Research
ENERGY STAR HVAC, counted
How much certified heating and cooling equipment exists, by category, brand and refrigerant, from EPA’s own product lists.
Written by HYRE HVAC Research Desk Primary-source research, data analysis and fact checking
The finding
ENERGY STAR HVAC equipment is plentiful, but the list is dominated by one category.
As of October 26, 2026, EPA lists 12,715 distinct heat pump outdoor units from 284 brand names, sold in 285,115 certified system combinations. 75.0% of those outdoor units carry the cold-climate designation.
Beside them sit 3,733 furnaces, 4,892 geothermal heat pumps, 659 boilers and 585 room air conditioners.
What does ENERGY STAR certified mean for HVAC?
It means the model meets the efficiency rules EPA sets for its category and is on EPA’s public list.
For heat pumps the rules are in ENERGY STAR’s air-source heat pump specification; for furnaces and boilers they include minimum AFUE ratings.
A product either appears on the list or it is not certified, which makes the list countable.
EPA publishes each list as an open dataset. We downloaded seven of them in full on October 26, 2026 and counted them. Definitions of the ratings are in our glossary: HVAC glossary.
How many ENERGY STAR HVAC products are certified?
| Category | Certified models | Brand names | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Air-source heat pumps | 12,715 outdoor units | 284 | 285,115 system combinations |
| Geothermal heat pumps | 4,892 | 47 | 2,076 closed-loop water-to-air |
| Furnaces | 3,733 | 75 | 29 oil-fired; the rest gas or gas/propane |
| Boilers | 659 | 51 | 150 oil-fired |
| Room air conditioners | 585 | 49 | 518 window, 67 through-the-wall |
| Dehumidifiers | 571 | 141 | 24 whole-home |
| Smart thermostats | 120 | 35 |
ENERGY STAR certified product datasets, retrieved October 26, 2026. Heat pumps counted as distinct outdoor units; other categories as listed models.
Brand names are counted as listed. Several brand names can come from the same manufacturer, so brand counts overstate the number of companies.
Which kinds of heat pumps are certified?
Mostly mini-splits. Of 12,715 certified outdoor units, 7,641 (60.1%) are mini or multi-split, 4,231 (33.3%) are conventional split systems and 843 are single-package units. But each split-system outdoor unit is certified with many indoor coils and furnaces, so split systems make up 93.4% of the 285,115 certified combinations.
10,875 outdoor units (85.5%) list a continuously variable compressor in at least one combination. For what that means in practice, see variable-speed vs single-stage. For mini-splits against ducted systems, see ductless vs ducted heat pumps.
How many cold-climate heat pumps are certified?
9,539 outdoor units, 75.0% of the list, from 262 brand names. By type: 6,383 mini or multi-split, 2,656 split system and 500 single package. A unit counts when at least one of its certified combinations carries ENERGY STAR’s cold-climate designation.
HyreHVAC analysis: the cold-climate label is no longer rare. It covers most of the list. What separates models is how much heat they still deliver at 5°F, which is the subject of our cold-climate heat pump performance study.
Which refrigerants do certified heat pumps use?
Mostly the new low-GWP refrigerants. 5,983 outdoor units list R-454B and 2,283 list R-32, against 4,454 that list R-410A. By combination the shift is sharper: 80.4% of certified combinations use R-454B.
Why that matters for a buyer is set out in our refrigerant transition study and the R-454B vs R-32 comparison. Every certified room air conditioner on the list uses R-32.
Which brand names have the most certified heat pumps?
| Brand name (as listed) | Certified outdoor units | Share of all units |
|---|---|---|
| Midea | 362 | 2.8% |
| Mdv | 294 | 2.3% |
| Tosot | 294 | 2.3% |
| Mitsubishi Electric | 272 | 2.1% |
| Gree | 252 | 2.0% |
| Hisense | 202 | 1.6% |
| Blueridge | 202 | 1.6% |
| Carrier | 201 | 1.6% |
| Day & Night | 191 | 1.5% |
| Heil | 190 | 1.5% |
The ten brand names with the most certified heat pump outdoor units hold 19.3% of the list. 197 brand names have ten or more.
A count of certified models, not of sales or quality. A brand with many models is not a better brand, and several brand names on the list share a manufacturer.
How efficient are certified furnaces and boilers?
Very. The median certified furnace is rated 96% AFUE, the range runs from 87% to 99%, and 945 models are rated 97% or more. Nearly all are gas; only 29 are oil-fired. The median certified boiler is 95% AFUE, and 150 of the 659 boilers burn oil.
For choosing between them, see single vs two-stage furnaces and our high-efficiency gas boiler guide.
How did we count?
Heat pumps (83eb-xbyy), furnaces (i97v-e8au), boilers (6rww-hpns), geothermal heat pumps (acvd-5wvz), room air conditioners (5xn2-dv4h), smart thermostats (7p2p-wkbf) and dehumidifiers (mgiu-hu4z), from data.energystar.gov on October 26, 2026. The heat pump file was paged until every record was in.
EPA lists heat pumps as matched systems. One outdoor unit can appear hundreds of times with different coils and furnaces. We count distinct pairs of brand name and outdoor model number, so “models” means outdoor units.
A unit is cold-climate, variable-speed or uses a refrigerant if any of its combinations says so. Type is mini or multi-split if any combination is.
One script reads the files and writes every count, the tables and the CSV.
What does this count leave out?
EPA updates the lists often. Models are added and retired; these counts are for October 26, 2026.
A certified model may not be sold in your area, or may be sold only through some installers.
This page counts what is certified. It does not rate brands or models.
The federal 25C credit for this equipment expired on December 31, 2025. Some utility and state programs still require ENERGY STAR; check the program itself.
How should you cite this study?
Please cite as: HyreHVAC Research Desk, “ENERGY STAR HVAC, counted,” hyrehvac.com/research/energy-star-availability/, from ENERGY STAR certified product data retrieved October 26, 2026. Charts may be reused with credit and a link. The CSV below has every count.
Questions
How many ENERGY STAR heat pumps are there?
Are ENERGY STAR heat pumps good in cold weather?
Are ENERGY STAR furnaces worth it?
Do ENERGY STAR products still get a tax credit?
How can I check whether a model is ENERGY STAR certified?
Written and audited by
HYRE HVAC Research Desk
Primary-source research, data analysis and fact checking
We are a research desk, not a sales floor. We read the federal microdata file, the statute or the manufacturer data sheet ourselves, and we publish the figure with the document it came from and the date we retrieved it.
Where a number cannot be traced to a primary source, we publish the shorter page and say what we could not verify.
The counts below are generated from the published pages themselves, last counted November 12, 2026, and they are what we have actually published rather than what we intend to.
- 18
- studies published
- 15
- federal sources read and cited
- 15
- studies published with their full dataset as CSV
- 51
- jurisdictions reproduced against EIA’s own tables
How this desk works
- Primary sources only. Federal data comes from the agency that collects it, in the file that agency publishes. We do not cite an article that cites a source; we download the source and compute the figure ourselves.
- We validate against the agency before we publish. First, we use each federal microdata file to reproduce the agency’s own published tables. Our cooling research reproduces EIA’s state estimates and standard errors for all 51 jurisdictions. That check caught a variance formula that was off by a factor of four.
- Every estimate carries its uncertainty. These are survey figures, not counts. Standard errors are computed from the replicate weights the federal file supplies and printed beside the estimate. An estimate too imprecise to publish is reported as such rather than printed.
- Nothing is typed by hand. Prose, tables and charts all read from one dataset built by script, so a number in a sentence and the same number in the table below it cannot disagree.
- We publish the data, not just the conclusion. 15 of our 18 studies offer the full computed table as a CSV download on the page, so you can check the analysis or disagree with it. A study without a row-level dataset gets no download link and claims none in its structured data.
- We correct in public. Where we have published a figure wrongly we fix the figure, rewrite any analysis that rested on it rather than patching the number underneath it, and leave a dated correction note on the page.
- We do not install or sell HVAC equipment, and we take no payment for placement, ranking or a favorable mention. Nobody buys a position on this site.
Data as of ENERGY STAR certified product data, retrieved October 26, 2026. Authorship on this site is organizational: the analysis belongs to the desk rather than to a named individual, and we do not publish credentials we do not hold. Our editorial policy sets out how we source, date and correct what we publish.
The data behind this page
Every figure on this page is computed from one file, and that file is published here so the analysis can be checked, disagreed with, or reused.
Sources & retrieval dates
Comparing efficient models?
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