Short read. This is a ~300-word brief based on the full analysis at Househeating Pulse. For the interactive charts, brand-level data, and source tables, open the original.
France’s heat-pump story is not being driven by an especially cheap power-to-gas ratio. The latest household electricity price sits at €0.2561/kWh versus €0.1436/kWh for gas, giving France a 1.78 electricity-to-gas ratio — well below the rough 3.7 break-even benchmark often used for a SCOP 4 heat pump. For developers modelling running costs, that means tariff structure, not just tariff level, is the real variable to watch.
The visible Eurostat history also matters. French household electricity fell from a peak of €0.2926/kWh in 2024-H2 to €0.2561/kWh in 2025-H2, a drop of about 12.5%. But it remains far above the €0.1748/kWh low seen in 2018-H1, which is roughly 46.5% lower than today. In the full semi-annual series, the current figure is still the fourth-highest point recorded. That makes flat-rate assumptions defensible as a baseline, but not a substitute for time-of-use analysis.
The catch is data granularity. The corpus contains a single household electricity series for France’s KWH2500-4999 band, not a split day/night tariff table, so it cannot directly quantify the off-peak spread in €/kWh or estimate how much flexible operation would lower annual bills. The canonical article on this gap is here: https://househeating-pulse.com/articles/france-2026-heat-pump-tariff-gap-day-vs-night
For context, Househeating Pulse’s Market Index v1 puts the average listed heat pump at SCOP 4.55, which implies about €0.0563 per delivered kWh of heat at France’s current electricity price. That is why the France question is less “is electricity cheap?” and more “how much of the load can be shifted below the average?”
If you want the reproducible breakdown — Eurostat tariff history, SCOP assumptions from the EPREL-derived market index, and the missing-data constraints around day vs night pricing — read the full analysis with live data: https://househeating-pulse.com/articles/france-2026-heat-pump-tariff-gap-day-vs-night
Househeating Pulse aggregates 60,000+ EPREL-registered heat-pump models across Europe — efficiency rankings, refrigerant trends, country-level installed prices and subsidies. Data from EPREL, Eurostat, NASA POWER. Full analysis at https://househeating-pulse.com/articles/france-2026-heat-pump-tariff-gap-day-vs-night.
