A heat pump cost site that publishes the losing cases

The problem we are trying to solve

Search for a heat pump cost in the US and you will land on one of three things: a national average range copied from another site, a manufacturer page written by a marketing department, or a lead marketplace that wants your phone number before it tells you anything.

Almost none of them will tell you that in your state, with your current fuel, a heat pump may not save you money. That is the most important thing a homeowner in this category needs to know, and the market has a structural reason not to say it.

Who writes this

Pages are written by the HeatPumpAtlasUSA editorial team and reviewed against the same published sources the calculator uses: EIA prices, NOAA climate data, Census fuel mix, and the administrator page for every rebate we list. We are not an HVAC contractor and we do not sell equipment. The point of that distance is so the model can say when a heat pump loses, not only when it wins.

Every article shows a written-by line, a last updated date, and a link to the methodology. Rebate pages also carry a separate verification date. If a number changes, the date changes with it.

What we do differently

We built a cost model that prices heat per million BTU rather than quoting a national average. It uses state electricity and gas prices from the EIA, heating degree days from NOAA, and heating fuel distribution from the Census. Then it publishes the result, including the states where the incumbent system wins.

We also treat rebate status as a first-class field rather than a footnote. Several of the largest US programs have exhausted their funding and paused applications, and a lot of content still advertises that money as available. We label it instead.

What we do not do

• We do not publish a page for every US city. Our own research found the search demand is not there.
• We do not scrape a national incentive database and republish it. We verify a focused list instead.
• We do not quote the expired federal 25C tax credit as if it were current.
• We do not tell you a heat pump always saves money. Sometimes it does not.

How this site makes money

Through installer referrals in a small number of markets where we can verify coverage. A homeowner who runs the calculator can choose to send their scenario to installers who work in their ZIP code, and those installers pay for the introduction.

That model only works if the recommendations are honest. A site that talks homeowners into bad projects gets a few months of revenue and then nothing, because the installers stop buying and the homeowners stop coming back. Publishing the losing cases is not a moral position here, it is the commercially sensible one.

What we are not

We are not an installer, we do not sell equipment, and we do not do site visits. We are not a substitute for a load calculation by a competent contractor. The methodology page sets out exactly what our model knows and what it cannot know, and the second list is longer.

Editorial standards

Every page carries a last updated date. Rebate pages carry a separate verification date. Where we cite a source, we link it, and we mark primary government or program sources differently from secondary benchmarks. The same rules sit on the methodology page so you can check the model, not just the prose.

If you find an error, particularly in a rebate amount or a rate, please tell us. We publish corrections rather than quietly editing numbers.