Gov. Cuomo, under pressure from federal officials, announced Sunday night that Ebola-zone aid workers returning to New York will be able to serve their mandatory 21-day quarantines at home instead of at hospitals unless they show signs of a fever.

Cuomo insisted at a press conference that he was not wilting under heat from the White House, but merely further detailing the policy he and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie had announced on Friday.

The same policy will apply in New Jersey, a spokesman for Christie said.

An Obama administration source had said earlier in the day that the feds were “furious’’ with both Cuomo and Christie for announcing their own regulations “without consultation.”

But asked at the press conference whether there was pressure on him from the White House to soften his policy, Cuomo insisted, “I had none.”

The controversy heated up on Saturday when Kaci Hickox, a nurse who worked with Ebola patients in West Africa, went public with an angry attack against the policy after she was quarantined in a tent outside a Newark hospital against her will. Mayor de Blasio criticized her treatment at the press conference Sunday night.

Cuomo admitted that being forced to stay home could be an “inconvenience’’ to a possible Ebola patient, but insisted the “safety of the population’’ is more important.

Speaking of the nurse, he said, “My understanding is she will have a test tomorrow for Ebola. If it’s negative, I guess she’ll go on with the rest of her life.”

She may not qualify to finish her quarantine at home, though, because she lives in Maine — and, said Christie’s spokesman, “Non-residents would be transported to their homes if feasible and, if not, quarantined in New Jersey.’’

Under the home-quarantine policy, aid workers can receive visitors. But they’ll have to be there when health workers randomly show up twice a day to make sure they’re actually at home.

The state will pay their salaries if their employers do not.

Promising that the state’s regulations will be the safest protocols in the country, Cuomo stressed that anyone who breaks the rules of the home-quarantine policy can be detained.

Asked if that was too strict, Cuomo said, “We have to live in the here and now. I’ll take that criticism.

“My Number 1 job is to protect the people of New York, and this does that.”

Meanwhile, de Blasio said he spoke for 10 minutes by phone with the city’s first Ebola patient, Dr. Craig Spencer of Harlem, who contracted the disease while treating patients in Guinea and who is being treated at Bellevue Hospital.

“This is an incredibly noble human being . . . He ran toward the danger, to where the need was greatest, in an effort to protect the entire world from this disease,” de Blasio said.

“He is truly a hero. And I look forward to spending time with him when he has made his recovery.”

Dr. Ram Raju, head of the city Health and Hospitals Corp., which operates Bellevue, said Spencer remained in serious but stable condition and had tolerated a transfusion eatment of blood plasma from Ebola survivor Nancy Writebol.

Additional reporting by Frank Rosario and Sophia Rosenbaum