Home Insurance Basics

This chapter explains what home insurance in Germany actually covers, where it quietly stops covering you, and which clauses decide whether a claim gets paid. The policy people mean when they say home insurance is the Hausratversicherung, the household contents insurance. It is not compulsory, and it is not the same thing as the insurance on the building you live in. Most of the money lost on these policies is lost not because someone had no insurance, but because they had the wrong sum insured, missed an add-on, or broke a duty they did not know they had.

Everything below is general information, not insurance advice. Your own policy wording, the Versicherungsbedingungen or terms of insurance, decides your case, and those terms vary between insurers far more than newcomers expect. Where this chapter cites a paragraph of law, it is naming the rule so you can look it up or quote it, not telling you how your claim will end. The wider map of which insurance in Germany is compulsory, which is genuinely worth having and which you can skip is covered in the chapter on insurance essentials in Germany. This chapter assumes you have read that one and goes into the household policies in depth.

What home insurance in Germany actually insures

Hausratversicherung insures your Hausrat, which is a defined category rather than a loose word for “your stuff”. It covers three groups: your Einrichtung, meaning furnishings such as sofas, beds, wardrobes, lamps and carpets; your Gebrauchsgegenstände, meaning items of use such as televisions, computers, kitchen appliances, clothing, tools and bicycles; and your Verbrauchsgüter, meaning consumables such as food, cleaning products and toiletries. The test is functional. If it serves your private household and is not part of the building, it is usually Hausrat.

What falls outside is just as important. Things bolted into the fabric of the building are not Hausrat, because they belong to the building policy. Your own installed kitchen is a common argument: a fitted kitchen you bought and installed yourself is generally treated as your contents, while one that came with the flat belongs to the landlord and their insurance. Cash, jewellery and other valuables are Hausrat, but they are capped, often at a percentage of the total sum insured and with a lower sub-limit again if they are not kept in a safe. Motor vehicles are not Hausrat at all. Read the definition in your own terms before you assume something expensive is included.

Cover follows you a certain distance from home. Most policies include Außenversicherung, external cover, for your belongings while they are temporarily away from the flat, which is why a laptop stolen during a move or on a trip may be covered. But this is time-limited and capped, and it is not travel insurance. If you are between flats, or living somewhere short term, check the policy is actually running at the address where the things are, because the insured address is a term of the contract and not a formality. The chapter on more on renting in Germany covers the tenancy side of moving.

The named perils: your policy is a list, not a promise

This is the most important structural fact about German household insurance, and the one that surprises people from countries with broader all-risk policies. A Hausratversicherung does not cover damage in general. It covers a closed list of named perils, the versicherte Gefahren, and if your loss is not on the list it is not covered, no matter how genuine or how ruinous it is. Dropping your own television does not appear on the list. Neither does a phone lost on a train. Neither, in the standard policy, does a flood.

The standard list has four entries. Feuer, meaning fire, lightning strike, explosion and in most terms the impact of an aircraft, along with the smoke and firefighting water damage that comes with them. Leitungswasser, meaning tap water escaping from pipes, radiators, boilers and connected appliances such as a washing machine, which is by volume the most common household claim in Germany. Sturm und Hagel, meaning storm and hail, where storm is defined by a threshold: cover applies from Windstärke 8 on the Beaufort scale, equivalent to wind speeds from about 62 kilometres per hour. Below that threshold there is no storm claim, and insurers do check the weather record for your postcode. And Einbruchdiebstahl, meaning burglary, which requires that someone broke in.

That last word does real work. Einbruchdiebstahl is not simple theft. It requires a break-in, or use of a false key, or comparable force. If a thief walks through the door you left unlocked and takes your laptop, that is einfacher Diebstahl, simple theft, and the standard policy does not cover it. An open ground-floor window in summer has cost people entire claims. Insurers also expect evidence of forced entry, which is why the police report matters and why you should not tidy the scene before it is recorded. Vandalism after a break-in is usually included; vandalism on its own often is not.

The gap that matters most: Elementarschäden are not included

The single most consequential gap in a standard Hausratversicherung is that Elementarschäden, elemental or natural hazard damage, are not in it. They are a separate add-on, a Zusatzbaustein, and if you did not actively buy it you do not have it. The peril list above includes storm and hail because wind is one thing. Water arriving from the ground is another thing entirely, and it is priced and sold separately.

The Elementar add-on typically covers Überschwemmung, meaning flooding; Rückstau, meaning water backing up out of your drains, which is what heavy rain does to an overloaded sewer and which is a far more common suburban claim than river flooding; Erdbeben, earthquake; Erdsenkung and Erdrutsch, subsidence and landslide; Schneedruck, the weight of snow; Lawinen, avalanches; and Vulkanausbruch, volcanic eruption. Note that Starkregen, heavy rain, needs to be expressly within the wording, and note that Rückstau alone is worth the conversation even if you live nowhere near a river, because a backed-up drain does not care about your elevation. One structural point worth knowing: the Elementar cover is generally not sold as a standalone policy at all, only bolted onto an existing Hausrat or building policy.

The Ahrtal floods of July 2021 made this gap national news, because a large share of the destroyed households turned out to have contents and building cover but no Elementar add-on, and therefore no claim. Since then there has been a continuous political debate about making the cover compulsory, and you should know exactly where that debate stands, because it is frequently misreported. As of July 2026 it is not law. Elementarschäden cover remains optional and you have to buy it yourself. The Bundesrat passed an Entschließung, a non-binding resolution, in June 2024 asking the federal government to bring forward a proposal, which was itself a repeat of the same request from March 2023. A motion in the Bundestag calling for compulsory cover was removed from the agenda in April 2026 without a vote. Various models have been discussed, including an opt-out design where the cover would be included by default and you would have to decline it in writing. All of that is discussion. None of it is a duty on you, and none of it is cover you have. Be careful with headlines here: several trade sites have run the line “Bundesrat beschließt Pflichtversicherung”, which reads as though a law passed, when what passed was a request to the government to draft one. Until something is actually enacted, the only thing that puts Elementar cover on your policy is you buying it.

Unterversicherung: the trap that cuts a small claim

Here is the trap that costs the most money and is understood the least. If you insure your contents for less than they are worth, the insurer does not simply cap your payout at the sum you chose. It cuts every claim in proportion, including small ones. This is Unterversicherung, underinsurance, and it lives in §75 of the Versicherungsvertragsgesetz (VVG), the Insurance Contract Act.

The mechanism is arithmetic. If the sum insured is significantly lower than the true value of your contents at the time of the loss, the insurer owes only the ratio of the sum insured to the actual value. Suppose your contents are really worth 60,000 euros and you insured them for 30,000. That is a ratio of one half. Now suppose a burst pipe destroys a 4,000 euro sofa. You might expect to be paid 4,000, since it is nowhere near your 30,000 limit. You are paid 2,000. The ratio applies to the individual claim, not just to a total loss. This is what people mean when they say underinsurance punishes you on the day you thought you were fine. One point of precision, because it is often stated too harshly: §75 is triggered where the sum insured is “erheblich niedriger”, significantly lower, than the value. A trivial shortfall does not trigger it. But once you are meaningfully under, the proportional cut applies to everything.

The standard fix is the Unterversicherungsverzicht, the waiver of the underinsurance defence. The insurer contractually agrees not to raise the §75 argument at all. In practice this is bundled with the qm model, where instead of inventorying your possessions you insure a flat rate per square metre of living space and the insurer accepts that figure as sufficient. The conventional flat rate is around 650 euros per square metre, with the market ranging roughly 650 to 750 depending on the insurer and tariff. Treat that as a convention to verify in the current offer in front of you, not as a fixed rule, because it is a market practice and not a legal number. On an 80 square metre flat at 650 it produces a sum insured of 52,000 euros. Two conditions attach and both get missed: you must state your Wohnfläche, living space, correctly, and the waiver protects you only within the agreed sum. If you understate your flat size, or if you own genuinely unusual amounts of valuable property, the waiver can fail you exactly when you need it. The honest way to use the qm model is to sanity-check the number it produces against what replacing everything would really cost.

Grobe Fahrlässigkeit: the most misunderstood clause in German insurance

Almost everyone gets this wrong, including people who have lived here for years, so it is worth being exact. Grobe Fahrlässigkeit means gross negligence: not an ordinary slip, but conduct that ignores the obvious care a reasonable person would take. Leaving a candle burning in an empty room. Leaving the flat with the door unlocked and the ground-floor window open. Leaving a pan of oil on a lit hob.

The old rule was all or nothing: gross negligence meant you got nothing. That rule is gone. §81 VVG now sets out a graduated regime. Under §81(1), if you cause the loss deliberately, the insurer owes nothing at all, and that has not changed. But under §81(2), if you cause it through gross negligence, the insurer is entitled to reduce its payment in proportion to the severity of your fault. Not refuse it. Reduce it, in a ratio matching how badly you behaved. In practice that produces reductions of some percentage rather than a zero, and the percentage is arguable, which means it is negotiable and sometimes litigated.

Two practical consequences follow. First, if an insurer tells you a grossly negligent claim is simply not covered, that is not what the statute says, and you can point at §81(2). Second, and more usefully, note the statutory wording makes reduction a right of the insurer, something it is “berechtigt” to do. A right can be given up. Many modern policies therefore include a Verzicht auf den Einwand der groben Fahrlässigkeit, a contractual waiver of the gross negligence defence, sometimes up to the full sum insured and sometimes only up to a cap. This waiver is one of the few genuinely meaningful differences between two otherwise similar-looking tariffs, and it is worth more than most of the extras that get advertised louder. When comparing policies, look for it by name.

Obliegenheiten: duties you did not know you had

An Obliegenheit is a duty the contract places on you, and breaching one can cost you cover. These are ordinary-sounding obligations buried in the terms: lock the door when you go out, keep windows closed when nobody is home, keep the flat heated in winter so the pipes do not burst, turn off the water if the flat stands empty for a long period, report a burglary to the police without delay, do not dispose of damaged items before the insurer has seen them, and tell the insurer about the claim promptly and truthfully. The winter heating one catches people who travel over Christmas. The “do not throw it away” one catches almost everybody, because the instinct after water damage is to clear up.

§28 VVG governs what happens when you breach one, and the regime is more balanced than insurers’ letters often suggest. Under §28(2), if you breach deliberately the insurer can be released from paying; if you breach through gross negligence it may reduce its payment in proportion to your fault, in the same graduated way as §81. But that same provision puts the burden of proving the absence of gross negligence on you, which is a real disadvantage and a reason to document things as you go. Under §28(3) there is a defence worth knowing about: the insurer must still pay to the extent your breach made no difference, meaning it was causal neither for the loss occurring, nor for establishing the loss, nor for determining what the insurer owes. If you reported a fire two days late and the delay changed nothing about the investigation, that lateness should not cost you the claim. That defence falls away if you acted arglistig, fraudulently. And under §28(5), a clause that lets the insurer walk away from the contract entirely, a Rücktritt, because you breached a duty is simply void.

There is one more protection, and it is under-known and directly useful, though it is narrower than it is often described. §28(4) says that where the duty you breached is an Auskunfts- oder Aufklärungsobliegenheit arising after the insured event, meaning a duty to give information or explain something once a claim exists, the insurer can only rely on non-payment if it warned you of that consequence beforehand by a separate notice in Textform, text form. Textform means writing that does not need a handwritten signature, so an email or a letter qualifies. Read the requirement precisely: it is about post-claim information duties, not about every duty in the contract. It does not mean an insurer needs a warning letter before it can rely on you having left the door unlocked. But if your claim is being refused because of something you did or failed to say during the claims process itself, ask whether that separate Textform warning was ever given, because if it was not, the insurer cannot rely on the consequence.

Wohngebäudeversicherung: your landlord’s home insurance, not yours

This distinction produces more confusion among foreign tenants than any other, so state it plainly. Wohngebäudeversicherung, residential building insurance, insures the building: the walls, roof, fixed installations, pipework, permanently fitted floors. Hausratversicherung insures the things inside it. If you rent, the building policy is your landlord’s contract, taken out by them and paid to them. You are not the insured party. If the roof blows off, the payout goes to your landlord, and the sofa ruined by the rain that came through it is not their insurer’s problem. It is either yours, or nobody’s.

Now the part that genuinely feels unfair, and is nonetheless correct. The cost of that building policy is an allocable operating cost, which means your landlord may pass it on to you through the Nebenkosten, the service charges. This is not a grey area or an aggressive landlord practice. It is written into the Betriebskostenverordnung (BetrKV), the Operating Costs Ordinance, at §2 Nr. 13, which lists “die Kosten der Sach- und Haftpflichtversicherung” and expressly names insurance of the building against fire, storm, water and other Elementarschäden, plus Glasversicherung and the liability insurance for the building, the oil tank and the lift. So you pay a share of a policy that does not cover a single thing you own. That is the correct legal position and it is worth understanding rather than arguing about.

There is a trap hiding in that statutory wording. A tenant who reads their Nebenkostenabrechnung, their service charge statement, and sees the words Elementarschäden and Glasversicherung can reasonably conclude they are covered for floods and broken glass. They are not. Those words describe cover on the building, bought by the landlord, benefiting the landlord. Your own contents remain uninsured against exactly those perils unless you bought your own add-ons. If you want to understand how these charges are built up and checked, the chapter on understanding utility services goes through the Nebenkosten in detail, and tenant rights and responsibilities covers what you can challenge.

The add-ons worth considering, and the one policy this chapter cannot replace

Beyond Elementar, three add-ons come up repeatedly. Glasversicherung, glass insurance, covers breakage of windows, glass doors, glass ceramic hobs and sometimes furniture glass and aquariums. Whether it earns its premium depends entirely on how much glass your home has and who is liable for it under your tenancy. Fahrradschutz or Fahrraddiebstahl, bicycle cover, matters more than it sounds in a country where a good bicycle or an e-bike can cost as much as a used car. In the standard policy a bicycle is covered only as part of an Einbruchdiebstahl, meaning it was stolen from a locked room after someone broke in. Stolen from the street, where bicycles are actually stolen, it is not covered without the add-on. Read the add-on’s conditions too, because many require a specific lock standard, or exclude night hours unless the bike was in a locked room, or cap the payout at a percentage of the contents sum.

Then there is the policy this chapter cannot substitute for, and the interaction is the point. If you damage the flat itself, that is not a Hausrat claim. Your contents policy insures your possessions against perils; it does not pay for harm you cause to somebody else’s property, and your rented flat is somebody else’s property. Drill through a pipe, crack the bathroom washbasin, let the bath overflow into the neighbour below, and the policy that responds is Privathaftpflichtversicherung, personal liability insurance, and only then if it includes Mietsachschäden, damage to rented property, which is a clause you have to check for by name because not every tariff has it and some exclude damage to fitted installations. Personal liability is a different product with a different purpose, and the chapter on insurance essentials in Germany explains why it deserves priority over almost everything else you might buy. The short version for this chapter: contents cover insures a loss with a ceiling, while liability insures a loss without one, and the two are not alternatives.

Signing up, and the rules that protect you when you get it wrong

Three legal points matter disproportionately if German is not your first language, because each one turns on paperwork you may have signed without fully reading.

First, the vorvertragliche Anzeigepflicht, the pre-contractual duty of disclosure, in §19 VVG. When you apply, the insurer asks questions, and you must answer them accurately. Previous claims, previous burglaries, an insurer having cancelled you before: these are typical questions and the honest answer is the only safe one. The consequences of getting it wrong are graded. If you answered wrongly deliberately or through gross negligence, the insurer may declare Rücktritt, withdrawing from the contract, which can leave you with no cover at the moment you needed it. If your error was neither deliberate nor grossly negligent, §19(3) removes the right of Rücktritt and leaves the insurer only a one-month right to cancel going forward. Two limits work in your favour and are worth knowing. The duty under §19(1) extends only to circumstances the insurer actually asked about in Textform, so it is not an open-ended obligation to volunteer your life history. And under §19(5) the insurer may only use these rights if it warned you about the consequences of a disclosure breach by a separate notice in Textform, and loses them entirely if it already knew the true position. If you are unsure what a question means, ask before you tick, and keep the answer.

Second, the contract and the claim run in German. The Versicherungsbedingungen are German legal text, the claim forms are in German, the adjuster will write to you in German, and if it goes wrong the dispute is in German. An English summary from a broker or a comparison site is a convenience, not the contract, and it does not bind the insurer. This is a genuine reason to prefer an insurer or intermediary who will actually deal with you in a language you can argue in, and a genuine reason not to sign something you have only skimmed in translation.

Third, and most reassuringly, §8 VVG gives you a 14-day Widerrufsrecht, a right of withdrawal. You can withdraw your contract declaration within 14 days, in Textform, with no reason required, and sending it in time is enough, so you do not carry the risk of the post. The clock is friendlier than it looks: under §8(2) it does not start until you have actually received, in text form, the Versicherungsschein, the policy document, the full terms including the Allgemeine Versicherungsbedingungen, and a proper instruction about the withdrawal right itself. The insurer bears the burden of proving those things reached you. The right lapses at the latest 12 months and 14 days after conclusion, but under §8(4) that long-stop does not apply at all if you were never properly instructed about the right in the first place. So if you signed something in a hurry, you very likely have more time than you fear.

Cancelling and switching without paying twice

Contents policies typically run for a year and renew automatically unless cancelled, usually with three months’ notice before the end of the insurance year. Diarise that date when you sign, because the automatic renewal is the mechanism by which people stay for a decade in a tariff they would not choose today. Beyond the ordinary notice there are außerordentliche Kündigungsrechte, extraordinary rights of cancellation, that arise on specific events: after a claim has been settled, either side may usually cancel; and if the insurer raises the premium without adding cover, you generally get a right to cancel in response to that increase. The letter announcing a price rise is legally obliged to tell you so, which is a reason to read it rather than file it.

Moving house deserves its own warning, because it is where cover silently breaks. A Hausratversicherung is tied to the insured address. When you move, the policy does not simply follow you: you must notify the insurer, and during the move most terms cover both the old and new flat for a limited transition period. If your new flat is larger, the qm-based sum insured must be recalculated or you have quietly recreated the Unterversicherung problem from earlier in this chapter, waiver and all, because the waiver depends on the stated Wohnfläche being right. A change of address that increases risk or living space can also change the premium, and the insurer generally gets a right to adjust it. Tell them before you move, not after.

When you do cancel, do it in writing and keep proof of dispatch. If it helps to have the letter laid out correctly, Werkzeu.ge has a free Kündigungsschreiben generator that produces a formally clean cancellation letter and explicitly handles Versicherung, insurance contracts, as one of its categories alongside mobile phone and gym contracts. It is in the Gast tier, meaning it is free and needs no account, and it runs in the browser. Werkzeu.ge is built by Cryon UG, the same company behind WeLiveIn.de, so treat this as a recommendation from an interested party and check it against your own contract. It is in beta until the end of November 2026, its own terms say tools may be incomplete, the free tier carries ads, and it generates documents rather than sending anything to anyone: you still have to post the letter. It is not legal advice and it does not replace reading your policy’s notice clause. Other tiers exist for other tools; see the current pricing if you want the details.

What to do next

Start by deciding whether you need contents cover at all, and be honest rather than anxious about it. Add up roughly what it would cost to replace everything you own from nothing. If that number is small enough that you could absorb it, this policy is optional in a real sense and not only a legal one. If it would be genuinely painful, insure it. Unlike liability cover, this is a loss with a ceiling, so the arithmetic of premium against value is the right calculation to run.

If you do buy, do four things in this order. Get the sum insured right and take the Unterversicherungsverzicht, checking that the Wohnfläche on the policy matches your actual flat. Decide on Elementarschäden deliberately rather than by default, remembering it is still optional in 2026, that Rückstau from heavy rain is the realistic risk for most addresses, and that no proposal currently in Berlin has bought you the cover. Look specifically for a waiver of the grobe Fahrlässigkeit defence and treat it as a headline feature rather than fine print. And add bicycle cover if you own a bike worth stealing, then actually read its lock and location conditions.

Once the policy exists, three habits protect it. Keep a record of what you own, with photographs and receipts for anything significant, stored somewhere that survives your flat burning down. Report burglaries to the police immediately and do not clear up damage before the insurer has seen it. And when something goes wrong, write things down and keep copies, because under §28(2) the burden of proving you were not grossly negligent sits with you. Finally, if a claim is refused, do not assume the refusal is the last word. Ask which clause it rests on and check it against the rules in this chapter, because gross negligence is meant to reduce a payment rather than erase it, a breach that changed nothing should not cost you the claim, and a warning the insurer never sent is a warning it cannot rely on. If the amount is worth it, the Versicherungsombudsmann offers free, independent dispute resolution, and the insurance supervisor BaFin takes complaints about insurers’ conduct.