Just Over Half of Latvian Homes Are Insured, Central Bank Says

In 2025, 52.8% of homes in Latvia were covered by insurance, according to a housing insurance market assessment by Latvijas Banka, the country's central bank and financial sector supervisor. That means almost every second home in the country still has no insurance, even though the situation has improved in recent years.

The bank calculated the figure by comparing the number of valid home insurance contracts reported by insurers with the number of households in Latvia. In 2025 there were 445,600 such contracts in force. In 2017, by contrast, only 30.8% of homes were insured, so the share has risen by 22 percentage points since then.

Storms as a reminder of risk

Evija Dundure, head of the Insurance and Pension Supervision Department at Latvijas Banka, says significant progress has been made over eight years, but damage from the recent storm shows it is not enough. In her words, the 47.2% of homes without insurance means a large part of society could face a heavy financial blow in the event of a serious misfortune.

Of all insurance contracts, 99.98% include natural disaster risk. Latvijas Banka concludes that the main problem is not what policies cover, but that almost half of homes have no insurance at all.

Size of payouts

The recent storm, in which trees fell on buildings and damaged roofs and other structures, showed how sudden and substantial such losses can be. In 2025 the average payout for natural disaster damage per home was 1,552 euros, roughly 25% more than the average payout in property insurance overall (1,242 euros).

The impact of natural events varies considerably from year to year: in 2024 they were linked to 43.9% of reported home insurance claims, while in 2025 the figure was 7.8%. Latvijas Banka stresses that one calmer year's statistics do not mean the risk has disappeared or fallen significantly.