PAS 2030 Certified Installer
You are not buying a certificate. You are buying a scope
What PAS 2030 is for
PAS 2030 is the BSI specification for installing energy efficiency measures in existing buildings. It exists because government-funded retrofit — ECO4, the Great British Insulation Scheme, and the funded schemes that will follow them — needed a way to specify how a measure is installed rather than merely who installed it.
If you want to be paid out of those funds, you need PAS 2030 certification, and you need TrustMark registration alongside it. Neither substitutes for the other.
Certification costs in the region of £3,000 and is assessed annually by a UKAS-accredited or MCS-approved certification body.
That figure is the one everyone asks about and the least important thing on this page. The expensive part of PAS 2030 is not the fee. It is that certification is granted measure by measure, and every measure you hold carries its own competence evidence, its own quality procedures and its own share of the annual audit.
What the assessment covers
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Installer competence, per measure.
Technical competence has to be demonstrated for each measure you intend to install — cavity wall, loft, external wall, underfloor, heating controls — not for the company in general. Evidence: installer qualification certificates for each measure type.
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A documented quality management system.
Survey, design, installation, commissioning and customer handover, written down, for every measure in your scope. Evidence: the QMS procedure documents.
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A complaints handling procedure.
Written, and with a route to an independent disputes service. Evidence: the procedure document.
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Concurrent TrustMark registration.
Required for essentially all government-funded work. Evidence: TrustMark registration confirmation.
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Certification body assessment.
They audit the QMS and inspect completed installations before granting certification. Evidence: the application, plus sample installations available to inspect.
What you have to keep doing
Pass an annual audit covering both documentation and installation quality.
Report completed installations to the relevant government register inside the required timescale. Late reporting is a funding problem, not a paperwork problem.
Scope is the decision, and most firms get it wrong in the same direction
Here is the thing that separates a PAS 2030 certification that pays from one that does not.
Firms approach certification asking what they can get certified for, and the answer is usually “quite a lot” — so they certify wide. Six measures, eight measures, everything the assessor will grant. It feels like optionality.
It is not optionality. It is fixed cost. Every measure in your scope has to be maintained: the competence evidence kept current, the procedures kept accurate, the measure represented in the annual audit. A scope with eight measures in it and funded work flowing through three of them is paying to maintain five sets of paperwork that earn nothing, every year, indefinitely.
The reverse error is rarer and worse. A firm certifies narrowly, wins funded work that includes an adjacent measure, and cannot install it — so they subcontract it at a margin that makes the job barely worth having, or turn the whole package down.
The useful way to decide is to work backwards from the funding. Look at what the schemes in your area are actually paying for, look at what the managing agents in your region are packaging together, and certify for that, plus the one adjacent measure that most often travels with it. Then review it annually, at renewal, when the cost is visible.
The commercial reality of funded retrofit
Funded work does not arrive because a homeowner found your website. It arrives through managing agents and scheme coordinators who package measures, match them to funding, and allocate them to certified installers.
Which means the marketing question for a PAS 2030 firm is genuinely different from every other trade on this site. You are not being found by customers. You are being selected from a list by a small number of intermediaries who need to know three things: what you are certified for, what capacity you have, and whether your paperwork comes back clean.
That is what your website has to answer, and very few of them do. The typical PAS 2030 installer’s site is written for homeowners who will never commission the work, while the people who actually allocate it cannot tell from the homepage which measures the firm holds.
Put the scope on the site, in a list, in plain terms. Say what regions you cover and what monthly volume you can take. Say how quickly compliance data is returned. That page is worth more than most of the rest of the site put together, because it is the page read by the four people who decide.
The mistakes we see most
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Certifying wide to keep options open.
Every unused measure is an annual cost with no revenue against it.
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Treating TrustMark as a formality.
It is a parallel obligation with its own requirements, and funded work needs both.
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Writing the website for homeowners.
They are not the people who allocate the work.
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Reporting installations late.
The compliance data is part of the deliverable, and a reputation for returning it slowly costs you allocations.
TrustMark is the half your customer can see
PAS 2030 and TrustMark are usually discussed as one obligation because funded work needs both. They are not the same kind of thing, and confusing them wastes the more useful of the two.
PAS 2030 is a technical specification audited by a certification body. Nobody outside the industry has heard of it, and no homeowner will ever search for it.
TrustMark is a government-endorsed consumer register with a public search on it. Homeowners do search that, and local authorities and scheme coordinators point people at it. It is the customer-facing half of a pair of obligations you are already paying for.
Most retrofit firms hold both and market neither. The TrustMark listing is filled in once at registration, with a trading name, a phone number and whatever trade categories were ticked at the time, and never looked at again — so the listing that people actually find describes a business that has since changed its scope twice.
The fix is unglamorous and takes an afternoon. Make sure the listing carries the name you advertise under, the measures you are currently certified for, a working phone number and a link to the site. Then make sure the page it links to answers the question a homeowner arrives with, which is whether their house qualifies for funding and what happens next — not a company history.
You are paying for the registration either way. The difference between a listing that converts and one that does not is entirely in what was typed into it.
Where this lands in Gaffer
Certification scope is recorded as a list of measures rather than as a single yes, with the competence evidence for each attached to it — so preparing for an audit is retrieval rather than reconstruction.
Renewal and audit dates carry reminders far enough ahead to actually do something about them, which matters more here than on most schemes: an expired certification stops funded work dead, and the work does not queue up waiting for you.
Questions retrofit installers ask
Do I need MCS as well? For heat pumps and solar under funded schemes, yes — they are separate certifications with separate scopes.
How long does certification take? Months, mostly spent writing the quality management system. The audit is the short part.
Can I add a measure later? Yes, through your certification body, with its own competence evidence and assessment.
Is £3,000 the real cost? It is the certification cost. The QMS work, the evidence gathering and the audit time are the larger number, and they recur.
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