Europe 2026: R290 is not always the premium story

R290 won the listing race, but by how much?

EPREL’s latest EU snapshot shows 537 listings declared as R290 against 13,935 declared as R32, which means R32 still leads by 13,398 listings and by 22.0 percentage points of the full 60,989-model database, not the other way around (market_index_snapshot).

That matters because the underlying data does not support the claim that R290 is already dominant in the current EU-wide EPREL snapshot. R290 accounts for just 0.88% of all listed models, while R32 accounts for 22.85% (market_index_snapshot). Across all declared refrigerant codes in the snapshot, R290 ranks second by usage count behind R32 and ahead of R410A’s 1,896 declarations if the code is read exactly as declared in EPREL (refrigerant_universe).

There is also a coding wrinkle. EPREL contains small additional propane variants under R290A and R290a, adding 3 more listings; even grouped together, propane-coded entries reach 540, still far below R32’s 13,935 (market_index_snapshot). For readers tracking the phase-down context, the refrigerants reference shows why these codes matter, but the market balance in this snapshot is unambiguous.

So the real divergence is not “R290 has won Europe.” It is that policy attention and manufacturer messaging are moving toward propane while the listing base still remains heavily R32-weighted in aggregate (market_index_snapshot) (market index).

Who actually put R290 into the catalogue at scale

On manufacturer count, the market is concentrated long before R290 becomes the story. The largest catalogue holder is Daikin Europe N.V. with 14,668 models, equal to 24.05% of all EPREL listings, followed by Mitsubishi Electric Europe B.V. at 5,575 models or 9.14%, and JOHNSON CONTROLS HITACHI AIR CONDITIONING EUROPE SAS, SUCURSAL EN ESPAÑA at 5,207 or 8.54% (brand_share).

The top five manufacturers together account for 31,670 listings, or 51.93% of the entire database; the top ten account for 41,121, or 67.42% (brand_share). That concentration is the clearest numeric signal in the corpus: catalogue leadership sits with a handful of brands.

But the corpus does not provide a manufacturer-by-manufacturer breakdown of R290 share within each catalogue, nor does it show how much of the total R290 pool is concentrated in the top manufacturers. So it is not possible, from this dataset alone, to identify which manufacturer has the highest or lowest internal R290 share, or to quantify top-brand concentration within propane listings specifically.

What the data does show is that visible R290 examples are not concentrated in the very largest catalogues alone. In the top 15 R290 models by listed minimum power, Mitsubishi appears 4 times, while smaller distributors and niche names such as Global Income Sp. z o.o., Arc E-commerce se and Comtrade Distribucija d.o.o. also appear multiple times (top_models). That suggests the early R290 surface in EPREL is more fragmented than the overall manufacturer ranking.

For buyers browsing the full heat-pump catalogue or the R290-filtered listing set, that fragmentation is visible in practice.

The brand-level price premium: where R290 stays expensive and where it doesn’t

The central question in this article is supposed to be brand-level pricing: which manufacturers keep R290 expensive, and which do not. But the research corpus supplied here contains no price dataset at all.

That means the article cannot answer, with numbers, the requested comparison of average listed price for R290 models versus R32 models by major manufacturer. It also cannot quantify the spread in R290/R32 price ratios across brands. Any claim about propane carrying a premium, or about some brands making it affordable, would go beyond the evidence provided.

This absence is important in itself. The supplied data supports a refrigerant-count story and a manufacturer-concentration story, but not a pricing story. If readers want to compare brand catalogues directly, the available route is qualitative browsing via manufacturer pages such as Bosch Thermotechnik GmbH, Ariston SpA and Vaillant GmbH, plus filtered views for R290 models. But a quantified premium analysis is not possible from this corpus.

So the strongest defensible takeaway is narrower than the headline angle: refrigerant adoption and catalogue scale can be measured here; price dispersion cannot.

Do the biggest sellers also have the cheapest R290?

By model count, no one is close to Daikin’s 14,668 listings, while Mitsubishi has 5,575 and Johnson Controls Hitachi has 5,207 (brand_share). Yet among the top 15 R290 models in the supplied leaderboard, Daikin does not appear at all, Mitsubishi appears 4 times, Global Income appears twice, Arc E-commerce appears twice, and Comtrade appears twice (top_models).

That means model-count leadership does not automatically match the visible R290 leaderboard presence in this slice of the data. Mitsubishi’s presence is especially notable because it combines a top-two overall catalogue position with the single highest-powered R290 listing in the sample, the MSZ-RZ50VU / MUZ-RZ50VUHZ at 6.0 kW minimum listed power (top_models).

Still, “biggest sellers” cannot be established from the corpus either. What we have is listing volume, not sell-through, shipment or installation data. And “cheapest R290” is also unavailable because no prices are included. So the answer is partial at best: the biggest catalogue owners are known, and they do not map neatly onto the visible R290 model sample, but neither sales leadership nor low-price leadership can be measured here.

Readers comparing catalogue breadth can use the manufacturer leaderboard hub and the all manufacturers index, but they should not confuse listing scale with market sales.

What the refrigerant mix means for installers and buyers

For installers and buyers, the immediate implication is that Europe’s listed market remains overwhelmingly shaped by non-propane refrigerants even while propane gets the attention. R32 alone covers 13,935 listings, versus 537 for R290, in a 60,989-model universe (market_index_snapshot). Natural refrigerants as a whole account for just 3.27% of the database (market_index_snapshot).

That does not mean R290 is irrelevant. It means choice architecture still depends heavily on manufacturer catalogue strategy, product type mix, and how quickly brands refresh registrations. The snapshot includes 30,452 air-water models, 21,065 air-air models and 9,228 heat-pump water heaters (market_index_snapshot). But the corpus does not break refrigerants down by type, so it cannot show where propane is strongest by segment.

For technically literate buyers, that is a cue to check specific filtered inventories rather than rely on broad narratives. The air-to-water catalogue, air-air catalogue, and newest registrations are more useful for real procurement questions than an abstract “R290 transition” headline.

Why policy watchers should care about price dispersion, not just refrigerant share

Policy watchers should care about price dispersion because refrigerant share alone can overstate how far the transition has really moved. In this snapshot, R32 remains the dominant declared refrigerant by a very wide margin: 13,935 listings versus 537 for R290 (refrigerant_universe). That is the hard count.

But the second hard fact is concentration. Ten manufacturers account for 67.42% of all models, and the largest single manufacturer alone accounts for 24.05% (brand_share). When a market is that concentrated, the pace of any refrigerant shift depends disproportionately on a small number of manufacturers’ product-planning decisions.

What cannot be shown here — but is the key policy question — is whether those firms are narrowing or widening the effective cost gap between refrigerants. Without brand-level price ratios, there is no way to tell from this corpus whether propane is moving into the mainstream through affordability, or staying confined to premium or niche lines.

So the policy lesson from the available numbers is simple: track declared refrigerant counts, but do not mistake them for market accessibility. The current EPREL snapshot says more about catalogue structure than about buyer economics (market_index_snapshot) (methodology notes).

Sources

market_index_snapshot — Househeating Pulse · Market Index v1, computed from EPREL Public API. Snapshot: 2026-06-09.
refrigerant_universe — IPCC AR6 GWP table; EU Reg. 2024/573 phase-out schedule; EPREL declared codes. Snapshot: 2026-06-09.
brand_share — EPREL Public API · brand-share aggregation. Snapshot: 2026-06-09.
top_models — EPREL Public API via Househeating Pulse catalog. Snapshot: 2026-06-09.