Spain 2026: R290 now leads heat-pump listings by a clear margin

Spain’s 2026 listing data: why refrigerant mix matters more than market size

Spain’s EPREL-linked heat-pump listings now show R290 at 53.7% of the market, ahead of R32 at 43.8% — a lead of 9.9 percentage points — making propane the clear front-runner rather than a niche option in the current listing set (country_profile_es_mix).

That matters because this is not just a story about how many models are on the market. It is a story about which refrigerants manufacturers are choosing to register and offer. In a country profile where electricity is priced at €0.2669/kWh, gas at €0.0955/kWh, and support for qualifying installations can reach €3,000 and up to 80% of cost under RD 1124/2021, product positioning around compliance and efficiency is commercially relevant, not theoretical (country_profile). Spain’s warmer climate profile — 2,252 heating degree days and 623 cooling degree days — also makes the market mix worth watching for both heating and reversible systems (country_profile).

Readers can see the broader country context on the Spain country profile, the full heat-pump catalog, and the current market index snapshot.

The scale of the shift is straightforward in the listing counts. Spain’s current EPREL-linked set contains 1,281 heat-pump listings in total, of which 688 use R290 and 561 use R32 (country_profile_es_mix). That leaves just 32 listings for all other refrigerants combined, or 2.5% of the market (country_profile_es_mix).

So the leading refrigerant family does not just edge ahead: it covers more than half of all listed models, with R290 accounting for 53.7% of Spain’s listing universe (country_profile_es_mix). R32 remains substantial at 43.8%, but it is now the second refrigerant in Spain rather than the default leader (country_profile_es_mix).

In absolute terms, R290 exceeds R32 by 127 listings in Spain, and exceeds the entire rest-of-market tail by 656 listings (country_profile_es_mix). For buyers or installers browsing R290 models in the catalog, that means the low-GWP option is no longer a thin specialist slice. It is the deepest single refrigerant pool in the Spanish listing set. By contrast, the R32 catalog slice is still large, but no longer dominant in this market snapshot.

What the listing universe says about product availability and manufacturer commitment

The manufacturer picture supports the same reading: Spain’s R290 lead appears to reflect multi-brand participation rather than a single-brand quirk. The corpus does not provide a Spain-specific refrigerant-by-brand table, so it cannot identify with certainty which manufacturers contribute the most to Spain’s R290 volume. That limitation matters, and the data here should be read as a market-level refrigerant signal, not a definitive Spain R290 brand ranking.

What the corpus does show is the broader EPREL brand landscape. Across the full market index, the largest manufacturers by listing count are Daikin Europe N.V. with 14,668 models (24.05%), Mitsubishi Electric Europe B.V. with 5,575 (9.14%), Johnson Controls Hitachi Air Conditioning Europe, Sucursal en España with 5,207 (8.54%), Bosch Thermotechnik GmbH with 3,602 (5.91%), and Ariston SpA with 2,618 (4.29%) (brand_share). Those top five together account for 51.93% of all indexed models (brand_share).

That concentration is important because a refrigerant transition becomes durable when large-volume suppliers participate. The dataset cannot allocate Spain’s 688 R290 listings across those brands, but the overall market’s concentration around large manufacturers suggests that any national shift of this size is unlikely to be sustained by fringe suppliers alone (brand_share). Readers tracking brand breadth can use the manufacturer leaderboard, the all manufacturers index, and brand profiles such as Daikin Europe N.V., Bosch Thermotechnik GmbH, and Ariston SpA.

Spain in the EU context: is this a bellwether or an outlier?

Against the EU-wide EPREL-linked listing base, Spain looks exceptional. Across the market index, R32 accounts for 13,935 of 60,989 models, or 22.8%, while R290 accounts for 537 models, or 0.9% (market_index_snapshot). Spain, by contrast, sits at 53.7% R290 and 43.8% R32 (country_profile_es_mix).

That means Spain’s R290 share is roughly 52.8 percentage points above the EU-wide listing share, while its R32 share is about 21.0 points above the EU-wide level too (country_profile_es_mix; market_index_snapshot). The second result may sound counterintuitive, but it reflects how heavily the EU-wide index is diluted by other refrigerants, categories, and legacy registrations. Spain stands out not because R32 has disappeared, but because R290 has surged enough to overtake it.

The refrigerant reference also helps explain why this matters for compliance positioning. In the corpus, R290 is listed with GWP 0, while R32 has GWP 771 and a listed phase-out date of 2027-01-01 under the referenced EU schedule (refrigerant_universe). That does not by itself predict purchasing decisions, but it does show why manufacturers might accelerate propane portfolios ahead of tighter market constraints. For background, Househeating Pulse’s refrigerants reference and country comparison dashboard are the right places to benchmark Spain against the wider market.

Efficiency and compliance implications: what R290’s model profile suggests

The corpus is thinner on Spain-specific performance splits than on refrigerant counts. It does not provide a Spain-only average SCOP or capacity by refrigerant, and both SCOP-sorted probes for R290 and R32 return no model rows, so it is not possible to quantify whether Spain’s R290 subset has a higher average SCOP than Spain’s R32 subset from this dataset alone (top_models_r290_scop; top_models_r32_scop).

What can be said is narrower. Across the whole EPREL-linked market, average heat-pump performance sits at SCOP 4.55 and average capacity at 9.3 kW (market_index_snapshot). The same market index shows a very low natural refrigerant share of 3.27%, while Spain’s listing set is already majority R290 at 53.7% (market_index_snapshot; country_profile_es_mix). That gap suggests Spain’s refrigerant mix is moving faster than the broader market baseline, even if the corpus does not prove an R290 efficiency premium in Spain specifically.

On compliance, the signal is clearer than on efficiency. A market where 688 of 1,281 listings use GWP-0 R290 indicates that low-GWP availability is already mainstream in the current Spanish listing universe, not an emerging fringe (country_profile_es_mix; refrigerant_universe). For installers, that changes the practical question from “are compliant low-GWP options available?” to “which product segment and brand family best fit the job?” The methodology page, refrigerants reference, and top SCOP air-to-water leaderboard are useful follow-ups.

What installers and policymakers should read into the shift

The main takeaway is that Spain’s listing mix now signals supply-side alignment ahead of the wider European average. A majority-R290 market share, a 9.9-point lead over R32, and only 32 non-R290/non-R32 listings together point to a market coalescing around two refrigerant paths, with propane now in front (country_profile_es_mix).

For installers, that implies broader product availability in propane systems than many still assume. For policymakers, it suggests that Spain’s listed product base may already be moving in step with lower-GWP objectives faster than the EU-wide index would imply. For journalists and market watchers, Spain looks less like a random outlier than a plausible early signal of where listing strategies may head as compliance timelines bite. The corpus cannot establish causality or forecast adoption, but it does show one clear fact: in Spain’s current EPREL-linked listing set, R290 is already the leading refrigerant (country_profile_es_mix).

Sources

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.
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.
brand_share — EPREL Public API · brand-share aggregation. Snapshot: 2026-05-08.
top_models — EPREL Public API via Househeating Pulse catalog. Snapshot: 2026-05-08.