US Residential HVAC: Peak season pulse check - Q2 2026 distributor survey results

Research evidence excerpt

US Residential HVAC: Peak season pulse check - Q2 2026 distributor survey results

29 June 2026

U.S. Multi Industry & Electrical Equipment

US Residential HVAC: Peak season pulse check - Q2 2026

distributor survey results

We ran a survey among 40 residential HVAC distributors to understand sell-out, Varun Govindaraj

+1 917 344 8543 inventory, sell-in, pricing, and sentiment trends. This was done starting around the 20th

varun.govindaraj@bernsteinsg.com of June to gather a pulse of how the quarter went and how the rest of the year is likely to

play out. Summarized results below. Please reach out to the authors or your Bernstein sales

Specialist Sales counterpart for the raw data.

Steve Song

+1 917 344 8401 Sell-out: Q2 residential sell-out (by distributors to contractors) leans more negative

steve.song@bernsteinsg.com than expected; ~30% of respondents saw sales as worse than expected, ~60% saw

sales as expected, and ~10% saw sales better than expected. Versus 2Q 2025, ~35% of

respondents saw sales that were down by 5% or more, about half were between -5% to

5% vs. last year and ~20% saw sales 5% or higher vs. last year.

Inventory: On average, inventory was at ~7.7 weeks. Compared to the 2Q25, inventories

for the distributors surveyed do not seem to have dropped as much as we expected. About

40% saw a decline, 20% were flat, and 40% saw an increase. Compared to 1Q26, over

50% of distributors surveyed saw an increase in inventory levels. This is counter to what we

have heard from management teams and could be a headwind for sell-in later in the year.

Sell-in: Purchases by distributors in 2Q 2026 were largely in line with their expectations

going into the quarter. Numbers also seem to be relatively in-line with 2Q 2025 (albeit with