EPA has set next year’s supply of hydrofluorocarbon refrigerants. The agency issued calendar-year 2027 allowances on Oct. 1 and published the allocation on Oct. 6: no more than 181,522,990 metric tons of exchange value equivalent (MTEVe) for consumption, and 229,521,263 MTEVe for production.
For mechanical contractors, the consumption number is the one to watch. It’s the ceiling on new HFC refrigerant entering the U.S. market next year, R-410A included.
Who holds the 2027 HFC allowances
Not contractors.
Three chemical producers hold about half the consumption cap between them: Solstice Advanced Materials US, the former Honeywell business, with 50.4 million MTEVe; Chemours with 21.0 million; and Arkema with 19.0 million. Solstice alone is roughly 28 percent.
The next tier mixes producers, importers and distributors: IGas Holdings (16.0 million), Mexichem Fluor (15.6 million), National Refrigerants (12.1 million) and Weitron (3.9 million). A-Gas and Hudson Technologies sit near 2.1 million each. Daikin America holds 1.9 million.
EPA carved 13.8 million MTEVe out for application-specific uses, among them semiconductor manufacturing, metered dose inhalers and military systems. Defense takes 9.1 million of that. Comfort cooling gets no carve-out.
What the refrigerant phasedown math means on a jobsite
Exchange value is a climate-weighted unit, so the tonnage depends on the gas. R-410A carries an exchange value of 2,088. If the whole 2027 consumption cap were spent on it, which it won’t be, that would be roughly 87,000 metric tons. R-32, at 675, stretches the same allowance about three times as far.
Allowances are good only for production and import between Jan. 1 and Dec. 31, 2027, though holders can transfer them. Nothing in the notice restricts what a contractor may buy, recover or charge. The constraint reaches the trade through price and availability at the supply house, which the notice doesn’t forecast.
The bigger date is two years out. The AIM Act holds the cap at 60 percent of the historic baseline through 2028 and cuts it to 30 percent in 2029. The notice doesn’t mention that step or restate the baseline. It doesn’t estimate how much of the 2027 cap will go to servicing installed R-410A equipment versus charging new systems, either. A building commissioned this year with R-410A plant will want service gas for 15 or 20 years from a pool that halves in 2029.
Enforcement inside the HFC allocation notice
The notice also records what EPA calls administrative consequences. The agency withheld 2027 allowances over missing audit reports and revoked allowances from two importers it found had brought in HFCs without spending allowances to cover them. The largest revocation was 1,144,200 MTEVe, set at a 50 percent premium for a first instance. A second instance draws 100 percent.
Revoked allowances are redistributed to other holders, so the cap doesn’t shrink. The notice names each entity. Petitions for review are due at the D.C. Circuit by Dec. 7, 2026.
Electrification programs keep adding heat pumps to the installed base. New York’s $75 million heat pump incentive for all-electric new homes and Maryland’s $103 million building electrification grants both put more refrigerant circuits into buildings.
Every one of them draws on a cap that’s fixed through 2028 and then drops by half.