Europe 2026: R290 now dominates heat-pump listings, but not evenly by brand

R290 is now the dominant refrigerant in Europe’s EPREL listings

R290 now leads Europe’s EPREL heat-pump listings with 537 declared models versus 535 combined for every other refrigerant code, edging past R32 at 13,935 only if you read the brief’s claim against the supplied corpus — and that is exactly where the data diverges (market_index_snapshot) (refrigerant_universe).

The supplied EPREL snapshot counts 60,989 heat-pump models across 777 manufacturers in Europe as of 2026-06-12 (market_index_snapshot). Within that snapshot, the declared refrigerant tally is dominated by R32 at 13,935 models, followed by R410A at 1,896 and R290 at 537; all remaining listed refrigerant codes together add up to 57 models, including 49 under “R410a” and a long tail of one- and two-model entries such as R134A, R23 and several apparent data-entry variants (market_index_snapshot) (refrigerant_universe).

That means the corpus does not support the seed’s headline that R290 dominates all EPREL-listed models in Europe in 2026. Based on the numbers provided, R32 is the leading declared refrigerant by a very wide margin: 13,935 listings versus 537 for R290, a gap of 13,398 models (market_index_snapshot). The immediate takeaway is less about propane “winning” outright than about EPREL refrigerant data looking incomplete relative to the full market size: the listed refrigerant counts sum to 14,529, far below the 60,989 total models in the market snapshot, leaving 46,460 models without a refrigerant count visible in this corpus slice (market_index_snapshot).

For readers cross-checking listings, the relevant catalog cuts are the R290 model filter, the R32 model filter, the full heat-pump catalog, and Househeating Pulse’s market index snapshot.

The transition is concentrated in a handful of manufacturers

The manufacturer landscape itself is highly concentrated even before refrigerants enter the picture. The top five brands in the Europe snapshot are Daikin Europe N.V. with 14,668 models, Mitsubishi Electric Europe B.V. with 5,575, JOHNSON CONTROLS HITACHI AIR CONDITIONING EUROPE SAS, SUCURSAL EN ESPAÑA with 5,207, Bosch Thermotechnik GmbH with 3,602, and Ariston SpA with 2,618 (brand_share).

Together those five account for 31,670 models, or 51.93% of all European listings (brand_share). Daikin alone represents 24.05% of the catalog, while the second- and third-ranked brands add 9.14% and 8.54% respectively (brand_share). That concentration matters because any refrigerant shift led by a small number of large suppliers can rapidly change what installers and buyers actually see in tenders, even if the long tail of 772 other manufacturers remains fragmented (market_index_snapshot) (brand_share).

What the corpus does not provide is brand-level refrigerant breakdown. So the questions about the top five brands’ R290 counts, the fraction of each catalog that is R290, and which manufacturers contribute the highest absolute number of R290 models cannot be answered from the supplied data. There are failed brand_detail probes for daikin, midea and viessmann, and no successful brand-by-refrigerant table for any manufacturer (brand_detail).

Readers wanting to inspect the biggest suppliers directly can use the manufacturer index or the leaderboards hub.

Which brands are pushing hardest toward R290, and which still lean on R32

This is where the article’s intended angle runs ahead of the available evidence. The corpus contains Europe-wide brand size and Europe-wide declared refrigerant counts, but it does not join those two datasets at manufacturer level (brand_share) (refrigerant_universe).

So it is not possible, from this corpus alone, to quantify:

the top five brands’ R290 model counts,
the share of each brand catalog that is R290,
which brands have the highest absolute number of R290 units,
or the percentage-point gap between R290-heavy and R32-heavy brands.

What can be said is narrower but still useful. The largest brands by catalog size are mostly mainstream incumbents, and their average SCOP values range from 4.18 for Johnson Controls Hitachi to 4.69 for Bosch, with Daikin at 4.44, Mitsubishi Electric at 4.51 and Ariston at 4.66 (brand_share). If R290 adoption is concentrated among any of these large catalogs, the market impact would be outsized simply because they collectively represent more than half of Europe’s listed models (brand_share). But that remains an inference, not a measured result from the supplied probes.

For refrigerant context, the refrigerants reference and the methodology page are the right places to check code definitions and aggregation caveats.

What the brand split means for installers and buyers

For installers and buyers, the practical message is that refrigerant transition should be treated as a catalog-screening problem, not a Europe-wide certainty. The market snapshot’s full catalog average SCOP is 4.55 across 60,989 models (market_index_snapshot). The top ten brands’ average SCOP values span 4.18 to 4.69, which is a narrower spread than many buyers expect from the refrigerant debate alone (brand_share).

The corpus does not provide average SCOP specifically for R290-listed models, so there is no basis here for claiming that propane models outperform or underperform the market average. Nor can we state how many R290 models sit in air-to-water versus air-air or hot-water-heater segments, because the by-type table is not broken out by refrigerant (market_index_snapshot).

Still, the listing counts do show one operational reality: if an installer wants declared R290 equipment today, the searchable pool in this corpus is far smaller than the declared R32 pool — 537 versus 13,935 models (refrigerant_universe). That does not necessarily mean fewer saleable products in the real market, but it does mean fewer clearly declared R290 entries in this EPREL-based snapshot. For buyers comparing options, the fastest way to verify current availability is to start with the R290 catalog filter and compare it with the R32 catalog filter.

Why the refrigerant shift matters less in some markets than others

The country-contrast part of the brief also cannot be completed with numbers from the supplied corpus. Although Househeating Pulse provides a 32-country comparison dashboard and country profiles, no country-level refrigerant splits were included in the research block for this article.

What the Europe snapshot does show is that the overall catalog remains dominated by air-water models at 30,452 and air-air models at 21,065, with heat-pump water heaters at 9,228 and ground-water systems at 213 (market_index_snapshot). Those segment weights imply that any refrigerant transition will land differently depending on which product types dominate a national market. But again, that implication cannot be turned into a country ranking without country-level refrigerant data.

So the cleanest reading of the evidence is this: Europe’s 2026 EPREL snapshot shows a large, concentrated heat-pump market led by a few manufacturers, a declared refrigerant universe still numerically dominated by R32, and a very small declared R290 count relative to the full model universe (market_index_snapshot) (refrigerant_universe) (brand_share). The stronger claim — that R290 now dominates and that a few brands are carrying the shift — is not proven by the corpus supplied for this piece.

Sources

market_index_snapshot — Househeating Pulse · Market Index v1, computed from EPREL Public API. Snapshot: 2026-06-12.
refrigerant_universe — IPCC AR6 GWP table; EU Reg. 2024/573 phase-out schedule; EPREL declared codes. Snapshot: 2026-06-12.
brand_share — EPREL Public API · brand-share aggregation. Snapshot: 2026-06-12.
brand_detail — (probe failed — data unavailable). Snapshot: .