Magazine / Magazine
3.6 million Germans go boating, only one in eight on their own boat
Half of Germany's regular boaters charter and one in four borrows from friends, a survey for the ADAC found. Anyone at the helm of someone else's boat has different questions.
17 September 20264 min readNAMMERT Assekuradeur GmbH
Around 3.6 million people aged 16 and over go boating regularly in Germany. That is the finding of a survey of 13,926 people carried out online by Nordlight Research for the German motoring club ADAC in January 2026. The headline figure is not the interesting part. Who owns the boats is: 51 per cent usually take out a chartered or rented boat, 25 per cent a boat belonging to friends or family, and only 12 per cent mostly their own.
For insurance this matters. Boat insurance is tied to the boat and to its owner. Someone who charters or borrows stands at the helm of a boat whose policy they have never seen. When something goes wrong, the question is not what their own policy pays, but whether there is any cover that responds for them at all.
On a charter the arrangement is clear but incomplete. The charter company's hull cover protects the boat, not the charterer. The deposit, often between 1,500 and 5,000 euros, is at the charterer's risk, as are claims that go beyond the boat's liability cover or arise between members of the crew. That is what skipper liability and deposit insurance are for, and both belong in place before the trip, not on the pontoon.
With a borrowed boat things are less formal and therefore more delicate. Whether the owner's liability cover extends to a friend at the helm, whether there is hull cover and how high the excess is: the borrower rarely knows. Personal liability cover at home is written differently from one country to the next, and damage to the borrowed boat itself is almost never part of it. A short conversation before casting off avoids a longer one afterwards.
The survey shows two more things. About half of Germany's boaters are between 16 and 39, and more than half took the helm for the first time after 2010. Most of them stay at home: the Mecklenburg Lake District, the waters around Berlin and Brandenburg, the Baltic and the Rhine, Main and Danube. Abroad, the Netherlands, Italy, Greece, Spain and Croatia follow, which means many German crews are chartering in exactly the harbours our readers know.
How we read it: on popular waters, owners of a sailing yacht, motor boat or jet ski with decades of experience share the lock and the anchorage with charter crews who met their boat three days ago. For owners that is an argument for liability cover with a generous limit. For everyone else it means one thing: before each trip on a boat that is not yours, find out who pays if there is a claim, and whether the insurer will see you as covered.
Source: ADAC Skipper, article on the ADAC market research into boating in Germany, 17 August 2026 (in German). Online survey by Nordlight Research, January 2026, 13,926 respondents, representative of the population in Germany aged 16 and over.
Worth checking
Common questions
Am I covered by the charter company's insurance?
The boat is covered by its hull policy, you only to a limited extent. The deposit and claims beyond the boat's cover are usually yours, which is what skipper liability and deposit insurance address.
Where do the figures come from?
From an online survey of 13,926 people by Nordlight Research for the ADAC in January 2026, representative of the population in Germany aged 16 and over. They describe Germany, not other countries.
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