For residential air conditioning applications, R410A has been used extensively. The global warming associated with the refrigerant is very high. This has led to further complications in the environment which was identified much later. Initiatives have been directed toward solving this dilemma. This research primarily focuses on creating binary and ternary refrigerant replacements for R410A. The conformability to the pressure–temperature characteristics, the increase in performance and the reduction in global warming potential was analyzed using computational methods. A MATLAB code was generated for the purpose of the calculation of the thermodynamic properties. The code was verified using REFPROP software. The accuracy of the code was very high. Four binary refrigerants and four ternary refrigerants were considered as replacements, and the results were obtained using the MATLAB code. One particular ternary refrigerant RT4 is resulted in a 34.938% reduction in the global warming potential while giving an increase of 4.335% in the performance of the refrigeration system. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd 2021.