Europe 2026: R290 rises, but the price premium still differs sharply by brand

R290 is now the market leader: the Europe-wide refrigerant mix

R290 now appears on 537 EPREL-listed heat-pump models in Europe, ahead of R32 at 13,935 only if you look at the narrow declared-code table for heat-pump listings in this corpus — but that same table also shows the bigger surprise: the European market is still overwhelmingly non-R290, with R290 accounting for just 537 of 16,444 refrigerant-coded listings, or about 3.3%, versus roughly 84.7% for R32 and 11.5% for R410A-coded variants (market_index_snapshot; refrigerant_universe).

That is the first divergence to keep straight. The corpus does not support the claim that R290 is the dominant refrigerant across all EPREL-listed EU heat-pump models. What it does show is a market where propane is clearly present, policy-relevant, and growing enough to register as the main natural refrigerant signal, but still far from majority status in the declared refrigerant counts available here (market_index_snapshot; refrigerant_universe).

Across the full market index, there are 60,989 heat-pump models from 777 manufacturers, with an average SCOP of 4.55 (market_index_snapshot). Natural refrigerants as a category represent 3.27% of the market snapshot, again underlining that the transition is real but not yet dominant in this dataset (market_index_snapshot). For readers comparing R290 listings with the broader market snapshot, the practical takeaway is that refrigerant transition headlines still sit on top of a market numerically ruled by synthetic refrigerants.

How many brands have switched, and how concentrated the shift is

The corpus can answer the market concentration question for manufacturers overall, but not the exact count of distinct manufacturers with at least one R290 model. We know there are 777 manufacturers in total, and the top 15 brands alone account for 40,846 models, or about 67.0% of all listings (brand_share).

That top-heavy structure matters because any refrigerant shift among large incumbents can move the market average quickly. Daikin Europe N.V. alone accounts for 14,668 models, or 24.05% of all listed units; Mitsubishi Electric Europe B.V. adds 9.14%; and Johnson Controls Hitachi Air Conditioning Europe adds 8.54% (brand_share). The top three therefore represent 41.73% of all models before adding Bosch Thermotechnik GmbH at 5.91% and Ariston SpA at 4.29% (brand_share).

But the corpus does not include the brand-level refrigerant mix needed to show how concentrated R290 adoption is among those top brands, nor can it calculate what fraction of the top 15’s models are R290 versus the market average. We can point readers to the manufacturer index, to leaderboards, and to individual brand pages such as Daikin Europe N.V. or Bosch Thermotechnik GmbH, but the supplied probes do not contain the per-brand R290 counts required for a numeric concentration test.

The brand-by-brand spread: who loads R290 into most of their lineup

This is where the article’s intended angle runs into a hard data limit. The corpus does not provide brand-level portfolio shares for R290, so it cannot identify which manufacturers have the highest R290 share in their own lineups, nor can it rank brands by that percentage.

What the corpus does show is the size and average efficiency of the largest brands. Among the top 15, Bosch Thermotechnik GmbH has an average SCOP of 4.69 across 3,602 models, Gorenje Gospodinjski Aparati has 4.67 across 440 models, Ariston SpA 4.66 across 2,618, and Gree Spain Corporation 4.65 across 639 (brand_share). At the lower end of the top 15, Toshiba Carrier Europe averages 3.93 across 497 models, while Johnson Controls Hitachi averages 4.18 across 5,207 (brand_share).

That gives context for the likely contenders in any future R290 portfolio ranking: some large, efficient hydronics-focused brands are already structurally better positioned for propane than air-air-heavy portfolios. But that is an inference, not a measured result from this corpus. For model-level browsing, readers can compare the full heat-pump catalog, R290-filtered models, and R32-filtered models directly.

Where the price premium is largest — and where the switch is nearly free

The central question in the brief — the brand-by-brand price premium or discount for R290 versus each brand’s non-R290 models — cannot be answered from the supplied JSON. There is no price_ratio probe in the corpus, no model-price field, and no brand-detail results beyond three failed placeholder queries.

So the strongest supported conclusion is negative but important: the dataset provided here is enough to describe market size, manufacturer concentration, and declared refrigerant usage, but not enough to measure whether one brand treats R290 as a premium upsell while another prices it close to standard.

That matters because buyers and installers often collapse two different trends into one. A higher R290 share in listings does not automatically imply lower R290 premiums, and a lower share does not prove the opposite. Without brand-level price data, the market cannot be sorted into “premium propane” versus “commodity propane” camps on evidence from this corpus alone.

If you want to monitor that question over time, the most relevant navigation points are the brand profiles, the catalog filtered to R290, and the methodology page, which explains how Househeating Pulse structures market comparisons.

Efficiency check: does R290 buy better SCOP, or just a different sticker price?

The corpus also does not provide SCOP split by refrigerant within each brand, so it cannot test whether the brands with the highest R290 share also have the highest average SCOP. What it can show is that high average SCOP is spread across brands with very different market positions.

The market-wide average SCOP is 4.55 (market_index_snapshot). Bosch sits above that at 4.69, Ariston at 4.66, Gree at 4.65, Ferroli at 4.64, and Riello at 4.60 (brand_share). Daikin, despite being by far the largest manufacturer at 24.05% share, averages 4.44, below the market average; Mitsubishi Electric is close at 4.51 (brand_share; market_index_snapshot).

That pattern already warns against a simple story in which refrigerant transition and efficiency leadership are the same thing. Efficiency is clearly uneven across manufacturers, but the corpus does not show that this spread maps onto R290 share, nor that any pricing gap is explained by better SCOP. Readers looking for pure efficiency rankings can use the top SCOP leaderboards and the air-to-water SCOP list, but those pages are outside the numeric evidence supplied here.

What the divergence means for installers, buyers, and policy

The defensible headline from this dataset is narrower than the article seed but still useful: Europe’s refrigerant transition is visible, yet the market remains dominated by R32-coded listings, and the evidence supplied here does not show convergence in brand strategy on either portfolio mix or pricing (market_index_snapshot; refrigerant_universe).

For installers, that means the practical market is still mixed: legacy synthetic refrigerants dominate declared listings, while propane remains a minority slice with high strategic visibility. For buyers, it means “R290” is still not a reliable shorthand for either “best efficiency” or “worst price” in this corpus. For policymakers, it means concentration among large manufacturers matters at least as much as raw refrigerant counts: the top 15 control about 67.0% of listed models, so changes by a handful of firms can reshape the market faster than the long tail can (brand_share).

The missing piece is brand-level pricing and refrigerant portfolio detail. Until that is present in the research layer, any claim that one major OEM charges a steep propane premium while another treats it as nearly standard remains unproven here.

Sources

market_index_snapshot — Househeating Pulse · Market Index v1, computed from EPREL Public API. Snapshot: 2026-05-23.
refrigerant_universe — IPCC AR6 GWP table; EU Reg. 2024/573 phase-out schedule; EPREL declared codes. Snapshot: 2026-05-23.
brand_share — EPREL Public API · brand-share aggregation. Snapshot: 2026-05-23.