Extreme weather causes over 200,000 home damage claims in the Netherlands

Extreme weather has caused hundreds of thousands of cases of damage to homes insured with Centraal Beheer over the past ten years. The insurer covered the damage in approximately six out of every ten cases.

Insurance company Centraal Beheer received 207,432 claims for damage to homes caused by extreme weather between 2016 and 2025, according to an analysis of the insurer's data. A spokesperson said the company paid out compensation for around 60 percent of the claims, amounting to a total of 180.3 million euros.

A spokesperson said around two-thirds of the claims that did not result in a payout were not pursued by the customers. In some cases, homeowners dealt with the damage themselves, while others faced repair costs below their insurance excess.

Around 6 percent of the claims were rejected because the damage was linked to issues such as overdue maintenance and “could therefore have been prevented,” the spokesperson said.

Claims for damage caused by heavy rainfall have become more common in recent years. Over the past five years, the number of such claims per insured home was approximately 14 percent higher than in the five years before that.

Stormy conditions across the Netherlands late last week prompted Centraal Beheer and several other insurance companies to receive more than 1,000 claims for damage, the insurers reported on Monday.

A separate survey of more than 1,000 people in the Netherlands by Centraal Beheer found that concerns about climate change damaging homes are growing. Nearly half of those surveyed were worried about the impact in August, up from 35 percent last year.

Although most respondents want to better protect their homes against climate-related risks, some said financial constraints or their reliance on landlords or homeowners' associations (VvEs) prevented them from making changes.

Ted Veldkamp, a Climate and Water lecturer at Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, warned that many Dutch homes are ill-equipped to cope with extreme weather. Older properties are particularly vulnerable because they were often not built to withstand heavy rain, prolonged dry spells, or high temperatures. Since not all homeowners can afford to make the necessary changes, Veldkamp said climate resilience should become a standard consideration in property maintenance, renovations, and new construction.

She stressed that preparation is essential because some weather-related damage cannot be avoided and insurance policies do not necessarily cover all climate-related losses. “This is all the more important because not all damage caused by extreme weather can be prevented, and not all climate-related damage can be insured or is covered by standard insurance policies,” she said.