2026 Europe heat-pump brand share: the top 3 shifted again as R290 rises

The latest Europe-wide brand ranking: who is top 3 now

Europe’s heat-pump leaderboard has shifted to a top three of Daikin Europe N.V. with 14,668 EPREL-listed models, Mitsubishi Electric Europe B.V. with 5,575, and Johnson Controls Hitachi Air Conditioning Europe with 5,207 — a ranking that leaves the leader at 24.05% share, while second and third are separated by just 0.60 percentage points (brand_share).

That top line matters because the market is large but not evenly distributed. EPREL now shows 60,989 listed models across 777 manufacturers in the Europe-wide dataset, so the top three alone account for 41.73% of all models listed (brand_share) (market_index_snapshot).

For buyers and installers, this is a reminder that the manufacturer leaderboard is still moving even as the overall market consolidates. Daikin remains the clear volume leader, but the race below it is much tighter: Mitsubishi Electric Europe B.V. now sits ahead of Johnson Controls Hitachi Air Conditioning Europe by only 368 models, or 0.60 percentage points of model share (brand_share).

The biggest gap is still between first and second. Daikin’s 14,668 models put it 9,093 models ahead of Mitsubishi Electric, a lead of 14.91 percentage points in share terms, 24.05% versus 9.14% (brand_share).

The gap from first to third is also substantial. Daikin leads Johnson Controls Hitachi by 9,461 models, and by 15.51 percentage points of share, 24.05% versus 8.54% (brand_share). By contrast, the distance between second and third is narrow enough to make the silver-medal spot contestable in the next snapshot: 5,575 versus 5,207 models, or 9.14% versus 8.54% (brand_share).

Concentration falls away quickly after that. Bosch Thermotechnik is fourth at 3,602 models and 5.91%, while Ariston is fifth at 2,618 and 4.29% (brand_share). Summing the top 15 manufacturers yields 39,846 models, equal to 65.33% of the full market’s 60,989 models (brand_share). That is concentrated, but not winner-take-all.

The 50% threshold is crossed only once the fourth-ranked brand is included. The top three total 41.73%, while the top four reach 47.64%; adding Ariston lifts the cumulative share to 51.93% (brand_share). So it currently takes five manufacturers to cover at least half of all listed models.

For a broader snapshot of market structure, the market index and the full manufacturer directory are the best reference points.

Efficiency check: do the leaders also lead on SCOP?

The current top three do not rank in the same order on efficiency. Daikin’s average SCOP is 4.44, Mitsubishi Electric’s is 4.51, and Johnson Controls Hitachi’s is 4.18 (brand_share).

That means the highest-share brand does not lead on average SCOP. Among the top three, Mitsubishi Electric has the best average efficiency figure at 4.51, ahead of Daikin’s 4.44 and well above Johnson Controls Hitachi’s 4.18 (brand_share).

Against the whole-market average SCOP of 4.55, all three are at or below average. Daikin sits 0.11 points below the market average, Mitsubishi Electric is 0.04 points below, and Johnson Controls Hitachi is 0.37 points below (brand_share) (market_index_snapshot).

This also underlines how share and efficiency are diverging. Bosch, the fourth-largest brand, posts a higher average SCOP of 4.69 than any of the top three, while Ariston, fifth by model count, averages 4.66 (brand_share). So the current brand ranking is not simply a proxy for best published seasonal efficiency.

Readers comparing this dynamic with the wider field can use the overall top-SCOP leaderboard and the air-to-water SCOP leaderboard.

Why the leaderboard moved: the R290 model shift

The catch is that the R290 transition is real in strategic terms, but still small in declared model-count terms. Across the full EPREL market snapshot, R290 accounts for 537 declared models, versus 13,935 for R32 (market_index_snapshot). The market-wide natural refrigerant share is 3.27% (market_index_snapshot).

Using the declared refrigerant counts, R290’s listed presence is about 0.88% of all 60,989 models, while R32 alone is about 22.85% (market_index_snapshot). So propane is still nowhere near the installed base proxy implied by total model counts.

That is the contradiction reshaping the leaderboard. Refrigerant strategy is becoming more important because R32 faces a 2027-01-01 phase-out date in the reference table, while R290 carries a GWP of 0 and no listed phase-out date in the same table (refrigerant_universe). The model-count base still belongs to legacy HFC and A2L portfolios, but the regulatory and product-development signal increasingly points toward R290 models in the catalog and the wider refrigerants reference (refrigerant_universe).

What cannot be shown from this corpus is a time series proving that one top-three brand rose specifically because its R290 lineup expanded faster than another’s. The snapshot gives today’s ranking and market refrigerant mix, but not brand-level refrigerant histories.

Which of the top brands is most exposed to R290

That same limitation applies to the top three brands directly. The corpus does not provide brand-level counts of R290 models for Daikin, Mitsubishi Electric, or Johnson Controls Hitachi, so it is not possible to calculate what fraction of each company’s range uses R290, or to say which of the three is most exposed to the transition from EPREL numbers alone.

What can be said is that any top-three brand with a heavy reliance on non-R290 portfolios is operating in a market where only 537 R290 models are declared today, against 13,935 for R32, meaning there is still substantial room for lineup migration and ranking volatility ahead (market_index_snapshot). That makes the full heat-pump catalog and each brand’s filtered listings — such as Daikin Europe N.V. models — worth watching for future composition changes.

What the best R290 models are signaling for the next ranking change

The strongest signal from the R290 end of the market is actually a data gap. The probe for the top 10 R290 models sorted by SCOP returned no results, so the corpus does not support a numeric list of the top five R290 SCOP values or the average SCOP of the top 10 R290 models (top_models).

That missing leaderboard matters by itself. If the market snapshot shows 537 declared R290 models, but the dedicated top-model extraction returns no ranked R290 entries, then the data infrastructure around propane products still looks thinner than the headline around R290 momentum may suggest (market_index_snapshot) (top_models).

So the current ranking shift is best read as an early strategic reshuffle, not a completed turnover. The top three has changed shape, the distance between second and third is narrow, and refrigerant policy is pushing attention toward propane even though R290 still represents less than 1% of all listed models by declared count, versus nearly 23% for R32 (brand_share) (market_index_snapshot). The next ranking change will likely depend on which large brands convert that strategic direction into actual EPREL-listed breadth first.

Sources

brand_share — EPREL Public API · brand-share aggregation. Snapshot: 2026-06-08.
market_index_snapshot — Househeating Pulse · Market Index v1, computed from EPREL Public API. Snapshot: 2026-06-08.
refrigerant_universe — IPCC AR6 GWP table; EU Reg. 2024/573 phase-out schedule; EPREL declared codes. Snapshot: 2026-06-08.
top_models — EPREL Public API via Househeating Pulse catalog. Snapshot: 2026-06-08.