R290 reaches 2026 scale in Europe: which brands are actually leading

R290 is no longer niche in EPREL

R290 now accounts for 537 heat-pump listings in EPREL, equal to 0.88% of the 60,989-model market, which is large enough to be visible at category scale even if brand participation is still far from broad-based (market_index_snapshot).

That is the key 2026 shift. Propane is no longer just a handful of showcase products buried in the database: there are now hundreds of listed models in the R290 catalog, and R290 alone makes up most of EPREL’s natural-refrigerant heat pumps because all natural refrigerants together account for 3.27% of listings, while R290 itself contributes 0.88 percentage points of that total (market_index_snapshot). In the refrigerants reference, R290 is classified as propane, a natural refrigerant with GWP 0 and A3 flammability (refrigerant_universe).

Still, “mainstream” here needs to be used carefully. R32 remains vastly larger at 13,935 declared listings, versus 537 for R290, so the installed direction of travel is clearer than the present balance of volume (market_index_snapshot). What has changed is not that propane has overtaken incumbent refrigerants, but that it has reached a scale where brand strategy can now be measured rather than inferred from one or two launch models.

For a broader baseline, the market index snapshot and the full heat-pump catalog show a market with 777 manufacturers and an overall average SCOP of 4.55 across all listed heat pumps (market_index_snapshot). Against that backdrop, 537 R290 models is enough to reveal who moved first.

Who leads the R290 brand race

The research corpus does not include a brand-by-brand ranking for R290-only listings, so it cannot identify which manufacturers have the most R290 models in EPREL with source-backed certainty.

That gap matters because the article’s central brand-ranking question requires exactly that cut of the data. We do have overall EPREL brand rankings, and those show a highly uneven market structure: Daikin Europe N.V. leads all heat-pump listings with 14,668 models, or 24.05% of the market, followed by Mitsubishi Electric Europe B.V. on 5,575 models and 9.14%, and JOHNSON CONTROLS HITACHI AIR CONDITIONING EUROPE SAS, SUCURSAL EN ESPAÑA on 5,207 and 8.54% (brand_share).

The gap in the overall market is therefore substantial. Daikin’s lead over Mitsubishi Electric is 9,093 models, and its market share is 14.91 percentage points higher; the lead over Johnson Controls Hitachi is 9,461 models and 15.51 percentage points (brand_share). That does not prove the same ranking in R290, but it does show that any refrigerant transition is happening inside a market already dominated by a few very large manufacturers.

The same pattern continues through the next tier: Bosch Thermotechnik GmbH has 3,602 models, Ariston SpA 2,618, and ATLANTIC SOC FRANCAISE DEVELOP THERMIQUE 1,516 in the overall database (brand_share). If R290 adoption is broadening, it is likely broadening from this existing base of large catalog owners rather than from equal participation across hundreds of brands. The manufacturer directory is the right place to inspect that spread brand by brand.

How concentrated the category really is

For R290 specifically, the corpus does not provide the top-3, top-5, or top-10 concentration shares by brand, so those percentages cannot be stated from the available data.

What the corpus does show is that concentration is a structural feature of the wider heat-pump market. In the overall EPREL dataset, the top 3 brands account for 41.73% of all listings, the top 5 for 51.93%, and the top 10 for 60.89% (brand_share). Those totals come from summing the reported brand shares in the ranking table (brand_share).

That matters for the propane story because a refrigerant segment rarely disperses faster than the market around it. When the full market’s top 10 manufacturers already control 60.89% of listed models, a new-technology segment with 537 listings is unlikely to be evenly distributed across a long tail of smaller players from day one (brand_share; market_index_snapshot).

The more defensible 2026 signal, then, is not that R290 leadership is settled, but that the category has reached enough scale for concentration to matter commercially. Buyers comparing the leaderboards hub with the R290 model list are no longer looking at a novelty segment.

What the leading brands say about market breadth

The corpus also does not include R290 listings split by heat-pump type or by model family for each manufacturer, so it cannot show which brands have meaningful R290 breadth across multiple types, or whether leadership rests on a wide portfolio versus a few flagship lines.

We can, however, describe the breadth of the market into which R290 is expanding. EPREL’s overall database is dominated by air-water heat pumps at 30,452 listings and air-air units at 21,065, with hp-water-heaters at 9,228, ground-water at 213, and water-water at 31 (market_index_snapshot). That means any brand claiming real R290 breadth would need presence across at least some of these larger segments, especially air-to-water heat pumps and possibly heat-pump water heaters, where category scale is already established (market_index_snapshot).

The absence of a type-level R290 brand split is not trivial. Without it, one cannot distinguish between a manufacturer with, say, dozens of propane air-water products and a manufacturer with only one or two niche propane variants. Nor can one test whether the market is broadening beyond early movers in a statistically clean way. That remains a live reporting gap rather than a conclusion.

Efficiency check: are the leaders also the best performers?

Across the whole EPREL market, the average SCOP is 4.55, and among the largest overall brands the leaders are not uniformly the most efficient on that measure (market_index_snapshot; brand_share).

Among the top 10 overall manufacturers, Bosch posts the highest average SCOP at 4.69, followed by Ariston at 4.66, Daikin at 4.44, Mitsubishi Electric at 4.51, Johnson Controls Hitachi at 4.18, Atlantic at 4.38, Vaillant GmbH at 4.54, BDR Thermea Group B.V. at 4.37, General HVAC Solutions Euro at 4.39, and Panasonic at 4.30 (brand_share). Relative to the market-wide 4.55 average, Bosch is 0.14 higher, Ariston 0.11 higher, and Johnson Controls Hitachi 0.37 lower (brand_share; market_index_snapshot).

But the corpus does not provide average SCOP for leading R290 brands specifically. So it cannot answer whether the top propane brands are also the best-performing propane brands, or whether R290 leadership is being won on breadth rather than efficiency. For that question, the best available adjacent reference is the top SCOP leaderboard and the air-to-water SCOP ranking, which show where efficiency leadership sits overall, not within propane alone.

What 2026 leadership implies for the next wave of R290 adoption

The strongest data-backed signal is that R290 has crossed from niche visibility to measurable scale at 537 listings, but the evidence needed to prove a broad, evenly distributed brand transition is not in the corpus (market_index_snapshot).

That leaves a narrower but still useful takeaway. Europe’s heat-pump market is already concentrated among a relatively small number of large manufacturers, with the top 10 controlling 60.89% of all listings, and R290’s current footprint remains small beside 13,935 R32 listings (brand_share; market_index_snapshot). In practical terms, that points to a next phase driven first by the catalog decisions of incumbent heavyweights, not by a simultaneous market-wide switch.

So the 2026 brand signal is twofold. First, propane is now big enough in EPREL to matter commercially and editorially at 537 models, or 0.88% of all listings (market_index_snapshot). Second, the underlying market structure suggests early R290 scale will probably stay concentrated until more manufacturers convert meaningful chunks of their ranges rather than adding isolated propane products. The methodology page is worth checking before reading too much into raw listing counts alone.

Sources

market_index_snapshot — Househeating Pulse · Market Index v1, computed from EPREL Public API. Snapshot: 2026-07-03.
refrigerant_universe — IPCC AR6 GWP table; EU Reg. 2024/573 phase-out schedule; EPREL declared codes. Snapshot: 2026-07-03.
brand_share — EPREL Public API · brand-share aggregation. Snapshot: 2026-07-03.