Brand signal · 5 min read · Published 2026-07-09
2026 R290 heat-pump brand share in Europe: which makers are winning
A fresh EPREL readout shows whether the R290 shift is still a niche story or becoming a brand-level advantage. The article will identify the leaders, the laggards, and the clearest share change.
The 2026 EPREL brand ranking: who leads by model count
R290 is not yet a market-wide reset: the latest EPREL brand ranking spans 10 manufacturers, and the leader, Daikin Europe N.V., alone accounts for 14,668 listed models, or 24.05% of the universe covered by the top-10 readout (brand_share).
That immediately shows how concentrated the catalog still is. The top five by EPREL model count are Daikin Europe N.V. with 14,668 models, Mitsubishi Electric Europe B.V. with 5,575, JOHNSON CONTROLS HITACHI AIR CONDITIONING EUROPE SAS, SUCURSAL EN ESPAÑA with 5,207, Bosch Thermotechnik GmbH with 3,602, and Ariston SpA with 2,618 (brand_share). The gap from No. 1 to No. 5 is 12,050 models, a very large spread for what is often discussed as a single “European heat-pump market” (brand_share).
Across the whole ranking slice, the total model universe is 60,989 entries (brand_share). Buyers and journalists can benchmark that against the broader heat-pump catalog, the manufacturer index, and the current leaderboards hub, but the core point here is simpler: scale still matters, and Daikin’s scale remains exceptional (brand_share).
SCOP averages add a second layer. Among the top five brands, average SCOP is 4.44 for Daikin, 4.51 for Mitsubishi Electric, 4.18 for Johnson Controls Hitachi, 4.69 for Bosch, and 4.66 for Ariston (brand_share). Bosch is the best performer in that top-five group at 4.69, exceeding the lowest top-five average, Johnson Controls Hitachi’s 4.18, by 0.51 SCOP points (brand_share). A market-wide average SCOP is not provided in the corpus, so it is not possible to quantify how far Bosch exceeds the overall market average.
How big is the R290 footprint in the European heat-pump catalog?
R290 remains a minority refrigerant in the declared EPREL refrigerant mix: 537 entries are labeled R290, versus 13,935 labeled R32 and 1,896 labeled R410A, with only small residual counts for other labels and variants (refrigerant_universe).
Using the declared usage table, plain “R290” represents about 3.3% of the listed refrigerant declarations, while “R32” represents about 84.8% and “R410A” about 11.5% (refrigerant_universe). Even if the small spelling variants “R290A” and “R290a” are included, the propane footprint only rises to 540 entries, still roughly 3.3% of the declared mix (refrigerant_universe). That is the clearest numeric answer to whether propane has already become the default catalog language in EPREL: it has not.
The refrigerant reference table also shows why the transition is strategically important despite that modest share. R290 is classified as a hydrocarbon refrigerant with GWP 0 and natural status true, while R32 is an HFC with GWP 771 and R410A is an HFC blend with GWP 1924 (refrigerant_universe). Readers comparing the current R290 catalog slice with the broader refrigerants reference can see that the commercial race is no longer just about efficiency classes, but also about positioning for the post-F-gas product mix.
Which manufacturers are converting R290 into share?
The strongest signal in the data is indirect but still useful: the brands with the biggest catalog footprints and solid average SCOPs are best placed to turn an emerging refrigerant shift into visible share, because EPREL share is still dominated by broad-line suppliers rather than niche specialists (brand_share).
Daikin’s 24.05% share is nearly 2.6 times Mitsubishi Electric’s 9.14%, and 5.6 times Ariston’s 4.29% (brand_share). Yet the average SCOP hierarchy among the top five does not mirror the model-count hierarchy. Bosch, with 5.91% share, posts the highest average SCOP at 4.69, ahead of Ariston at 4.66, Mitsubishi Electric at 4.51, Daikin at 4.44, and Johnson Controls Hitachi at 4.18 (brand_share). That matters because the brands most likely to convert the propane transition into a true brand advantage are the ones combining scale with stronger-than-peer efficiency metrics.
What the corpus does not provide is brand-level refrigerant composition: there is no valid brand-detail output giving each top manufacturer’s R290 share of catalog, or a brand-by-brand refrigerant-versus-type mix. The failed brand-detail probes for “daikin,” “midea,” and “lg” return unavailable data, and no equivalent successful probes are supplied for the ranked manufacturers (brand_detail). So the article cannot identify, with numbers, which top brand has the highest internal R290 concentration, nor compare that refrigerant mix with each brand’s type mix. That limitation should be kept in mind when reading broad claims about “R290 winners.”
Still, the ranking itself is informative. If R290 were already a universal reset, one would expect the refrigerant mix to show a much larger propane share than roughly 3.3%, and perhaps a stronger disruption of the incumbent brand order. Neither is visible yet (refrigerant_universe) (brand_share). For now, the advantage appears concentrated among large manufacturers with enough catalog breadth and enough brand visibility on their manufacturer profiles to absorb the transition early.
Efficiency leaders: the top R290 models by SCOP
The corpus does not currently identify any individual R290 efficiency leaders, because the dedicated top-models probe for refrigerant = R290 returns an empty dataset (top_models).
That means it is not possible, from the supplied evidence, to name the highest-SCOP individual R290 models, their manufacturers, or their exact SCOP values. Readers looking for live rankings can still check the site’s top SCOP leaderboard, the air-to-water SCOP leaderboard, and the filtered R290 model catalog, but this specific article cannot make model-level winner claims without data in the corpus.
The absence of model-level leaders is itself a useful market signal. It suggests the strongest current evidence for propane’s advance in EPREL is catalog presence, not yet a documented public leaderboard of standout R290 models in this dataset snapshot (top_models).
What the brand mix says about competitive positioning in 2026
The 2026 picture is therefore uneven. On one side, the overall EPREL catalog remains dominated by incumbent brands and by R32 rather than R290: Daikin alone sits at 24.05% share, while R32 accounts for 13,935 declared entries against 537 for plain-labeled R290 (brand_share) (refrigerant_universe). On the other, the top-five SCOP averages show that large incumbents are not competing on volume alone, with Bosch at 4.69 and Ariston at 4.66 outperforming Daikin’s 4.44 average despite much smaller model counts (brand_share).
That is why the best reading of 2026 is not “propane has already reordered the market.” It is that propane has become strategically important without yet becoming numerically dominant. The competitive advantage, where it exists, is likely accruing to brands that can combine broad model coverage, respectable fleet efficiency, and an early shift toward low-GWP refrigerants. The corpus confirms the first two conditions clearly; it only partially confirms the third because brand-level R290 shares are not provided (brand_share) (refrigerant_universe).
For readers tracking whether the shift is accelerating, the most useful follow-up is to watch three things together: changes in the market index, the next refresh of manufacturer rankings, and the size of the R290 catalog segment. That combination will show whether R290 remains a niche catalog layer or starts to rewrite the brand pecking order.
Sources
- brand_share — EPREL Public API · brand-share aggregation. Snapshot: 2026-07-09.
- brand_detail — (probe failed — data unavailable). Snapshot: .
- refrigerant_universe — IPCC AR6 GWP table; EU Reg. 2024/573 phase-out schedule; EPREL declared codes. Snapshot: 2026-07-09.
- top_models — EPREL Public API via Househeating Pulse catalog. Snapshot: 2026-07-09.