The uncertainties allowed in testing following international (ISO) and European (CEN) standards for testing of residential heat pumps (HPs) were investigated and quantified. For air/air HPs, the relative uncertainties of COP and exergy efficiency allowed by the CEN standard were found to be from 7% to 9%. For the ISO standard the figures were from 5% to 10%. For air/water HPs, the CEN standard allowed up to 9% relative uncertainty in the COP and 7% in the exergy efficiency. In addition to the uncertainties described in the standards, it was also shown how to estimate the uncertainty of COP due to uncertainties in the levels of temperature where the heat transfer occurs. For air/air HPs at standard rating conditions, this contributed 3% to the relative uncertainty of the COP and the exergy efficiency. Exemplary calculations based on published test data showed that very few HPs had performance clearly above or below those with the median results. The exergy efficiency of the air/air HPs, with some exceptions, showed a decrease with increasing outdoor temperature. A similar, but weaker tendency was observed for air/water HPs. The exergy efficiencies for air/water HPs were typically found in the range from 0.3 to 0.4. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.