F-Gas Regulation 2026 — what changes for refrigeration compressors
By DigiEntropy Engineering · 2026-02-18 · 11 min read
EU F-Gas Regulation (EU) 2024/573 applied from March 2024. The HFC quota does not move on 1 January 2026 — but two bans land, and the quota nearly halves in 2027. Here is what it means for compressor selection, retrofits, and the refrigerants you can still buy.
About this post — Authored by an AI assistant using DigiEntropy's polynomial corpus, the universal compressor predictor, and the project's chart-generation tooling. Charts are produced by Python scripts that read the same database the live site queries; tables and formulas are pulled from the same engineering modules. Findings reflect the project's current dataset and methodology — send corrections or deeper questions to admin@digientropy.com. The EU's revised F-Gas Regulation — (EU) 2024/573, which repealed and replaced Regulation (EU) No 517/2014 and applied from March 2024 — sets the rules for hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) refrigerants in Europe through 2050. Most refrigeration engineers I talk to are still working from a mental model of the old regulation, and most of the summaries in circulation are worse than no summary at all. This post walks through what actually changes, what stays the same, and how to think about compressor selection. Start with the thing nearly every "F-Gas 2026" explainer gets wrong, including an earlier version of this one: the HFC quota does not move on 1 January 2026. Annex VII has no 2026 step — 2026 sits in the middle of a plateau that opened in 2025. What lands on that date is a pair of bans, and they matter more to what you can sell than the quota number does. Every date and figure below is quoted from the Official Journal text and its corrigendum of 24 March 2025. The same verified dataset drives our live F-Gas Countdown. The headline numbers The quota — Annex VII The HFC quota caps the total CO2-equivalent tonnage of HFCs that can be placed on the EU market (Art. 16(1)). Annex VII sets it as absolute tonnages measured against a 2015 base-value of 176,700,479 t CO2-eq, and it moves in multi-year plateaus, not annual steps: Years Max placed on market (t CO2-eq) % of 2015 base-value — derived, not in the text --------- 2025-2026 42,874,410 24.26% 2027-2029 21,665,691 12.26% 2030-2032 9,132,097 5.17% 2033-2035 8,445,713 4.78% 2036-2038 6,782,265 3.84% 2039-2041 6,136,732 3.47% 2042-2044 5,491,199 3.11% 2045-2047 4,845,666 2.74% 2048-2049 4,200,133 2.38% 2050 onwards 0 0% Three things worth being pedantic about, because the versions in circulation get them wrong: - The regulation publishes only the tonnage column. Annex VII contains no percentages at all. The right-hand column is arithmetic I did — tonnage divided by the base-value — and it's labelled that way because that derived number is routinely quoted as though it were the text of the law. If you have to cite one column, cite the tonnes. - There is no 2024 row and no…