2026 brand shift: which heat-pump maker gained the most R290 share in Europe

The striking point is that the supplied corpus does not contain the brand-level R290 share snapshots needed to identify the biggest 2026 gainer, even though it does show a large European catalog dominated by a handful of manufacturers and a much smaller declared R290 footprint than R32 overall. EPREL-based manufacturer totals sum to 60,989 models, led by Daikin Europe N.V. with 14,668 models, or 24.05% of the market, while declared refrigerant usage shows 537 R290 entries versus 13,935 R32 entries and 1,896 R410A entries (brand_share) (refrigerant_universe).

That matters because the article angle asks for a share change versus the previous EPREL snapshot by manufacturer. The corpus includes no prior brand refrigerant snapshot, no manufacturer-level refrigerant mix table, and no country-by-brand refrigerant breakdown. So the strongest defensible takeaway is narrower: the R290 transition is visible in the refrigerant universe, but the evidence here is insufficient to say which manufacturer moved fastest in 2026, or by how many percentage points.

Readers wanting the live market backdrop can cross-check the market index, the manufacturer directory, and the R290-filtered heat-pump catalog. For refrigerant policy context, the refrigerants reference shows that R290 is a natural refrigerant with GWP 0, while R32 carries GWP 771 and an F-gas phase-out date of 2027-01-01 in the supplied reference table (refrigerant_universe).

Europe’s top brands, ranked by model count and refrigerant mix

What the corpus does show clearly is who controls the European model universe. Daikin Europe N.V. ranks first with 14,668 models and a 24.05% share; Mitsubishi Electric Europe B.V. is second with 5,575 models and 9.14%; and Johnson Controls Hitachi Air Conditioning Europe ranks third with 5,207 models and 8.54% (brand_share). Bosch Thermotechnik GmbH follows with 3,602 models and 5.91%, ahead of Ariston SpA on 2,618 models and 4.29% (brand_share).

Those rankings matter for the R290 story because any refrigerant transition can look broad in absolute counts while remaining narrow at the brand level. The top 15 manufacturers alone include brands such as Daikin Europe N.V., Mitsubishi Electric Europe B.V., Bosch Thermotechnik GmbH, Ariston SpA, and Vaillant GmbH, but the corpus does not attach refrigerant mix shares to any of them individually (brand_share).

That leaves a key analytical limit: we cannot rank “Europe’s top brands by model count and refrigerant mix” from the supplied data alone. We can rank by scale, but not by brand-level R290 penetration. Nor can we count how many top-15 brands have above-average R290 penetration, because no manufacturer-specific R290 shares are provided (brand_share).

The standout gainer: how far ahead is the leader, and by how much?

The short answer is that the corpus cannot identify the standout R290 gainer. There is no manufacturer-level time series showing 2026 share versus a previous snapshot, so question 1 cannot be answered with numbers from the supplied probes. For the same reason, question 2 — the leading brand’s 2026 R290 share and its gap to the second-placed brand — is also unanswerable from this dataset.

Likewise, question 4 asks how many total models the leading R290 brand lists in EPREL and what share of its portfolio remains on R32 or other refrigerants. We do have total portfolio counts for the largest brands — for example, Daikin at 14,668 models, Mitsubishi Electric at 5,575, and Bosch at 3,602 (brand_share) — but without brand-specific refrigerant splits, no brand can be confirmed as the “leading R290 brand,” and no residual R32 share can be calculated.

The failed brand-detail probes reinforce that gap. The only brand-detail requests in the corpus — for “daikin,” “midea,” and “mitsubishi-electric” — returned errors stating the manufacturer slug was not found, so there is no fallback manufacturer drill-down to recover refrigerant mix or product-level counts from those calls (brand_detail).

Broad shift or niche play: concentration of R290 adoption across manufacturers

The corpus supports a cautious answer here: R290 is present, but the transition still looks niche relative to R32 in declared refrigerant usage. Across the refrigerant universe, R290 appears 537 times, while R32 appears 13,935 times and R410A 1,896 times; even case-variant propane entries such as R290A and R290a add only 3 more declarations combined (refrigerant_universe).

That imbalance suggests the 2026 shift is not yet broad across the full catalog. But the exact concentration question in the brief — how many manufacturers have at least 50% of their portfolio on R290, and how many have less than 10% — cannot be answered because the corpus provides no manufacturer-by-refrigerant table (refrigerant_universe) (brand_share).

Still, one policy signal is clear. In the refrigerant reference table, R290 is listed with GWP 0, while R410A has a phase-out date of 2025-01-01, R134a 2026-01-01, and R32 2027-01-01 (refrigerant_universe). That regulatory sequence helps explain why buyers and installers are increasingly watching R290 product listings against the wider heat-pump catalog, even if the manufacturer-level winners are not identifiable from this snapshot.

Europe-wide or market-specific: what the country comparison shows

This is another place where the dataset is thinner than the brief requires. The country probe covers energy prices, heating degree days, grid carbon intensity, and subsidies for 32 countries, but it does not include brand-level or refrigerant-level adoption shares by country (country_compare). So we cannot test whether the R290 leader moved in the same direction in Germany, France, Spain, or another major market versus Europe overall.

What we can say is that major national markets present very different operating and policy environments. Germany shows electricity at €0.3869/kWh, gas at €0.1223/kWh, 3,308 heating degree days, and a maximum subsidy of €21,000 (country_compare). France sits at €0.2561/kWh electricity, €0.1436/kWh gas, 2,759 heating degree days, and up to €11,000 subsidy, while Spain is warmer at 2,252 heating degree days, with electricity at €0.2669/kWh, gas at €0.0955/kWh, and a €3,000 maximum subsidy (country_compare).

Those differences are easy to inspect in the 32-country comparison dashboard, as well as country pages such as Germany, France, and Spain. But they do not prove a Europe-wide or market-specific R290 brand shift, because the needed country-brand refrigerant shares are absent from the corpus (country_compare).

What the brands selling more R290 have in common on efficiency

The efficiency question also runs into a data boundary. The corpus provides average SCOP for the top 15 manufacturers overall, not split by refrigerant. Daikin’s average SCOP is 4.44, Mitsubishi Electric’s 4.51, Bosch’s 4.69, Ariston’s 4.66, and Vaillant’s 4.54; Toshiba Carrier Europe is lowest among the top 15 at 3.93 (brand_share). But there is no way here to separate “main R290 adopters” from the rest of the market, so no defensible average SCOP premium for R290-heavy brands can be calculated.

What is visible is that high average SCOP is not confined to the biggest-volume suppliers. Among the top 15 by model count, Bosch averages 4.69, Gorenje 4.67, Ariston 4.66, Gree Spain 4.65, and Ferroli 4.64 (brand_share). For readers tracking efficiency leaders rather than refrigerant strategy, the top SCOP leaderboard and air-to-water SCOP leaderboard are the more direct tools.

So the clean analytical takeaway from the available data is not “brand X won the R290 race.” It is that Europe’s catalog remains heavily concentrated among a few large manufacturers, while declared refrigerant usage still overwhelmingly favors R32 over R290, and the corpus supplied here is insufficient to identify the manufacturer-level winners of the propane transition in 2026 (brand_share) (refrigerant_universe).

Sources

brand_share — EPREL Public API · brand-share aggregation. Snapshot: 2026-05-11.
brand_detail — (probe failed — data unavailable). Snapshot: .
country_compare — Eurostat · NASA POWER · EEA · Househeating Pulse subsidy register. Snapshot: 2026-05-11.
refrigerant_universe — IPCC AR6 GWP table; EU Reg. 2024/573 phase-out schedule; EPREL declared codes. Snapshot: 2026-05-11.

The 2026 R290 race: who is actually gaining share?