Austria 2026: R290 tops 90% of heat-pump listings

Austria’s 2026 refrigerant inflection in one number

Austria’s listed heat-pump market has already crossed the threshold from transition to dominance: 90.6% of models in the Austria dataset use R290, putting propane 0.6 percentage points above the 90% mark (country_profile; market_index_snapshot).

That is the key signal. A market can be “moving toward” a refrigerant for years; once nine in ten listed models use it, the shift is visible in the catalog itself rather than just in regulatory forecasts. For buyers and installers scanning the heat-pump catalog, Austria now looks like a market where propane is the default listed option rather than the alternative (market_index_snapshot).

The problem is that the supplied corpus does not include an Austria-specific listing count, Austria-specific refrigerant table, Austria-specific type split, or Austria-specific brand split. So the exact Austrian model total, the exact count of Austrian non-R290 listings, the Austrian R290 model count by type, and the top Austrian R290 manufacturers cannot be stated from this dataset alone. The seed establishes the 90.6% Austrian share, but the underlying country-level listing counts needed to derive those follow-on figures are not present in the corpus.

What the corpus does provide is the broader market frame around that Austrian threshold: the EU snapshot includes 60,989 listed models across 777 manufacturers, with an average SCOP of 4.55 in the overall index (market_index_snapshot). That makes Austria’s 90%+ figure notable precisely because it is happening against a much broader European catalog that still looks very different.

How Austria compares with the EU refrigerant baseline

At EU level, R290 is still a niche in listed models: 537 out of 60,989 models, or 0.88% of the market, while R32 accounts for 13,935 models, or 22.8%, and R410A accounts for 1,896 models, or 3.1% (market_index_snapshot). Even adding variant spellings and miscoded propane entries — R290A and R290a — only lifts propane-coded listings by three more models (market_index_snapshot).

That is the central contrast. Austria is presented here as a 90.6% R290 market, while the EU-wide listing base remains overwhelmingly non-propane by volume (market_index_snapshot). Put differently, Austria is not just ahead of the European mix; it is operating on a different refrigerant composition altogether.

The long tail of other declared refrigerants in the EU snapshot is tiny. Beyond R32 and R410A, there are 49 models coded as R410a, two as R134A, and single-model remnants under codes such as R23, R420A, R423A and others (market_index_snapshot). You can inspect the broader refrigerants reference or the live R290 catalog filter and R32 catalog filter to see how narrow the propane share still is in the overall index.

Why does that matter now? Because the policy calendar is tightening around older gases. In the refrigerant reference, R134a carries a phase-out date of 2026-01-01, R32 of 2027-01-01, and R410A of 2025-01-01 under the cited EU schedule (refrigerant_universe). Austria’s catalog mix, at least by share, appears to have moved ahead of that curve rather than waiting for it.

Which product types are driving the R290 surge

The corpus does not provide Austria-only model counts by heat-pump type, so it cannot answer which Austrian type contributes the largest number of R290 listings or what the Austria-only average SCOP is for those R290 types.

What it can show is the structure of the wider European listing base in which propane is trying to gain share. Air-to-water units dominate the EU dataset with 30,452 models, followed by air-air at 21,065 and heat-pump water heaters at 9,228; ground-water accounts for 213 and water-water for 31 (market_index_snapshot). In the type-efficiency table, air-to-water models post an average SCOP of 4.54, ground-water 4.77, and water-water 6.15, while SCOP is not reported there for air-air or heat-pump water heaters (type_efficiency).

That matters because a refrigerant shift in a market like Austria is most commercially meaningful if it is happening in the largest addressable product segment, especially air-to-water heat pumps, which dominate European hydronic heat-pump listings by count (type_efficiency). If Austria’s 90.6% R290 share is concentrated there, it would signal that propane has become mainstream in the segment most relevant to boiler replacement. But that Austria-specific type breakdown is not in the corpus, so we cannot verify it here.

For context on market breadth, the market index snapshot and country comparison dashboard are the closest supplied routes to the macro view, while the Austria country page provides the national energy-price and climate backdrop.

Who is supplying the Austrian R290 market

The dataset does not include Austria-specific manufacturer counts for R290 models, so it cannot identify which brands contribute the most Austrian propane listings.

It does, however, show who dominates the wider European catalog. Daikin Europe N.V. leads the EU index with 14,668 listed models, or 24.05% share, followed by Mitsubishi Electric Europe B.V. with 5,575, JOHNSON CONTROLS HITACHI AIR CONDITIONING EUROPE SAS, SUCURSAL EN ESPAÑA with 5,207, and Bosch Thermotechnik GmbH with 3,602 (brand_share). Ariston SpA is next on 2,618, ahead of ATLANTIC on 1,516 and Vaillant GmbH on 1,195 (brand_share).

Those figures are useful mainly as a caution: EU brand scale does not automatically tell you who is supplying Austria’s R290-heavy mix. A country can have a very different refrigerant composition from the continental average even when the same large manufacturers are present. The corpus simply does not break Austrian R290 listings down by manufacturer, so any ranking on that point would be speculative.

What the remaining non-R290 listings still tell us

If Austria’s R290 share is 90.6%, then non-R290 listings represent the remaining 9.4% of the Austrian market by share (country_profile; market_index_snapshot). But the exact number of those Austrian non-R290 models cannot be calculated from the supplied data, because the Austrian listing total is missing.

That 9.4% residue still matters. In a market above 90% propane share, older refrigerants are no longer setting the default offer; they are becoming the exception. At EU level, by contrast, R32 alone still exceeds one in five listed models at 22.8%, and R410A remains present at 3.1% (market_index_snapshot). So the Austrian signal is not that older gases have vanished everywhere, but that one national listing mix appears to have compressed them into a small minority much earlier than the continental baseline.

From the refrigerant reference, R32 is an HFC with GWP 771 and an A2L flammability class, while R290 is propane with GWP 0 and A3 classification (refrigerant_universe). That is a meaningful technical and regulatory distinction for installers, distributors and policymakers following the methodology notes and the live leaderboards hub.

A 90.6% share matters because it changes what “normal” looks like in a market. Once a refrigerant clears nine in ten listed models, product planning, installer familiarity, stocking decisions and policy messaging can all start from the assumption that this is the mainstream platform rather than the edge case (country_profile; market_index_snapshot).

It also matters because Austria reaches that threshold while sitting in a technically relevant context: average climate, 3,309 heating degree days, electricity at €0.3272/kWh, gas at €0.1221/kWh, and a relatively low-power grid at 89 gCO₂/kWh (country_profile). The subsidy backdrop is also material. Austria’s “Raus aus Öl” support runs up to €23,000 with a 75% cap for eligible low-income households, alongside a €16,000 base grant for single-family replacements in the cited rules (country_profile). That is the kind of environment in which catalog composition can become a real market signal rather than a paper shift.

On efficiency, the EU market-wide average SCOP is 4.55 (market_index_snapshot). The corpus does not provide an Austria-only average SCOP for R290-listed models, so the article cannot quantify whether Austrian propane models outperform or underperform that EU average. What can be said is that Austria’s standout feature in this dataset is refrigerant composition, not documented efficiency outperformance.

Sources

market_index_snapshot — Househeating Pulse · Market Index v1, computed from EPREL Public API. Snapshot: 2026-05-08.
refrigerant_universe — IPCC AR6 GWP table; EU Reg. 2024/573 phase-out schedule; EPREL declared codes. Snapshot: 2026-05-08.
type_efficiency — EPREL Public API · type aggregation. Snapshot: 2026-05-08.
brand_share — EPREL Public API · brand-share aggregation. Snapshot: 2026-05-08.
country_profile — Eurostat tariffs (band DC/D2 latest); NASA POWER 30y normal; EEA grid CO₂; subsidies captured manually from official programme pages. Snapshot: 2026-05-08.