Does buildings insurance pay out for gross negligence in Germany?

Premium examples from publicly quoted German tariff calculations for detached houses, 2026.

Gross negligence (grobe Fahrlässigkeit) means ignoring a danger that would be obvious to anyone. On a house it is always the same handful of cases: a candle burning in an empty room, a deep fryer left on a hot hob, a roof window left open when a storm has been announced, an unheated and unchecked heating system in an empty house in winter, and the water supply left on before a long trip.

There is no fixed ratio. German courts look at the actual behaviour and the circumstances. The figures below come from published rulings. They are useful reference points, not a table your insurer has to follow.

Simple negligence is the everyday slip: you trip over a cable, a vase falls, water spills. Such losses are covered in full and nobody argues about them.

Gross negligence is the next step up. You could have seen the danger and still did nothing. This is where the proportional cut under section 81 subsection 2 VVG applies.

Intent means you wanted the damage. Then the insurer pays nothing under section 81 subsection 1 VVG, and no clause changes that. Conditional intent, meaning you accepted the damage as a likely result, can also lead to a full refusal.

Many current German policies include a waiver of the gross negligence defence. The insurer then gives up the right to cut your payment because of your fault and settles the claim as usual.

The waiver is almost never in the basic tier, but in the middle or top one. In a published calculation for a detached house of 150 square metres with a garage in Hamburg, the basic tier cost about EUR 201 a year and the comfort tier about EUR 251. That gap buys you the waiver plus higher limits on several other items.

Watch for the cap. Some wordings call themselves a waiver but stop at a fixed amount. In a house fire a cap of EUR 10,000 or 25,000 is used up very quickly.

The waiver deals with causing the loss under section 81 VVG. Agreed duties are something else: they sit in the policy wording and are enforced through section 28 VVG. Typical duties are heating the building in winter or draining the pipes, securing the property, and reporting and limiting a loss without delay.

Break one of those and you can still face a cut, waiver or not. So check whether your contract extends the waiver to breaches of duty as well. Many good wordings do, but far from all.

The third point is an increase in risk. Under section 23 VVG you may not increase the risk without the insurer agreeing, and you have to report one as soon as you know about it. A long vacancy, a major conversion or a decommissioned heating system all count. Staying quiet costs you cover at a point the waiver never touches.

If your policy already waives the defence up to the full sum insured, you are done. Switching for that single point is not worth it.

And if an offer caps the waiver at EUR 10,000 but costs noticeably more, you are mostly buying a feeling. On a five figure building loss that cap changes little, so a different policy is the better answer than an expensive add-on.

One honest note: the cut only hits people who really were grossly negligent. If you run your house with normal care, you will never see this dispute. The clause protects you on one bad day, not in everyday life.

In several countries a careless mistake at home is simply covered, and only deliberate damage is excluded. German law allows a proportional cut, so do not assume your new policy works like the one you had before.

Your policy wording will be in German, and the wording is what counts in a dispute. Search the terms for grobe Fahrlässigkeit and Verzicht, or send them to us and we will tell you in English what your contract actually says.