Latvia’s central bank reports that 52.8% of homes carried insurance in 2025. The share is based on insurers’ figures for active home policies set against the number of households in the country. Historical Bank of Latvia data put the insured share at 30.8% in 2017, a rise of 22 percentage points since then. In 2025 there were 445,600 home insurance contracts in force.
Evija Dundure, head of the Bank of Latvia’s Insurance and Pension Supervision Department, said eight years have brought a substantial improvement, while damage from recent storms shows that it is still not enough, because almost every second home remains uninsured. She said natural disasters cannot be prevented, but people can be better protected financially from the consequences, and that natural-disaster risk is almost always covered when a home is insured.
The bank’s figures point to a long-term rise in residents choosing to shield their homes from the cost of unexpected events. Even so, 47.2% of homes have no policy, so a serious mishap can still become a heavy financial blow for a large part of the public. Natural-disaster risk is included in 99.98% of home policies, so the main gap is that nearly half of dwellings have no insurance at all.
A recent storm, when trees fell onto buildings and damaged roofs and other structures, showed that such losses can arrive suddenly and be large. In 2025 the average payout for natural-disaster damage to one home was €1,552, about 25% above the average property-insurance payout of €1,242. The yearly weight of these events varies sharply: they were linked to 43.9% of reported home-insurance claims in 2024 and 7.8% in 2025. A calmer year does not mean the risk has disappeared or fallen sharply.