SEAI grants · County Dublin
SEAI pays a fixed insulation grant set by your home’s type, not by what the job costs. A semi-detached Dublin house can claim €6,000 for external wall insulation and €1,500 for attic insulation. The home must have been built and occupied before 31 December 2010 and have its own MPRN.
Pick your house type to see every wall and attic grant it qualifies for. Then tell us about the job and we'll put it in front of contractors registered with SEAI to work in Dublin.
What kind of home is it?
Get quotes for a detached house
Higher rates apply to some households: attic insulation rises to €2,500 and cavity wall to €2,300 for a detached house where you are on a qualifying welfare payment. First-time buyers get the higher attic rate too, on a home bought since 1 January 2025.
Get quotes for a semi-detached or end of terrace
Higher rates apply to some households: attic insulation rises to €1,900 and cavity wall to €1,700 for a semi-detached or end of terrace where you are on a qualifying welfare payment. First-time buyers get the higher attic rate too, on a home bought since 1 January 2025.
Get quotes for a mid-terrace house
Higher rates apply to some households: attic insulation rises to €1,800 and cavity wall to €1,100 for a mid-terrace house where you are on a qualifying welfare payment. First-time buyers get the higher attic rate too, on a home bought since 1 January 2025.
Higher rates apply to some households: attic insulation rises to €1,400 and cavity wall to €900 for a apartment where you are on a qualifying welfare payment. First-time buyers get the higher attic rate too, on a home bought since 1 January 2025.
SEAI grant amounts, read from seai.ie and checked on 15 August 2026. Grants change — confirm yours with SEAI before you commit to work.
How it works
A contractor pays us a fee on work they win through an introduction from here. That is the whole model: we only get paid if a job actually goes ahead, and never by you.
We are not a contractor and we do not quote for work. Your contract is with the firm that does the job.
House type, rough age, what you're trying to fix. Two minutes. The house type is the part that sets your grant, so it matters more than it looks.
Only contractors on the SEAI register can claim these grants for you. We check the register, and we only approach firms that actually work in your part of Dublin. Here's what registration covers if you'd rather check yourself.
You deal with the contractor directly and the contract is between you and them. Say no to all of them if you want. There's nothing to cancel and nothing to pay us.
Three routes
SEAI runs three separate routes to the same measures. They differ on who holds the money, who picks the work, and how long it takes, and it's the biggest decision you'll make before you pick a contractor.
Whether the grant reaches you as a refund after you have paid the full price, or comes off the invoice before you pay anything.
The grant routes compared — which suits your house, what a One Stop Shop actually takes on, and how to tell whether Warmer Homes applies to you.
Both routes are described on SEAI’s wall insulation page. Checked 15 August 2026.
Dublin housing stock
Before you can choose a wall measure you need to know what your walls are made of, and in Dublin that's mostly a question about when the house went up.
Solid walls and cavity walls take completely different measures, and the rough dividing line runs through the 1940s. That single fact decides which of these pages is the one you need.
On a solid-walled house the choice is between wrapping the outside and dry lining the inside, and they are very different jobs to live through. One changes how the house looks. The other takes 60 to 100mm off the inside of every external wall.
Which is where planning comes in, and it is a Dublin-shaped problem. A lot of the inner suburbs sit inside conservation areas, and those are exactly the red-brick terraces that most need external insulation and are most likely to be constrained from getting it on the front. That question is worked through on the external wall insulation page.
One detail specific to external wall insulation. The wrap adds thickness, so cables and the meter box on the outside wall sometimes have to move. That's an ESB Networks service alteration, arranged separately from the insulation. Ask about it before the quotes come in rather than after.
Not sure? A contractor can tell from a borescope through one drilled hole.
Solid wall
Pre-1945 stock, mostly
Nothing to inject.
Cavity filled
Cheapest measure by far
Blown into the gap.
External insulation
Rooms keep their size
Wrapped, then rendered.
Internal dry lining
Rooms lose 60–100mm
Boarded inside.
Where to start
The grant is a fixed amount set by your house type, not a share of the quote, and that produces a gap most people don't expect. Set SEAI's own median costs against its own grants and the attic grant covers 64 to 74 per cent of the job. External wall insulation covers 25 to 30 per cent. Same scheme, wildly different value.
Cavity fill scores higher still on that measure, as the chart shows, but only where you have a cavity and nobody has filled it yet. The attic is the one almost every house can do, which is why SEAI singles it out as the most cost-effective upgrade a home can make.
So the usual order is attic first, then walls. There's a second reason for that order. Work altering more than a quarter of the home's surface area — which a full external wall job does — requires the house to reach a B2 BER or already have a heating system and attic insulation meeting the regulation standard. Doing the attic first is often what makes the wall job compliant.
Which wall measure comes next depends on what your walls are made of, and that's a question about the age of the house more than anything else. External wall insulation suits solid-walled houses with no cavity to fill. Cavity fill suits the suburban semi-ds where the cavity is still empty. And if the cavity is already filled and causing trouble, it has to come out first — that job has its own page.
Everything on this site
The attic, because it is the cheapest job and the grant covers most of it. Then walls, once you know which kind you have.
The cheapest measure and the one the grant covers most of. What 300mm actually means, and what happens to your storage.
The wrap. Biggest grant, biggest bill, and the one measure where planning permission is a real question in Dublin.
Dry lining. What you do when the outside of the house cannot be altered, and what it costs you in room width.
When old fill has slumped or wet and has to come out, and the second wall grant waiting on the other side of it.
One Stop Shop, manage it yourself, or the free Warmer Homes scheme. Which one you are on changes almost everything.
What one costs, the €50 grant nobody mentions, and why every grant needs one after the work rather than before.
What SEAI registration covers, five things to settle before you sign, and how to tell whether a quote is reasonable.
By local authority
Which of the four Dublin authorities you are in decides which development plan applies to your address and which conservation list it gets checked against. The housing differs just as much, which settles the measure before planning is even a question.
Homes built before 1945 run from 27.7% in Dublin City to 2.3% in South Dublin. That one figure is most of what decides whether you are looking at cavity fill or at the two expensive wall measures.
27.7% of homes built before 1945, 24 conservation areas listed by Dublin City Council.
3.7% of homes built before 1945, 27 conservation areas listed by Fingal County Council.
2.3% of homes built before 1945, 18 conservation areas listed by South Dublin County Council.
12.1% of homes built before 1945, 37 conservation areas listed by Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council.
No cost, no obligation
Tell us about the house. We pass it to SEAI-registered contractors working in Dublin, and they come back to you with quotes. We're not a contractor and we never charge homeowners.
Five questions. Email and the notes box are optional.
8 questions
It depends which route you're on. Manage the job yourself and you apply to SEAI, pay the contractor in full, and SEAI pays the grant to you once the work is done and a post-works BER is completed. Use a One Stop Shop and they apply on your behalf, with the grant deducted from your price up front, so you never handle it.
For insulation measures the home must have been built and occupied before 31 December 2010, and it needs its own MPRN, the meter number on your electricity bill. There's no upper age limit, so most of Dublin's housing stock qualifies comfortably.
Not on a grant. SEAI requires what it calls a whole-surface solution, meaning every external wall gets insulated. Doing one or two doesn't qualify, even if only one room is cold.
Cavity and internal insulation don't need planning permission. External wall insulation changes the outside face of the building, so it can need permission where the house is a protected structure or sits in an Architectural Conservation Area, which covers a lot of Dublin's red-brick terraces. Check with your local authority before you commit.
Nobody can apply for a specific measure for free. SEAI's Warmer Homes Scheme fully funds certain measures for households meeting its eligibility rules, but an SEAI surveyor decides which measures your home gets and an SEAI contractor installs them. Free upgrades are real; choosing what you get is not part of the deal. Everyone else is on the grant routes above, paying the balance.
Attic insulation, in almost every case. SEAI's published medians put a detached attic job at €2,700 against a €2,000 grant, so you pay about €700. The same house's external wall job runs a median €26,500 against €8,000. It's also the least disruptive and the quickest. Walls cost more and save more; the attic is where the ratio is best.
Nothing. We're a referral service, not a contractor. Contractors pay us a fee on work they win, which is why it costs you nothing and why we only get paid if a job goes ahead.
Sometimes. If you previously got a cavity wall grant you can apply for internal or external wall insulation. If you previously got internal wall insulation you can apply for external only. And if you've already had an external wall grant, that's the end of the road for wall measures.