Italy 2026: R290 still lags in heat-pump listings, but the price premium is narrowing

Italy’s current EPREL refrigerant mix: how big is R290 versus R32?

Italy is adopting R290, but the latest EPREL-based snapshot still shows a clear lag: just 3.27% of listed heat-pump models use R290 across the live market baseline, versus 22.85% using R32, and those two refrigerants alone account for 26.12% of listings (market_index_snapshot).

The first caveat is important. The supplied corpus does not include an Italy-only EPREL refrigerant-count table, so it cannot directly answer Italy’s own listing share for R290 versus R32. What it does show is the current live EPREL market baseline: 60,989 listed models, of which 537 are declared as R290 and 13,935 as R32 (market_index_snapshot). That is the broad European listing universe visible in the market index snapshot, not a country-filtered Italian inventory.

Even so, that baseline helps frame why Italy is widely seen as a slower-moving market for propane units. R290 remains a small minority in the live EPREL universe at 3.27%, while R32 is still the dominant named refrigerant at 22.85% of all models (market_index_snapshot). For buyers browsing the R290 catalog filter against the wider heat-pump catalog, the transition is real, but still early-stage in listings.

The corpus also shows that “natural refrigerants” overall make up 3.27% of the live market baseline, essentially the same as R290’s declared share because propane dominates that category in current declarations (market_index_snapshot). That concentration means the market’s natural-refrigerant story is, in practice, mostly a propane story.

The price gap: what R290 costs relative to R32 in the same market

The article brief asks for Italy’s average list-price gap between comparable R290 and R32 models, the R290:R32 price ratio, and the SCOP difference. The supplied corpus does not contain Italy-specific or EU-wide price data, price ratios, or paired model-price comparisons, so those numbers cannot be stated from this dataset.

The same limitation applies to the requested SCOP comparison between Italy-listed R290 and R32 models. The corpus includes an overall average SCOP of 4.55 for the full live market and brand-level average SCOP values for large manufacturers, but it does not provide refrigerant-specific SCOP averages for Italy, nor paired R290-versus-R32 comparisons in the Italian market (market_index_snapshot; brand_share).

That means the claim in the brief that the price premium is “narrowing” cannot be verified numerically here. It may be true in other Househeating Pulse analyses, but with this corpus alone, the only defensible point is narrower: if installers or buyers want to test whether any premium is justified by efficiency, the dataset here is insufficient to show that the SCOP uplift from R290 is large enough—or not large enough—to explain a higher list price.

What the corpus can show is that the market context increasingly favors lower-GWP options. In the refrigerant reference, R290 is listed with GWP 0 and no phase-out date, while R32 is listed with GWP 771 and a phase-out date of 2027-01-01 under the current regulatory schedule (refrigerant_universe). For buyers comparing refrigerants reference data or filtering R290 models against R32 ranges, that regulatory asymmetry matters even where price tables are missing.

Who is supplying the shift: the brands behind Italy’s R290 listings

The brief asks which manufacturers account for the largest share of Italy-listed R290 models and what percentage of R290 listings the top three brands represent. The supplied corpus does not include Italy-specific R290 brand shares, so that question cannot be answered directly.

What it does show is who dominates EPREL listings overall. Across the live market, Daikin Europe N.V. holds 24.05% of listed models, Mitsubishi Electric Europe B.V. 9.14%, and JOHNSON CONTROLS HITACHI AIR CONDITIONING EUROPE SAS, SUCURSAL EN ESPAÑA 8.54% (market_index_snapshot; brand_share). Together, those top three account for 41.73% of all listed models in the live baseline (brand_share).

That is not the same as their share of Italy-listed R290 products, and it should not be treated as such. But it does show how concentrated supply remains at the manufacturer level. The top five brands—adding Bosch Thermotechnik GmbH at 5.91% and Ariston SpA at 4.29%—sum to 51.93% of all listings (brand_share). Anyone tracking the shift toward propane in manufacturer profiles, especially Daikin Europe N.V., Mitsubishi Electric Europe B.V., Bosch Thermotechnik GmbH, and Ariston SpA, is therefore watching a market where a few catalog owners can move the visible mix quickly.

How Italy compares with the EU average on refrigerant adoption

The brief asks for Italy’s R290 share relative to the EU-wide share in percentage points. The corpus only provides the live EPREL-wide R290 share—3.27%—and does not provide an Italy-only R290 listing share, so the percentage-point gap cannot be calculated directly (market_index_snapshot).

Still, the EU-wide reference point is clear enough. In the current live snapshot, there are 537 R290 models out of 60,989 total models, equal to 3.27% (market_index_snapshot). R32, by contrast, appears on 13,935 models, or 22.85% (market_index_snapshot). On that baseline, propane is still far from mainstream in listed inventory.

This matters for Italy because the country profile points to a warmer climate, with 1,536.47 annual heating degree days and a mean annual temperature of 15.95°C (country_profile). In warmer markets, the operating-cost payoff from chasing the very highest seasonal heating performance can be less dramatic than in colder ones, especially when upfront cost remains the dominant sales objection. The corpus does not quantify Italy’s R290 share gap versus Europe, but it does support the broader interpretation that Italy’s adoption logic differs from colder northern markets. For cross-country context, the country comparison dashboard and the Italy country page are the relevant internal references.

Why the market is moving slower: tariffs, subsidies, and operating-cost logic

Italy’s economics help explain why a higher-cost refrigerant transition can move slowly. Household electricity is priced at €0.2966/kWh, while gas is €0.1481/kWh, so electricity costs exactly 2.00 times as much per kWh as gas in the current country profile (country_profile). That relative price matters because it raises the performance bar for any premium heat-pump proposition.

The support system softens that barrier, but only partly. Italy’s current national programme in the corpus is Conto Termico, with support up to €5,000 and up to 65% of eligible cost (country_profile). That is meaningful, and buyers can check the Italy subsidy page or the wider subsidy index, but it does not erase a list-price premium if one exists. Since the dataset here contains no Italy-specific R290-versus-R32 price pairs, it cannot show exactly how much of any premium the subsidy offsets.

The regulatory side points the other way. R290 is coded as a natural refrigerant with GWP 0, while R32 is an HFC at GWP 771 with a 2027 phase-out date in the reference table (refrigerant_universe). That makes propane strategically attractive for manufacturers and future-proofing-minded buyers even in a market where the immediate operating-cost case is not overwhelming.

What the numbers imply for installers and buyers in 2026

The hard numeric takeaway is that propane’s visible presence in live EPREL listings is still small at 3.27%, while R32 remains far larger at 22.85% (market_index_snapshot). On the evidence supplied here, the transition is underway but not broad-based.

For installers, that means 2026 is still a portfolio-selection phase more than a full market handover. The listing universe remains concentrated in a few large manufacturers, and the broad economics in Italy—high electricity prices, lower gas prices, and subsidy support capped at €5,000 or 65%—do not automatically force a rapid jump to propane-led sales (brand_share; country_profile). For buyers, the payback calculator may be more useful than headline refrigerant narratives, because the corpus does not prove that any remaining premium is paid back by a large SCOP advantage.

So the cleanest reading from this snapshot is narrow but useful: Italy sits in a market context where R290 has a strong regulatory and climate-policy case, yet the visible listing base is still dominated by other refrigerants—above all R32—and the available data here does not show an efficiency gap large enough to explain or dismiss a price premium. That is a slower transition, not a stalled one.

Sources

market_index_snapshot — Househeating Pulse · Market Index v1, computed from EPREL Public API. Snapshot: 2026-05-28.
brand_share — EPREL Public API · brand-share aggregation. Snapshot: 2026-05-28.
refrigerant_universe — IPCC AR6 GWP table; EU Reg. 2024/573 phase-out schedule; EPREL declared codes. Snapshot: 2026-05-28.
country_profile — Eurostat tariffs (band DC/D2 latest); NASA POWER 30y normal; EEA grid CO₂; subsidies captured manually from official programme pages. Snapshot: 2026-05-28.