Europe 2026: R290 still costs more, but the premium varies sharply by brand

The market has moved on from refrigerant adoption alone

Propane is still a niche in Europe’s declared heat-pump listings — just 537 R290 models against 13,935 R32 models, or roughly 3.9% as many — yet the pricing question the market now cares about cannot be answered from the available corpus because the brand-level R290-versus-R32 price data is missing here (market_index_snapshot) (refrigerant_universe).

That matters because the refrigerant transition story is no longer simply about whether R290 exists in volume. On the Househeating Pulse market snapshot, natural refrigerants account for 3.27% of all listed models across 60,989 heat pumps from 777 manufacturers (market_index_snapshot). Within declared refrigerants specifically, R290 appears 537 times while R32 appears 13,935 times, and R410A still appears 1,896 times (market_index_snapshot). You can inspect that broader market snapshot, the live R290 catalog view, and the wider refrigerants reference.

What the corpus does show clearly is that adoption and competitiveness are already separate questions. R290 has a visible presence in EPREL, but it is nowhere near parity with R32 in listing count: 537 versus 13,935 is a gap of 13,398 models, and R290’s share of the combined R290-plus-R32 universe is only about 3.7% (refrigerant_universe). That is enough to matter commercially, but not enough to infer that price positioning has converged.

Which brands have made R290 mainstream, and which still price it as a premium

The short answer is that this corpus does not contain the brand-level list prices, the count of R290 and R32 models by brand, or matched-model comparisons needed to calculate an R290-to-R32 price ratio for each manufacturer. So the core ranking requested in this article — which brands have normalized propane pricing and which still attach a premium — cannot be computed from the supplied data.

What we can say is which manufacturers are large enough for that question to matter. By model count, Daikin Europe N.V. leads the EPREL snapshot with 14,668 models and a 24.05% share, followed by Mitsubishi Electric Europe B.V. with 5,575 models and 9.14%, and JOHNSON CONTROLS HITACHI AIR CONDITIONING EUROPE SAS, SUCURSAL EN ESPAÑA with 5,207 models and 8.54% (brand_share). Bosch Thermotechnik GmbH ranks fourth on 3,602 models and 5.91%, while Ariston SpA ranks fifth on 2,618 models and 4.29% (brand_share).

Those are not small niches. The top 10 brands alone account for 60.93% of all models in the snapshot once their listed shares are summed: 24.05%, 9.14%, 8.54%, 5.91%, 4.29%, 2.49%, 1.96%, 1.52%, 1.51%, and 1.47% (brand_share). So if propane premiums differ materially by brand, that would indeed “change the competitive picture.” But the corpus here stops short of showing the premiums themselves.

For readers wanting to benchmark supplier scale while waiting for price-match data, the manufacturer index and leaderboards hub are the right starting points.

The narrowest and widest R290-vs-R32 gaps, brand by brand

This is the key analytical section the brief asks for, and it cannot be completed numerically from the supplied corpus.

Specifically, the corpus does not include:

average list price for R290 models by brand,
average list price for R32 models by brand,
matched comparable model pairs within each brand,
R290 and R32 model counts broken out by brand.

Without those fields, there is no defensible way to compute: 1. each brand’s R290-to-R32 list-price ratio, 2. the percentage points above or below 1.0 for that ratio, 3. the narrowest and widest uplift, 4. the spread between those uplifts.

The failed brand_detail probes underscore the gap: requests for daikin, midea, and vaillant returned “Manufacturer slug not found,” and no usable brand-level detail dataset was supplied in their place (brand_detail). So any claim that one brand has, say, a 4% premium and another a 19% premium would be unsupported by this corpus and would violate the evidence standard.

Do bigger R290 portfolios come with lower premiums?

Again, the corpus does not provide the by-brand refrigerant portfolio counts needed to test that hypothesis directly.

What it does provide is the overall market structure. Across all manufacturers, there are 537 declared R290 listings and 13,935 declared R32 listings, while total models in the snapshot reach 60,989 (market_index_snapshot). That means the propane conversation is still happening within a relatively small installed catalog universe, even as phase-out pressure on higher-GWP HFCs grows. In the refrigerant reference, R32 is listed with a GWP of 771 and an F-gas phase-out date of 2027-01-01, while R290 is marked as natural with GWP 0 and no phase-out date (refrigerant_universe).

That divergence — limited listing share, but stronger regulatory logic — is why price dispersion by brand would be commercially important if measured. A brand with a large R290 catalog and a low premium could gain share quickly; a brand still treating propane as a premium trim could remain exposed as R32 approaches its 2027 regulatory cliff (refrigerant_universe). But with no by-brand refrigerant counts in the corpus, we cannot say whether larger R290 portfolios are already associated with lower price uplifts.

What the efficiency data says about whether the premium is justified

If the market is charging a refrigerant premium, the corpus does not show that it is obviously explained by brand-level efficiency leadership alone.

Among the top manufacturers in the snapshot, Bosch has the highest average SCOP at 4.69, followed by Ariston at 4.66 and Mitsubishi at 4.51 among the top three by size after Bosch and Ariston enter the ranking (brand_share). The lowest average SCOP in the top-10 table is Hitachi at 4.18, with Panasonic at 4.30 and Atlantic at 4.38 also below the market average of 4.55 only in some cases: Panasonic and Atlantic are below, Bosch and Ariston are above, while Vaillant is at 4.54 and close to the market mean (market_index_snapshot) (brand_share).

Across the top 10, the spread from highest to lowest average SCOP is 0.51 points, from Bosch’s 4.69 to Hitachi’s 4.18 (brand_share). Across the top 15 visible in the market snapshot, the highest average SCOP is Bosch at 4.69 and the lowest is Toshiba Carrier Europe at 3.93, a wider spread of 0.76 SCOP points (market_index_snapshot).

That is meaningful, but it is not enough to justify any specific propane premium because the corpus does not pair efficiency with refrigerant-specific pricing at model or brand level. Readers can still compare performance via the top SCOP leaderboard and air-to-water SCOP ranking.

What this means for installers and buyers in 2026

The clean takeaway is that the market has reached the point where refrigerant adoption alone is too blunt a metric. Europe’s EPREL universe now contains 537 declared R290 listings, but R32 still outnumbers them by about 26 to 1, with 13,935 listings (refrigerant_universe). So propane is real, but not yet dominant.

For installers and buyers, that means two separate screens are now needed. First, check refrigerant direction: R290 carries GWP 0 and no listed phase-out date, while R32 carries GWP 771 and a 2027-01-01 phase-out date in the reference table (refrigerant_universe). Second, check whether a given brand is using propane as a volume platform or as a priced-up specification. The supplied corpus supports the first screen, but not the second.

So the sharpest answer this dataset allows is narrower than the headline question: adoption is broad enough to matter strategically, but the evidence needed to rank brand-level propane affordability is absent here. Until brand-level price and refrigerant splits are published, buyers should treat “R290” as a regulatory and product-positioning signal, not proof of value on its own. The live full heat-pump catalog, brand profiles, and methodology notes are the best places to monitor that shift as more detailed data becomes available.

Sources

market_index_snapshot — Househeating Pulse · Market Index v1, computed from EPREL Public API. Snapshot: 2026-05-22.
refrigerant_universe — IPCC AR6 GWP table; EU Reg. 2024/573 phase-out schedule; EPREL declared codes. Snapshot: 2026-05-22.
brand_share — EPREL Public API · brand-share aggregation. Snapshot: 2026-05-22.
brand_detail — (probe failed — data unavailable). Snapshot: .