Quick read
Nobody rings up wanting to spend this money. The boiler has packed in, or it is coughing its way towards another winter, and you want a rough idea of the damage before you start phoning round.
So, the numbers. A new combi supplied and fitted in Edinburgh starts from around £2,200 and typically runs up to £3,500. System and regular (heat-only) boilers start from around £2,800 and run to £4,200 once the hot water cylinder and the controls are counted in. That is typical for Edinburgh and the Lothians, and it sits in line with the rest of Scotland, where most combi replacements land somewhere between roughly £1,900 and £3,200. We are toward the upper half of that, and it is the housing stock here that does it.
What decides where you land inside those ranges is mostly one thing, and it is not the badge on the boiler. It is whether you are swapping like-for-like or changing the way the house makes hot water. Combi for combi in a flat, bottom end. Back boiler coming out of a post-war semi, or a regular system going combi in a four-bedroom house, top end.
None of that is a quote. Nobody can price a boiler properly without seeing where the flue has to go.
Typical cost by boiler type
Appliance plus a standard installation, so filter, flush where it needs one, controls and warranty registration all in.
Typical Costs
Typical Edinburgh ranges, not a quote. Every price we give is fixed and written after a free survey.
A combi swap is the cheapest of those because the job stays where it is. Same position, same pipework, nothing else in the house gets touched. Add a cylinder and a full set of controls and you are into the middle of that list, which is where a lot of three and four bedroom houses sit anyway.
The bottom two are not really boiler replacements. Taking a back boiler out from behind a fire and putting a combi in is a rebuild of the way the whole house makes hot water. Same appliance going on the wall either way, which is the bit that confuses people when they see the gap.
Typical cost by house size
Once a house has a second bathroom a combi usually stops being the right answer, and you are into a system boiler with a cylinder. Real jump in price, that one. It is also where a suspiciously cheap quote often turns out to be cheap because somebody has priced the wrong boiler for the house.
Typical Costs
Bedroom counts are a rough guide. What moves the price is the number of bathrooms, whether there is a cylinder, and how many radiators need balanced.
What actually pushes the price up
Conversion, not swap
This is the big one, and it is worth understanding before you look at another quote.
Taking a boiler off the wall and hanging a new one in its place is a day for two engineers. Converting a regular system to a combi is a different job wearing the same name. The cylinder comes out. The loft tanks get decommissioned. New pipework goes in, the gas supply needs upgraded in a lot of cases, and then somebody has to make good the cupboard and the ceiling and the wall where all that used to live. Reckon on £800 to £1,500 over the like-for-like price, and two days rather than one.
Making good is the bit that gets skated over, incidentally. You have just had a cylinder pulled out of an airing cupboard that has been shut since 1987 and there is a fair chance the plaster behind it is not in showroom condition. That is not an extra, it is part of the work, and it should be sitting in the quote where you can see it.
Edinburgh has no shortage of this sort of job. Post-war semis with the back boiler behind the fire, ex-council stock out in Gilmerton and Danderhall, tenement flats where the airing cupboard disappeared in a nineties refit. Normal work, all of it. But it is not a swap and it should never be priced like one.
Where the flue has to go
Flue position is the quiet cost. Straight out the wall behind the boiler and it adds nothing. Routed vertically through a roof, or shifted along to clear a neighbour's window or a boundary, and you are into extra materials and sometimes access equipment.
If you are in a conservation area or a listed tenement, external flue position can be a planning question as well as a regulations one. Much better raised at the survey than on install day.
Controls
Basic programmer and room stat, included in most quotes. A proper set of modulating controls, the sort that let the boiler run at lower flow temperatures instead of just banging on and off, is typically £150 to £400 on top. It is one of the very few upgrades that genuinely earns its money back on the gas bill, because it changes how much of the time the boiler is actually condensing.
The state of the water in your system
If the existing system is silted, all that sludge sitting in the old radiators gets dragged straight into your new heat exchanger the minute you fire it up. Most manufacturers want evidence of a clean system before the warranty will stand, so on an older system this is not really the optional extra some quotes make it look like.
A power flush typically adds £400 to £800, depending on how many radiators there are. On a lightly dirty system a chemical clean and a magnetic filter costs a good bit less and does the same job. A decent installer will tell you which one your water actually needs instead of defaulting to the expensive answer.
Brand tier
Baxi at the sensible end, Worcester Bosch and Vaillant at the premium end, Ideal somewhere in between. On a domestic install the appliance difference is usually £300 to £600.
That money mostly buys warranty length and parts availability rather than a dramatically better boiler. Staying in the house long term, the longer warranty on a premium unit usually earns its keep. If you are not, a mid-range boiler fitted properly, with the filter in and the system cleaned, will outlast a premium one fitted badly. It is the INSTALL that decides how long you get out of it, not the badge, and that is not sales patter, it is just what we see when we go back to other people's work.
What a quote should include
Before you compare two numbers, check both of them cover:
- The boiler, sized for the property rather than for the price list
- A magnetic system filter, which should NEVER be an optional extra
- Cleaning the existing system, and what level of clean
- Controls, and which ones
- Removal and disposal of the old boiler and any tanks
- Gas Safe notification and manufacturer warranty registration
- Making good where the old unit was
A quote missing three of those is not cheaper. It is smaller.
Is a boiler still the right call?
For most Edinburgh homes on mains gas in 2026, yes. The up-front cost of a heat pump is several times a boiler swap, and plenty of the older housing stock round here is not ready for one until some fabric work is done first. Worth knowing where you stand rather than assuming, mind, especially if you are off the gas grid or you have insulation work planned anyway. We have set the comparison out honestly on heat pumps versus boilers.
Get a real number for your house
Ranges are handy for budgeting and no use at all for deciding. What settles it is somebody standing in the room looking at where the flue goes, what the water looks like coming out of a radiator, and what the house actually needs.
We survey for free, we quote a fixed written price, and nothing extra appears once we start. And if the honest answer is that your existing boiler has a few years left in it yet, you will get told that too. Our boiler installation service page sets out what comes as standard.
Get a free quote or phone 0131 644 0045 and we will get someone out to you.
New boiler cost FAQs
The pricing questions Edinburgh homeowners ask before they commit.
Because they are usually not the same job. One quote has the magnetic filter in it, the system clean, the new controls and the warranty registration. The next one has none of those and comes in £600 cheaper. Brand accounts for a couple of hundred pounds of the gap, scope accounts for the rest. So before you put two numbers side by side, check both of them tell you what happens to the old system water, whether there is a filter, which controls are going in and how long the warranty runs. That is where the difference nearly always hides.