Is home insurance compulsory in Berlin?

No. Neither Hausratversicherung nor private liability is required by law for a tenant in Germany, although some landlords ask for liability cover in the tenancy agreement. Contents cover is a choice about money. Liability cover is the one most people in Berlin should treat as close to unavoidable, because in a rented flat you can do far more damage to other people’s property than you own yourself.

How high should the sum insured be for a Berlin flat?

The industry benchmark is 650 euro per square metre of living space, and that figure is what buys the underinsurance waiver on most tariffs. For the average Berlin rented flat of 68.2 square metres it comes to 44,330 euro. If your things are genuinely worth more than that, for example because of instruments, bikes or camera gear, agree a higher sum rather than relying on the benchmark.

What happens if my sum insured is too low?

The insurer reduces the payout in the same ratio as the sum insured to the real replacement value of your contents, and the model conditions say that reduction applies even when only part of the household was damaged. A flat insured for half of what it holds gets half of every claim. A burglary of the Berlin 2025 average, 8,832 euro, would pay 4,416 euro.

Is my bike covered by my Hausratversicherung in Berlin?

Inside the flat, or inside a locked cellar or shared bike room on the same plot, yes, a break-in that takes it is covered as part of the contents. Locked up on the street it is a separate add-on clause, and that clause is normally capped at about one to two percent of the sum insured. Older contracts also carry a Nachtzeitklausel that excludes theft between 22:00 and 06:00 unless the bike was inside at the time.

Does contents insurance cover a cellar break-in?

Yes. The model conditions name shared lockable rooms used to store household goods, including the Fahrradkeller and the Waschkeller, as part of the place of insurance when they are on the same plot as your flat. That matters in Berlin, where the police recorded 18,421 cellar break-ins in 2025 against 10,618 burglaries in homes.

What do I have to do after a burglary in Berlin for the insurance to pay?

Report it to the police and get a case number, either at a Polizeiabschnitt or through the Berlin police online reporting form. Photograph the damage before you tidy, write a Stehlgutliste of what is gone with prices and purchase dates, and notify the insurer in writing straight away even if the list is not finished. Late notification is one of the common reasons a payout is reduced.

When can I cancel or change my policy?

The standard notice period is three months before the end of the insurance year, which on a calendar-year contract falls on 30 September. The insurance year runs from the date your policy started, so check the Versicherungsschein before assuming the September date applies to you. If the problem is only the sum insured, you do not need to cancel at all, because raising it is an amendment the existing insurer will make at any point in the year.

What does private liability insurance need to include for a rented flat?

At least 10 million euro of cover, flat, for personal injury and property damage, plus two specific clauses. Mietsachschaeden covers damage to the rented flat itself, such as scratched parquet or a cracked washbasin. Verlust fremder Schluessel covers the loss of someone else’s key, which in a Berlin building with a central locking system can mean replacing every cylinder in the stairwell.

Home Insurance in Berlin: The Number That Decides How Much of a Claim You Get Back

Yusuf Ucuz

Sep 20

8 min read

Home insurance in Berlin is one of those things you sort out in your first month, tick off, and never look at again. Then something happens in the courtyard and you find out what you actually bought.

The number that decides that is not the monthly premium. It is the sum insured, the single figure written on your Hausratversicherung policy, and almost nobody checks whether theirs still makes sense after a few years of buying furniture and bikes and a decent laptop.

A five-storey Berlin residential block on the corner of Oderstrasse and Kienitzer Strasse in Neukoelln at dusk, its windows lit and cars parked along the kerb

Oderstrasse at Kienitzer Strasse in Neukoelln. Everything a Hausrat policy is about is behind those windows.

What the Berlin numbers actually look like

The Berlin police published the 2025 crime statistics in March. Three lines from them are the whole reason this post exists.

Burglaries in homes: 10,618 cases, up 24.5 percent on 2024. Berlin has the highest count of any German city. The clearance rate was 7.9 percent, so in more than nine cases out of ten nobody is caught and nothing comes back.
Cellar break-ins: 18,421 cases. That is almost twice as many as flat burglaries, even though the number fell by 18 percent last year. The Keller is where Berliners keep the bike, the winter tyres, the suitcase and the box of tools.
Bike theft: 22,630 cases. Down 16.5 percent, which is genuinely good news, and still more than sixty bikes a day. I went through where and when Berlin bikes actually disappear separately.

The averages matter more than the counts. Per completed case in 2025, the police recorded an average loss of 8,832 euro for a home burglary and 1,246 euro for a stolen bike. Those are the two numbers to hold in your head for the rest of this.

Home insurance in Berlin: the sum insured is the whole game

A Hausratversicherung covers the movable contents of your flat against fire, water from burst pipes, storm and burglary. The German market prices it off one figure: the Versicherungssumme, the maximum the insurer will ever pay for everything you own.

The industry benchmark is 650 euro per square metre of living space. It is a rough proxy for what a normal household costs to replace new, and it is what almost every tariff quotes against. For the average Berlin rented flat, 68.2 square metres according to the last Mikrozensus, that comes to 44,330 euro.

Here is the part that surprises people. If the sum on your policy is lower than what your things are actually worth, the insurer does not simply stop paying once you pass the sum. It cuts every claim in the same proportion, from the first euro. The model conditions the German insurance association publishes say it plainly: the reduction happens in the ratio between the sum insured and the real value of the contents, and it applies even when only part of the household was hit.

So a burglary that takes 8,832 euro of your things out of a flat insured for half its real value pays out 4,416 euro. Not because the loss was too big. Because the policy was. The Verbraucherzentrale runs the same arithmetic with a kitchen fire and gets the same answer.

The escape hatch is the Unterversicherungsverzicht, the waiver of that cut. Insure at the benchmark per square metre and you normally get it written into the contract, and then a claim is paid in full up to the sum. That is the single most valuable clause in an ordinary Hausrat policy, and it costs nothing extra, because it comes with buying enough cover in the first place.

The bare brick rear wall and courtyard side of the building at Kopenhagener Strasse 16 in Prenzlauer Berg, with old wooden window frames

Kopenhagener Strasse 16 in Prenzlauer Berg. The courtyard side of a Berlin block, where the cellar door and the bike rack usually are.

The bike is a separate argument

Bikes are where Berlin and the German insurance market disagree most.

Inside the flat, or inside a locked cellar or bike room on the same plot, your bike is part of the contents and a break-in that takes it is covered. The model conditions name the Fahrradkeller and Waschkeller as part of the place of insurance. That matters here, because of those 18,421 cellar break-ins.

Locked to a rack on the street, it is a different question. Theft away from the flat is an add-on clause you have to ask for, and it comes with a cap: usually one to two percent of the sum insured, sometimes more on a good tariff. Do the arithmetic on the average Berlin flat. One percent of 44,330 euro is 443 euro. The average bike stolen in Berlin last year was worth 1,246 euro. The standard clause pays about a third of it.

Then there is the Nachtzeitklausel, the night clause. Older contracts only pay for a bike stolen between 22:00 and 06:00 if it was inside the flat, the cellar or a locked bike room at the time. Newer tariffs mostly drop it, but plenty of contracts signed a few years ago still carry it, and it is exactly the window in which a bike left outside a bar in Neukoelln disappears.

My advice: open the policy, find the bicycle clause, and check two things. What percentage of the sum insured it caps at, and whether the night clause is still in there. If the answer is one percent with a night clause, the cover is close to decorative, and a separate bike policy or a better tariff is the honest fix.

Rows of bicycles parked under the bridge at Ostkreuz station in Berlin, seen along the kerb of the street

The bike parking at Ostkreuz. More than sixty bikes a day were reported stolen in Berlin in 2025.

The other policy, and why it matters more

If you can only afford one insurance in Berlin, it is not the Hausrat. It is the Privathaftpflicht, private liability, which covers the damage you do to other people and their property.

In a city of rented flats stacked on top of each other, the expensive accident usually happens downwards. Your washing machine hose lets go on a Saturday, and by the evening the ceiling of the flat below yours has come down. Hausrat pays for your own soaked belongings. The neighbour's ruined floor, and the landlord's building, are a liability question. Water in an old Berlin flat also has a slower version, and I wrote about when airing a room dries it and when it soaks it.

Two clauses decide whether a liability policy is worth having in a Berlin rental:

Mietsachschaeden, damage to the rented flat itself. Scratched parquet, a cracked washbasin, a burnt worktop. Without this clause the policy pays for damage to everyone except your own landlord, which in a rented flat is most of what can go wrong.
Verlust fremder Schluessel, loss of other people's keys. Berlin buildings run central locking systems, and a single lost key to one of them can mean replacing every cylinder in the stairwell. That is a four-figure bill on one keyring.

Liability cover is cheap for what it does. The usual range for a single person is roughly 40 to 120 euro a year, and the recommendation is at least 10 million euro of cover, flat, for injury and property damage together. Contents cover for a normal Berlin flat sits in a similar bracket, more in districts the insurers treat as high burglary risk, which in Berlin is most of them.

A graffiti-covered building entrance on Marienburger Strasse in Prenzlauer Berg with a cigarette machine beside the door and stone steps up to it

A front door on Marienburger Strasse. One lost key to a central locking system can cost more than a year of contents cover.

What to do when something actually happens

The claim process is where policies quietly fail, and it usually fails in the first day.

Report it to the police first. For a burglary, a cellar break-in or a bike theft, insurers want the Anzeige. You can file it at any Polizeiabschnitt or through the Berlin police online reporting form, and you need the case number before the insurer will do anything.
Write the list while the flat is still a mess. A Stehlgutliste, the list of what is gone, with what each item cost and when you bought it. Photograph the damage and the empty spaces before you tidy.
Tell the insurer immediately, in writing, even if the list is incomplete. Most contracts set a short reporting duty and a late notification is a reason to cut a payout.
Keep the serial number of the bike somewhere that is not the bike. The frame number is on the underside of the bottom bracket. Without it a recovered bike cannot be given back to you, and the insurer has less to work with.

The clearance figure above is the reason the paperwork is the part you control. A Berlin burglary is very unlikely to be solved. Whether it is paid is decided by your policy and your first afternoon.

The Polizeiabschnitt 31 building on Falkenberger Chaussee in Berlin Neu-Hohenschoenhausen, a low office block with bare trees in front

Polizeiabschnitt 31 on Falkenberger Chaussee. The Anzeige comes before the claim, and the case number is what the insurer asks for.

The date in September that decides your next year

Hausrat and liability policies renew themselves quietly. The standard notice period is three months before the end of your insurance year, and for a contract running on the calendar year that means 30 September. Miss it and the contract rolls on for another twelve months at the sum insured it already has.

Two things worth knowing before you act on that:

Your insurance year is not automatically the calendar year. It runs from the day the policy started. Check the Versicherungsschein for the Beginn date before you assume the September deadline is yours.
Never cancel before the replacement is signed. A gap of one week is a week in which a burst pipe is entirely your problem.

If the sum insured is the thing that is wrong, you usually do not need to cancel anything at all. Raising the Versicherungssumme is an amendment your existing insurer will make at any point in the year, and it is the faster fix.

A fight with a landlord is the one case where a third policy comes up, legal-expenses cover. Before buying it, look at what a tenant association membership costs in Berlin and what it covers, because for tenancy disputes it is usually the cheaper route. The same goes for the annual service-charge statement: the money is normally won by reading the bill line by line, not by going to court.

A 1970s residential slab block in the courtyard of the Wiener Strasse estate in Kreuzberg, with the ramp down to the underground garage in front of it

The Wiener Strasse estate in Kreuzberg. Underground garages and cellar corridors are part of the place of insurance, and part of the risk.

What I would check this week

Take the policy out, and answer four questions in about ten minutes.

What is the Versicherungssumme, and what is your flat in square metres? Multiply the square metres by 650. If the sum is lower than that, you are exposed to the proportional cut on every claim.
Does the policy say Unterversicherungsverzicht? If it does, the cut is waived and you are in decent shape. If it does not, that is the thing to fix.
What does the bicycle clause cap at, and is the night clause still in it?
Does the liability policy include Mietsachschaeden and lost keys? In a rented Berlin flat those two clauses are most of the value.

None of this is exciting and all of it is cheaper than finding out later. If you want one thing to do today, it is the multiplication. Square metres times 650, compared with the number on the policy. That comparison is the entire post.

Deadlines like the one above are most of what I put in the weekly letter, because they are the kind of thing that is easy to fix in September and expensive to notice in January.

Image credits

Source and licence details for the 4 photographs used in this article.

A residential corner block on Oderstrasse at Kienitzer Strasse in Berlin-Neukölln at dusk: Gunnar Klack, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The courtyard wall of the house at Kopenhagener Strasse 16 in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg: Ansgar Koreng, CC BY 3.0 DE, via Wikimedia Commons.

A building entrance on Marienburger Strasse in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg: Sascha Kohlmann, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The 1970s housing estate courtyard on Wiener Strasse in Berlin-Kreuzberg: Gunnar Klack, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.