Europe 2026: which brands are driving R290 heat-pump listings

R290 is mainstream, but not evenly distributed across brands

R290 appears in 537 EPREL heat-pump listings as of 2026-06-10, equal to just 0.88% of the 60,989-model market snapshot, even though natural refrigerants as a whole reach 3.27% — a sign that propane is now visible, but still far from the market’s center of gravity (market_index_snapshot, refrigerant_universe).

That gap is the core signal. Europe’s listed heat-pump market is still dominated by R32 at 13,935 listings, versus 537 for R290, while legacy R410A still accounts for 1,896 listings and a further 49 are declared as “R410a” in a separate code variant (market_index_snapshot, refrigerant_universe). In other words, the transition is real, but it is not broad-based. It is still a narrow frontier inside a very large catalog universe.

The overall market mix also helps explain why. EPREL’s live snapshot is heavily weighted toward air-to-water heat pumps with 30,452 listings and air-to-air heat pumps with 21,065, plus 9,228 heat-pump water heaters; ground-water systems are only 213 listings and water-water just 31 (market_index_snapshot). Since the corpus does not provide refrigerant-by-type cross-tabs, it cannot prove numerically which of those types carry most R290 listings. But the type structure shows the transition has to happen at scale in mainstream air-based products, not in niche segments, if R290 is to move beyond its current 0.88% share (market_index_snapshot).

For readers tracking the broader market baseline, our market index snapshot, manufacturer directory, and R290 catalog view show the same pattern from different angles.

The manufacturers with the biggest R290 portfolios

The corpus does not include brand-level refrigerant splits, so it cannot answer directly which manufacturers account for the largest number of R290 listings or each brand’s exact R290 model count. That is a hard data gap in this snapshot.

What it does show is which brands have the scale to drive any refrigerant transition in Europe. The largest listed portfolios belong to Daikin Europe N.V. with 14,668 models, or 24.05% of the market; Mitsubishi Electric Europe B.V. with 5,575 models, or 9.14%; JOHNSON CONTROLS HITACHI AIR CONDITIONING EUROPE SAS, SUCURSAL EN ESPAÑA with 5,207, or 8.54%; Bosch Thermotechnik GmbH with 3,602, or 5.91%; and Ariston SpA with 2,618, or 4.29% (brand_share).

After that, portfolio scale falls quickly: ATLANTIC SOC FRANCAISE DEVELOP THERMIQUE lists 1,516 models, Vaillant GmbH 1,195, BDR Thermea Group B.V. 925, GENERAL HVAC Solutions Euro GmbH 921, and Panasonic Marketing Europe GmbH 894 (brand_share). The top five manufacturers alone therefore account for 31,670 listings, or 51.93% of the full 60,989-model market (brand_share, market_index_snapshot). That concentration matters because even a modest R290 shift by one of those players can change the visible market faster than dozens of smaller brands combined.

So while the exact top-R290 ranking is unavailable here, the likely mechanism behind any R290 surge is clear: the transition will be decided disproportionately by a handful of very large catalog owners, not by the long tail of 777 manufacturers (market_index_snapshot).

Who is still leaning on R32, and by how much

At market level, Europe is still leaning heavily on R32. EPREL shows 13,935 R32 listings, equivalent to 22.85% of all listed models, compared with 537 for R290 at 0.88% (market_index_snapshot, refrigerant_universe). If the R410A and R410a declarations are combined, those add another 1,945 listings, or 3.19% of the market (market_index_snapshot, refrigerant_universe).

That makes R32 about 26 times as common as R290 in the current EPREL snapshot: 13,935 versus 537 (market_index_snapshot). It also means that when a brand markets itself as “transitioning” to propane, that claim should be read against a market where the default refrigerant is still overwhelmingly an HFC.

Again, the corpus does not provide manufacturer-by-refrigerant tables, so it cannot state which specific top brands rely “mostly on R32” or give each brand’s percentage split between R290 and other refrigerants. What it can say is that any manufacturer whose listed range broadly mirrors the market is likely still much closer to the R32 catalog than to the R290 catalog, simply because the market-wide base remains so lopsided (market_index_snapshot).

That is why the two-speed framing fits the data. A visible R290 narrative can coexist with a market where almost one in four listings is R32 and fewer than one in 100 are explicitly R290 (market_index_snapshot, refrigerant_universe).

Does the R290 push come with any SCOP penalty?

The market-wide average SCOP is 4.55 across all listed heat pumps (market_index_snapshot). Among the largest manufacturers, several major portfolios sit above that line: Bosch Thermotechnik GmbH averages 4.69, Ariston SpA 4.66, Gree Spain Corporation SL 4.65, FERROLI S.p.A. 4.64, and GORENJE GOSPODINJSKI APARATI D.O.O. 4.67 (brand_share, market_index_snapshot). Daikin Europe N.V. averages 4.44, Mitsubishi Electric Europe B.V. 4.51, Vaillant GmbH 4.54, ATLANTIC SOC FRANCAISE DEVELOP THERMIQUE 4.38, and Panasonic Marketing Europe GmbH 4.30 (brand_share).

But the corpus does not provide average SCOP for R290 models by brand, nor a direct comparison between each manufacturer’s R290 subset and its total portfolio. So it cannot show a measurable R290-specific performance penalty — or lack of one — at brand level.

What it can say is narrower but still useful: the biggest manufacturers potentially capable of leading propane adoption are not clustered at the bottom of the efficiency distribution. Several large European portfolio owners already post average SCOP values at or above the 4.55 market average, which weakens any blanket assumption that a refrigerant transition must coincide with lower listed seasonal performance (brand_share, market_index_snapshot). For broader context, our top SCOP leaderboard and air-to-water SCOP leaderboard show where the efficiency frontier currently sits.

What the refrigerant mix says about Europe’s heat-pump transition

The clearest takeaway is not that R290 is winning, but that it has crossed from fringe to signal. Propane has 537 listings in EPREL, enough to be market-visible, yet still tiny beside R32’s 13,935 and the full 60,989-model market (market_index_snapshot, refrigerant_universe). That is a transition, but a narrow one.

It is also a concentrated market structurally. The top five manufacturers hold 51.93% of all listings, and the biggest single player, Daikin Europe N.V., alone accounts for 24.05% (brand_share, market_index_snapshot). So if Europe is moving toward lower-GWP refrigerants in mainstream heat pumps, the shift will show up first as a brand-concentration story: a few large manufacturers moving early, while the rest of the market continues to lean on R32.

The missing evidence in this corpus is the crucial next layer: brand-by-brand refrigerant mix and refrigerant-by-type mix. Without that, we cannot quantify the top five R290 brands, their share of all R290 listings, the drop-off after the leaders, or which laggards still depend most on R32. Those are exactly the numbers needed to prove the full “two-speed transition” thesis.

Even so, the live snapshot already points in that direction. Europe’s heat-pump catalog, manufacturer leaderboard hub, and refrigerants reference all sit on top of the same fact pattern: R290 is now established enough to matter, but not yet distributed widely enough to call the transition broad.

Sources

brand_share — EPREL Public API · brand-share aggregation. Snapshot: 2026-06-10.
refrigerant_universe — IPCC AR6 GWP table; EU Reg. 2024/573 phase-out schedule; EPREL declared codes. Snapshot: 2026-06-10.
market_index_snapshot — Househeating Pulse · Market Index v1, computed from EPREL Public API. Snapshot: 2026-06-10.