Heat pumps kept gaining ground in the US after a federal tax credit disappeared, a useful data point for anyone expecting clean-energy hardware to fold the second Washington stops helping pay for it.
Heat pumps outsold natural-gas furnaces by 32% in the first quarter of 2026, according to a new report cited by Grist. US sales of the appliances have doubled over the past 15 years, the report said. Canary Media has reported that heat pumps have outsold gas furnaces in the US for four consecutive years.
The timing is the part that makes the numbers less boring. From 2023 through 2025, US households installing heat pumps could qualify for federal tax credits worth as much as $2,000. Those credits ended on January 1, 2026, after the Trump administration cut a set of incentives created under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
Lucas Davis, an energy economist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in a new analysis that heat pump shipments did not show the slump that might be expected after the subsidy expired. Using data from the Air Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute, Davis said shipments were flat from December to January, then gradually increased in the following months.
AHRI represents about 90% of the US market, according to Davis. He said the winter-to-spring increase matches a seasonal pattern seen in prior years, and that the 2026 rise was slightly stronger.
Why the credit did not behave like the EV credit
The heat pump market has not copied the recent electric-vehicle pattern. Federal tax credits of up to $7,500 for new EVs ended on September 30, 2025. Cox Automotive said EV sales jumped before the deadline as buyers moved to claim the incentive, then dropped sharply afterward. The Verge later reported that EV sales had begun to normalize.
Davis drew a different conclusion from the heat pump data: the federal credit may not have been the deciding factor for many buyers. “It appears that the U.S. market for heat pumps is strong enough that it does not depend on tax credits,” he wrote.
That does not make heat pumps cheap to install. The appliances often cost more upfront than gas furnaces, which is why governments have used rebates and tax credits to push adoption. The operating math is the counterweight. A heat pump uses electricity to move heat rather than create it by burning fuel or running resistance heating.
The basic mechanism is old refrigeration physics, not climate-tech fairy dust. Refrigerant circulates through a closed loop, expanding and compressing as it absorbs heat in one place and releases it in another. Many heat pumps can reverse that cycle, so the same machine can heat a building in winter and cool it in summer.
Because the device moves heat instead of generating it directly, it can deliver more heat energy than the electrical energy it consumes. That efficiency can make heat pumps cheaper to run than oil furnaces, gas furnaces, or common electric heating systems after installation. Since they do not burn fossil fuel inside the building, they can also cut emissions from heating when paired with cleaner electricity.
The US is not the only market moving in this direction. The International Energy Agency has reported strong recent heat pump adoption in countries including China and Germany.
The current US data does not prove incentives are useless. It does suggest that heat pumps have moved beyond being a policy science project. Buyers are still choosing them without the federal $2,000 nudge, which is more than many clean-energy markets can say after a subsidy vanishes.
This story draws on original reporting from MIT Technology Review.