollars available to any household, against a capped few thousand that was available to some households and is now available to none.

The second is that these rates already fell. For equipment placed in service between January 1, 2024 and December 31, 2025 the air-source credit was $1,500 with a minimum discount of $499.95, the ground-source credit was $3,000 with $999.90, and the water heater credit was $500 with $166.65. The page states that the totals decrease again in tax year 2029.

What the credit does have going for it is the thing HEAR did not. The eligibility line on the page is anyone installing a qualified heat pump in Colorado through a registered contractor. No income band, no regional allocation, no dashboard counting down to zero. All heat pumps must be Energy Star certified, air-source systems must be Air-Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration Institute matched systems, and heat pumps for space heating and cooling must be designed to meet at least 80% of annual heating needs.

The contractor requirement is where people lose the money, and Colorado runs two separate registrations. The heat pump credit has its own registered contractor list, HEAR had another, and the FAQ says the two can be combined for an eligible heat pump installation only if your contractor is registered with both. The credit page also sets December 31, 2026 as the final date for a contractor to apply to register in order to claim credits for installations completed in 2026. Ask before the work starts, not after.

The weatherization route is the other thing still moving

The Weatherization Assistance Program is not a rebate, and the Energy Office says so in as many words on its federal incentives page rather than on the program’s own. It is a no-cost service for income-qualified households, delivered through local providers by county, and its page is taking applications online.

It matters here for a reason that is easy to miss. The FAQ states that the Energy Office is currently administering a portion of HEAR funding through the Weatherization Assistance Program, and that the initial phase of HEAR launched through it. So a share of the same federal award is being spent through a channel that carries no closure notice.

The weatherization page is honest about its limits. Meeting the income requirement does not guarantee service, availability may depend on current funding and on your utility, and eligible households may be placed on a waiting list. Air source heat pumps appear on its list of common services with the qualifier that they are offered on a limited basis to qualifying homes. Homes weatherized within the previous fifteen years are not eligible again.

Enrolment in a benefit program can substitute for an income calculation here, and this is the point at which the two routes stop being interchangeable. The weatherization page lists Aid to the Needy Disabled, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Supplemental Security Income, SNAP and LIHEAP, which Colorado calls LEAP. HEAR’s list on the program page is longer and different, adding Medicaid, Head Start, Lifeline, the National School Lunch Program and several others. A household that qualifies automatically for one may have to prove income for the other, and a Medicaid enrolment in particular does nothing on the weatherization page. That LIHEAP appears on both is the same categorical shortcut described here.

One Energy Office page carries the federal expiry. Another does not.

Credit where it is due first. The Energy Office’s page on federal incentives states that those tax credits will no longer be available for projects placed in service after December 31, 2025, and it puts the note directly under the link rather than burying it. A live rebate page advertising a federal credit that has ended is the most common stacking error in this niche, and this site found a clear one on a Los Angeles utility page in the same week. The full list of what ended and when is here.

The same office does not carry that note everywhere. The FAQ, asked what to do by a household that needs an upgrade now, answers that the reader may be eligible for state tax credits, federal tax credits and utility rebates, and points them at the federal Energy Savings Hub. Elsewhere on the same page it links the Residential Clean Energy Credit. Neither mention carries the expiry that the federal incentives page states plainly.

So the pattern in this article is not that Colorado is careless and other states are not. It is that a single agency’s pages drift apart from each other, and which one a reader lands on decides what they are told. That is why the layer a figure belongs to matters more than the figure, which is the whole point of the split between the two federal rebate programs.

What to do with this

1. Stop reading the HEAR pages as an offer. Both regions are at $0 and the closure notice is the current statement. Where each state stands as it gets checked is on Is it open in my state?.
2. If a contractor quotes you a federal rebate figure from the table above, ask which pot it comes from and ask to see the reservation. The program’s own wording is that you are not guaranteed a rebate until you and your registered contractor receive a formal reservation notice.
3. Ask any heat pump contractor whether they are registered for the state heat pump credit before you sign, and ask for the discount to be shown separately on the invoice. The page says it should appear as a State of Colorado Heat Pump Discount.
4. If your household is income-qualified, the weatherization route is the one that has not shut. You can apply online or through the local provider for your county, and the page says the provider is who to ask about current status and wait times. Check which benefit programs that page accepts rather than assuming the HEAR list carries over.
5. If you are a building owner rather than a householder, the small multifamily money is the bucket with something in it, and the state has promised it before the end of this year. Neither the dashboard nor the program page names a month.
6. When the prose and the dashboard disagree, take the dashboard. Three pages carry an August 2026 update stamp and still say things the dashboard contradicts, so a stamp is evidence that part of a page was revised, not that all of it was.

If you were told this month that Colorado’s single-family rebate was still taking applications, or you reached a registered contractor who had not heard it closed, write in. The gap between a program closing and its pages saying so is the thing this site is for, and a reader’s account of it is better evidence than a page read from outside.

What is not confirmed here

• Whether the HEAR share inside weatherization is still funded. The FAQ says a portion of HEAR funding is administered through the Weatherization Assistance Program. Nothing on any page read here says whether that portion sits inside the $31.9 million single-family allocation now showing $0, or beside it. Do not read the weatherization route as a way to reach the closed rebate.
• Whether Region 1 closed on a different date. The notice gives one date, for Region 2, and gives no closure date for Region 1 at all. That was checked against all three copies of it and against the dashboard, where Region 1 shows $0 with no date attached. The Region 1 closure is therefore undated on every page read here, not merely unmentioned on one of them.
• What happens to applications submitted before the cut-off. The notice says applications after August 1, 2026 for Region 2 will be denied and that reviews are taking longer because of demand. It does not say whether everything submitted before that date is funded, or how far the queue reaches.
• Whether the multifamily openings will happen this year. Three of them are promised in 2026 on the program page and the FAQ, and the dashboard says only that small multifamily rebates will not be available until later this year. No month is given anywhere.
• The utility layer, which was not read. No Colorado utility page is cited above and none was read successfully. Xcel Energy’s residential rebate address returned a script loader and no text at all, so nothing in this article is a statement about what any Colorado utility, city or county pays. The Energy Office’s own advice is to look for utility and local government rebates separately, and that advice stands.
• Whether the contradictory pages have since been corrected. The FAQ timeline sentence, the FAQ answer saying the rebates run through 2029, and the contractor training invitation were all live on the verification date at the top. A page can be edited without any date on it changing, and these pages carry an Updated August 2026 stamp while still saying it, which is the point.
• Whether the program page contradicts itself too. It carries the closure notice, and below it a six-step how-it-works flow and a full set of eligibility tables written as though a household could start today. That is a weaker case than the FAQ and the contractor page, because a page can reasonably describe how a program works while saying it is shut, so it is not counted above.
• The tax treatment of any of this. The FAQ states that the rebates are treated as a reduction in purchase price and are not reported as income, and that is reported here as what the page says. What any of it means for a particular return is a question for a tax professional.
• HER for manufactured homes and large multifamily. The caps for both are printed on the program page and neither program has opened, so they are not reproduced above. Nothing here is a statement about what they will pay when they do.