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Abstract We extend the concept of Hawking-Moss, or up-tunnelling, transitions in the early universe to include black hole seeds. The black hole greatly enhances the decay amplitude, however, order to have physically consistent results, we need to impose a new condition (automatically satisfied for the original Hawking-Moss instanton) that the cosmological horizon area should not increase during tunnelling. We motivate this conjecture physically in two ways. First, we look at the energetics of the process, using the formalism of extended black hole thermodynamics; secondly, we extend the stochastic inflationary formalism to include primordial black holes. Both of these methods give a physical substantiation of our conjecture.