What counts as natural hazard damage in Germany and what is covered?

Premiums from a published German market analysis for contents and buildings cover, basic cover and basic cover with the natural hazard add-on.

German insurers call this group Elementarschaden, literally elemental damage. It is the set of natural perils that normal buildings and contents policies leave out. You cannot buy it as a separate policy, only as an add-on to one you already hold.

Most policy wordings list the perils below. Flooding and sewer backflow are often treated as one peril, snow pressure and avalanches as well.

Storm from wind force 8 upwards and hail are already in the basic cover of your buildings and contents policy. You do not need the natural hazard add-on for those, and this is the point most people get wrong.

Storm surge (Sturmflut) is excluded almost everywhere in the natural hazard add-on. If you live right on the coast, only very few providers offer anything for it.

Groundwater is only covered once it reaches the surface and runs into the building from there. Damp that creeps through a cellar wall from below is nobody's claim.

Subsidence and landslide have to be natural. If the ground sinks because of mining or the building site next door, the add-on does not apply. A burst pipe inside the house is not a natural hazard either, that is the separate peril Leitungswasser.

Buildings insurance pays for the house itself: screed, plaster, doors, heating, wiring, drying out, in extreme cases demolition and rebuilding. If you rent, your landlord holds this policy.

Contents insurance pays for your movable things: furniture, washing machine, rugs, tools, bikes in the cellar. Each policy needs the natural hazard add-on separately. If you only have it in one, you carry the other half yourself.

As a tenant you only need the contents side. In an owners association the community decides about the building.

Insurers place every address in one of four flood hazard classes using the industry system ZUERS Geo. More than 22 million addresses are in it. Your class drives the premium, the deductible and sometimes whether you get an offer at all.

There are also three heavy rain hazard classes. Just under 12 percent of all addresses sit in the highest class SGK 3, about 66 percent in SGK 2 and over 22 percent in SGK 1. That matters because heavy rain hits any location, far from the nearest river as well.

Cover does not start the moment you sign. For flooding from a surface watercourse, tariffs apply a waiting period (Wartezeit). One widely sold policy uses 7 days, others state 14 days or one month. If you switch without a gap from a contract that already had the add-on, the waiting period is usually dropped.

So do not sign up once the flood warning is already out. That is exactly what the waiting period is there for.

A deductible (Selbstbeteiligung) is normal. For contents, 150 or 300 euros are common; for buildings, often 500 euros or a percentage of the loss. In the high hazard classes insurers add a separately set deductible for natural perils.

For sewer backflow nearly every wording says the same thing: rooms at risk of flooding need a working backflow valve (Rueckstausicherung), and you have to keep it working. If it is missing or jammed, the insurer may reduce the payment or refuse it.

The usual duties apply too: report the loss without delay, keep it small, throw nothing away before it has been recorded or released. Photos of the wet cellar and old invoices are worth more later than your memory.

Claim letters and wordings are in German, and the German text is what counts. Ask us when a clause is unclear rather than guessing.

If you rent on the third floor with no cellar storage, your contents are barely exposed. The add-on is then comfort rather than necessity.

In hazard class 4 the premium can be so high and the deductible so large that little is left over. We say that openly instead of selling you something that hardly works. In those cases building measures often do more than the next contract.

A house without a cellar on high ground carries less risk. Landslide, snow pressure and heavy rain are still possible, and in class 1 the add-on usually costs under 100 euros a year. For most households that is money well spent.