EPC rating D: what it means
With an EPC rating D, your home picked up between 55 and 68 SAP points. That leaves it sitting halfway along the energy scale, one band under C. The letter on your certificate comes from a number, and that number is the SAP score. Homes with a higher score use energy better.
Check your home's EPC ratingOur EPC checker opens the free GOV.UK register search for any postcode.
- SAP points in band D
- 55 to 68
- of 2025 EPCs in England and Wales
- 29.9%
- average cost to take a rented home from D to C
- £6,000
- can be let today; band C is needed from 1 October 2030
- Until 2030
What a D says about your home
D is the letter you'll see most often on homes in England and Wales. Records go back to 2008, and the count of band D certificates issued since then stands at 10,947,391, more than for any other band.
Recent certificates tell the same story. In 2025 alone, 520,705 homes received a D, making up 29.9% of all certificates that year.
It also matters where you land inside the band. A home scoring 55 has more ground to cover than one scoring 68, and 68 sits just 1 point shy of C. Across Wales, the median score across the decade to March 2025 came out at 68, right at the top of band D. Smaller rural parts of England had a median of 63.
How to lift your EPC rating from D to C
Your certificate comes with a list of suggested improvements for your home. Every suggestion gives an approximate price and the rating you'd expect once the work is finished. Start there, because that list was drawn up for your property and no one else's.
The government's guidance has a sample EPC that walks through one home climbing through band D. Each step adds to what came before:
- Draught proofing, at roughly £80 to £120, left it at D55
- Switching to low energy lighting cost about £20 and gave D56
- High heat retention storage heaters, at £1,200 to £1,800, took it to D67
- Solar water heating, priced around £4,000 to £6,000, reached C69
In that example, the inexpensive jobs shifted the score by about a point. The heavy lifting came from changing the heating and hot water. Your list could easily look different, so weigh up the costs and ratings on your own certificate before you decide what to tackle first.
For homes in the private rented sector, the government's impact assessment reckons the typical move from D to C costs somewhere near £6,000.
Renting out a home rated D
You can let a D rated home today. Since 1 April 2020, landlords have been barred from letting, or continuing to let, covered homes rated below E unless they hold a valid exemption, a documented reason that allows a home to be let despite falling short of the standard. D sits safely above that line.
That standard is due to move up. According to the government's response, every private tenancy will need to follow the new rules by 1 October 2030.
A landlord's spending has a ceiling:
For cheaper homes, that lower cap is known as the Property Value Adjustment exemption. Take a property valued under £100,000: the ceiling there works out at 10% of its value.
| Property value | Spending cap |
|---|---|
| £100,000 or more | No more than £10,000 per property |
| Under £100,000 | 10% of what the property is worth |
Will a D rating get in the way of selling?
A D won't get in the way of a sale. The government guide to EPCs is clear that nothing in the law forces you to act on the improvements your certificate suggests.
The letter could still sway the price. Research cited in the impact assessment showed that B and C rated homes commanded a premium of 4.7% to 4.9% per square metre over D rated ones.