Future Homes Standard Suppliers: What Changes in 2027

There is no official list of Future Homes Standard suppliers. No government document behind the standard approves a manufacturer, a product or a shortlist. What exists is a dated rule change. The new requirements apply to building work in England from 24 March 2027, and to higher-risk building work from 24 September 2027, subject to transitional arrangements (Building Circular 01/2026).

A Future Homes Standard supplier is therefore any company whose products help a new home meet those rules. That covers heat pumps and other low temperature heating, solar PV, ventilation, fabric products such as windows and insulation, and the information builders must now give buyers.

The way a home proves it passes is changing too. The Home Energy Model (HEM) will replace SAP, the Standard Assessment Procedure, for rating the energy performance of homes. The government has said HEM will no longer launch at the same time as the standard (HEM consultation outcome).

I read all of this as a seller. A dated rule change is one of the few moments when a housebuilder's technical team wants to hear from suppliers. That moment comes well before March 2027.

Getting onto a builder's approved supply chain is a separate job. How UK housebuilders choose and approve suppliers explains how to get approved at all. Start there if no builder has you on its list yet.

What changes in Approved Documents L and F for product suppliers?

The Future Homes Hub sums up the shift: new homes will be fossil fuel free, will rely on low temperature heating, and in most cases will have photovoltaic (PV) panels. For a supplier, the heat in an English new build will have to come from something other than a gas or oil boiler once the rules apply.

The legal detail sits in the 2026 amending regulations for England and the new Approved Documents. The Circular and the other sources cited here point to four changes that reach product suppliers directly:

1. Low carbon heating and high energy efficiency under Part L, the part that covers conservation of fuel and power.
2. Updated ventilation guidance in Approved Document F.
3. L3, a new functional requirement for renewable electricity generated on site.
4. Regulation 40C, a new duty to give information to homeowners of new dwellings.

The Regulatory Policy Committee's opinion on the impact assessment records what the rules aim for. Homes built to the standard should not need retrofit work to reach zero carbon in use once the electricity grid is decarbonized. Whatever a builder fits in 2027 is meant to stay as the home's working system.

That splits suppliers into groups. Makers of gas boilers, flues and fossil fuel controls face a shrinking English new-build market once transitional projects finish. Makers of heat pumps, PV and ventilation get a specification market that asks for more evidence. Most sit in between. If that is you, sort your range into the two groups before you write to a single buyer.

The rules that govern construction products themselves are a separate regime, covered in the UK construction products rules.

Which product categories does the standard pull in?

Each row names the document that puts the category in scope. The last column is my reading of what follows for the supplier.

Read the table as a targeting map as well. A PV maker needs the people who own roof layouts and house types. A window maker needs whoever feeds component data to the energy assessor. Those are different inboxes inside the same builder.

The regulations set requirements and name no brand. If someone offers you a paid place on an "official Future Homes Standard supplier list", ask which government document created it. None of the documents cited here did.

How do the transitional arrangements work?

The dates below come from the Circular and the government's HEM and consultation pages.

The Circular sets the detail. Ordinary, non-HRB work stays on the current rules if its building notice, initial notice or full plans went in before 24 March 2027 and the work commences before 24 March 2028.

Higher-risk building work follows its own line. The new regulations do not apply to it where a valid building control approval application reached the regulator before 24 September 2027 and has not been rejected (Circular). If your products go into tall residential blocks, give that date its own column in your plan.

For a supplier, the transition creates three planning points:

1. Product choices come before the legal date. A builder piloting the new specification on a few plots is also choosing products for its rollout. A datasheet that arrives after the spec review waits for the next one.
2. Old and new specifications will sell side by side. Projects inside the transition keep ordering today's specification, so a line you plan to retire may still have buyers into 2028. Retire nothing until you know which customer sites are still on the current rules.
3. Two compliance methods will run at once after HEM launches. The RPC opinion discusses SAP and HEM running in parallel, so one site may be assessed under SAP while another moves to HEM.

Treat this as background, not legal advice. Read the Circular's transitional section against your own customers' sites.

What is the Home Energy Model and why should suppliers care?

HEM is a calculation method. It publishes no product list. It will replace SAP, the methodology the government currently uses to estimate the energy performance of homes (HEM consultation outcome).

Its first function is showing that a new home complies with the Future Homes Standard (HEM consultation document). That check runs through a layer called the Future Homes Standard assessment wrapper, built for a standardized compliance assessment of new dwellings against Building Regulations (government evaluation of HEM and the wrapper).

The 2023 HEM documents planned for the model to go live alongside the standard. That plan has changed: SAP stays first, and SAP and HEM will overlap for a period (HEM consultation outcome).

Product data is where HEM touches a supplier directly. The consultation document says its HEM version did not work with the existing Product Characteristics Database (PCDB) format, so that database has to be rebuilt. The evaluation confirms a new products database is being created.

None of the documents I cite gives a date or a route for listing products in that database. Treat the data behind your product's SAP entry as something you may have to submit again. Ask your trade body to tell you the day submissions open.

Heat pumps show why this matters. A clarification note issued during the 2023 consultation explained that the original two heat pump models were limiting the ability to model compliant homes, so more heat pump variants were added. How well a method represents a product type decides whether homes using it pass on paper.

The working rule for the dual-running period: your technical team keeps figures for both methods, and every performance figure in sales material names the method that produced it.

Who decides which products go into a new home?

When a rule moves, I want the name that sat on the last product approval. The person on the builder's website is often someone else. Go back through your last 10 housing projects and write down who actually signed off your product. In this market the answer usually sits in a small group of roles:

1. The housebuilder's technical team, with titles like Technical Director, Head of Technical or Group Technical Manager. They write the house-type specification.
2. The commercial or procurement team, which turns an approved product into a group deal and a price.
3. The energy assessor or sustainability consultant, who runs SAP today and HEM later. They can sink a specification without ever placing an order.
4. The heating or M&E (mechanical and electrical) subcontractor who installs and commissions the system, and who often proposes an alternative.
5. Housing association developers and councils that build homes. They buy through public procurement, which has its own rules, and what UK councils expect from suppliers is a separate job. Housing association buyers work differently again, as selling to housing associations as a contractor explains.

Build the list on the titles people in this niche really hold. A filter on the word "manager" drags in site managers and sales managers who never touch a specification. Exclude the generic titles and add the specific ones from your own approvals.

Then add lookalikes: builders and contractors that resemble the ones already buying from you. Check each email with a verifier before you send anything. Bounces should stay under 0.5%.

Where do Future Homes Standard opportunities show up?

No portal announces them. Most signals appear before anyone raises an order:

1. Pilot sites. The Future Homes Hub reports that homebuilders already preparing began with a small number of plots or a single development, resourced those pilots intensively, then scaled to whole developments or rolled out across regions.
2. Spec reviews for house types moving to the new rules. Taking a house type from gas to low temperature heating means reworking its specification, and that review is the meeting to be in.
3. Sites close to the transition dates in the table above, where the builder is deciding which rules a project will fall under.
4. The new HEM products database, once submissions open. An accurate listing is what lets assessors model your product.
5. Public housing tenders, where the specification is written into the tender itself.

How do you reach the people who choose the products?

BCIS, reporting MHCLG data, puts new-build completions in England at 35,800 in the second quarter of 2026, down 3.4% on the quarter. The people who pick products for those homes are a much narrower group: the technical teams at builders, housing associations and contractors.

That work has already started. The Future Homes Hub says developers have been working out likely specifications for their house types to meet Part L since the Future Homes Standard consultation in December 2023.

A narrow market changes how you reach it. Intent data pays off when a market is large. If a market is made of hundreds of target companies and only a handful show an intent signal, I skip the signals and write one offer that fits all of them. The 2027 rule change is the hook for that offer, because most technical teams building homes in England have to plan for it.

Start where trust already exists: your current customers' technical teams first, then their lookalikes. If a message gets no replies from the teams who already know you, it will not get them from 2,000 strangers. And do not shrink the list to a few dozen perfect-fit names.

You need volume and quality together. With only 50 to 100 contacts a month, you are betting that the right people happen to be free, ready and interested at that moment. That is a coin flip. Our answers on lists and targeting cover how a list like that is built and checked.

My team opens with LinkedIn outreach to technical directors, and the first message mentions their own sites. Email comes second, as a warm email to people who replied or engaged there. Budget 5 to 6 touches across both channels. The third follow-up usually earns the reply. Leave real days between them.

A technical director looks at your profile and datasheets before answering. People buy after they have checked you out, and the message only starts that check. Fix the profile and datasheets first.

In our campaigns, a broad send usually gets replies from about 1% of recipients, and nearer 0.5% at thousands of emails a day. A narrow, heavily researched campaign has reached 15% to 17%, with about 3 in 4 of those repliers interested. A note about one team's 2027 sites belongs to the narrow kind. These are ranges from our own work. The bigger the volume, the lower they run.

Meetings can land in the first 30 days. One tech client had no qualified calls at the start. Within 90 days they were taking 40+ a month. A specification sale still moves on the builder's cycle, and the deals from those meetings can close 4 months or more later. Judge the first month on conversations started, not contracts signed.

What to say in the first message

Before: "We are a leading supplier of Future Homes Standard ready heat pumps for all your developments. Please see our full catalog attached."

It claims a status no official list grants. It pitches the range in the opening line, which is the quickest way to be ignored. It writes to "all your developments" when only some sites move to the new rules first.

After: Subject line: Your 2027 starts and the new Part L "Hi Sarah, any site whose plans go in on or after 24 March 2027, or that has not commenced before 24 March 2028, will need to meet the new Part L. It is worth checking whether your assessor will use SAP or HEM on each one. We have mapped which of our units fit that specification and the data your assessor will ask for. Would 15 minutes before your next spec review help? If heating sits with someone else on your team, I would be glad to know who."

Sarah gets a date she can check, something her assessor can use and a small ask. The last line checks you reached the right person. The range waits for the call.

How should a supplier write a consultation response for the next round?

The 2023 consultation proposed changes to Part 6 of the Building Regulations and to Parts L and F, with a call for evidence on Part O, the overheating rule. It covered England only. It has concluded, and the outcome sits in the 2026 amending regulations and the new Approved Documents, so the window for these rules has passed.

The pattern still matters for the next round. The HEM consultation named product manufacturers and suppliers in its audience, and the heat pump variants added while the consultation was still open show that a method can change before it is final. Build the response kit before the next consultation on your product type opens.

Most supplier responses fail in a familiar way. A typical weak paragraph: "We support the Future Homes Standard but feel the timeline is too tight for the supply chain and the model does not reflect our products. We recommend the government works closely with manufacturers." No official can act on that. Each part of a response needs this:

Attach evidence you are willing to stand behind in public: test reports, real install and commissioning records, lead times and a note on how the method models your product.

Keep policy comment apart from a wish list. "The method's heat pump options limit how compliant homes can be modeled, so add variants for this type" is policy comment. "Require builders to use our product type" is a wish list, and it weakens everything else you wrote.

What to do before your next spec review

1. List the customer sites with 2027 starts.
2. Check which rules each site falls under, and whether its assessor uses SAP or HEM.
3. Send the narrow message to the technical team behind each one, on LinkedIn first and by warm email after.

The rule change hands you the reason to write. Specifications for 2027 starts get written long before the first plot starts. Fix your datasheets first. Then send.

If you make products for new homes in England and are unsure which sites to write to before 2027, book a call and bring your last ten housing projects. We can find who signed them off.