Do I claim from my insurer or from the Consorcio?

From the Consorcio. When damage is caused by one of the extraordinary risks defined in law, such as a flood or an earthquake, the policyholder files the claim with the Consorcio de Compensación de Seguros directly, quoting the ordinary policy. The private insurer still handles ordinary damage, such as a burst pipe or theft, under the same policy.

Is hail or heavy rain covered by the Consorcio?

Not as such. The Consorcio covers a closed list of perils: earthquake, tsunami, flood, volcanic eruption, atypical cyclonic storm with gusts above 120 km/h, and falling meteorites, plus political and social risks. Damage from hail, or rain that does not amount to a flood under the legal definition, falls to the private policy, if the policy covers it.

What happens if I have no home insurance in Spain?

Then the Consorcio pays nothing, because its cover attaches to an ordinary policy in one of the prescribed lines. Uninsured households depend on whatever public aid is granted after a disaster. UNESPA data reported by elDiario.es put the share of Spanish homes with insurance at 80.8%, leaving about one home in five outside the system.

Can the Consorcio run out of money?

In theory a single event could exhaust its stabilisation reserve, and in 2024 the loss ratio on extraordinary risks reached 612%. In practice the reserve stood at €7,518.7m available at the end of 2025, after the DANA claims, and a State guarantee sits behind it. That guarantee has never been used since the Consorcio became permanent in 1954.

Why is the surcharge the same everywhere in Spain?

A single national tariff avoids anti-selection: if people in safe areas could opt out, only the most exposed would pay and the pool would shrink. The Consorcio's own description of the system makes this argument. The cost of that choice is that a flat rate gives no price signal about where it is risky to live or build.

Consorcio de Compensación de Seguros: Spain's Disaster Cover

By 5 June 2026 the Consorcio de Compensación de Seguros had received 251,813 claims from the floods that hit Valencia between 28 October and 4 November 2024, and had paid €4,484m on 212,533 of them. SegurosNews, relaying the Consorcio’s own figures, reported that the final bill was expected to reach about €4,800m. No other event in the institution’s history comes close.

What is remarkable is less the size of the number than the way it was reached. Nobody in Valencia waited for a decree. There was no list of recognised municipalities, no political argument about whether the event counted. Every household and business with an ordinary policy in the right lines was covered the moment the water arrived, because Spanish law has made extraordinary-risk cover automatic since 1986.

What the Consorcio is

The Consorcio de Compensación de Seguros (CCS) is a public business entity (entidad pública empresarial) governed by Real Decreto Legislativo 7/2004, which consolidated its legal statute. It began provisionally in 1941, to cover riot risks after the Civil War, and became permanent in 1954, according to the Consorcio’s own 2016 description of the scheme.

It does several things, but its best-known role is as the insurer of “extraordinary risks”. These are events that private insurers in Spain do not cover themselves. The Consorcio covers them for everyone holding a policy in the prescribed lines: property damage (homes, offices, shops, industry, civil works), life, personal accident, business interruption and motor own-damage.

The covered natural perils are a closed list:

earthquake and tsunami;
flood, both river and coastal;
volcanic eruption;
atypical cyclonic storm, which includes gusts above 120 km/h and tornadoes;
falling meteorites.

The same cover extends to terrorism, rebellion, riot, civil commotion and the acts of armed or security forces in peacetime. That mix of natural and political risks is a legacy of 1941 and has no equivalent in the other schemes compared on Enhance Project.

The surcharge

The Consorcio is financed by a surcharge that must be added to every policy in the prescribed lines, whether or not the private insurer would itself have covered extraordinary risks. Insurers collect it with the premium and pass it on. The rate is a fixed national tariff on the sum insured, not on the premium, and it does not vary with exposure.

Type of property	Surcharge on sum insured	Deductible
Homes and residential communities	0.07‰	None
Offices	0.12‰	7% of the loss
Shops and industry	0.18‰	7% of the loss
Civil works	0.28‰ to 1.63‰	7% of the loss

These are the rates in the consolidated text of the Resolution of 28 March 2018 of the Directorate-General for Insurance and Pension Funds, published in the BOE and unchanged for homes since July 2018. The Consorcio’s 2016 brochure quotes 0.08‰ for homes, the rate in force before that date, and that older figure still circulates. A further Resolution of 30 December 2025, in force from 1 January 2026, changed the rules for light personal vehicles and the calculation of loss-of-profits cover, according to INESE, not the home rate.

To see what the per-mille rate means in money, take a hypothetical flat in Paiporta insured for €150,000. At 0.07‰ the extraordinary-risk surcharge is €10.50 a year, with no deductible on a claim. A hypothetical shop in the same street insured for €200,000 pays €36 a year at 0.18‰, and on a €50,000 flood loss bears a 7% deductible of €3,500. These are illustrations, not quotes, but they show why the system is hard to argue with from a household’s point of view: the cost is small and the cover is wide.

The stabilisation reserve and the State guarantee

The Consorcio funds claims from the surcharges and from a stabilisation reserve built up in quiet years. According to its Informe Anual 2025, the reserve available at the end of 2025 was €7,518.7m, with a gross figure of €7,672.8m against €7,118.7m a year earlier. That the reserve grew in a year in which the Consorcio paid out billions for the DANA says a lot about how much had been set aside.

Behind the reserve is a State guarantee for the case where catastrophes exceed the Consorcio’s capacity. It has never been used.

Premium and surcharge income for extraordinary risks was €860.4m in 2025, up from €829.2m in 2024. The loss ratio shows the volatility the reserve is there to absorb: 87.2% in 2025, against 612.0% in 2024. The 2025 figures also record 91,785 claims, down from 331,412 the year before, and a total cost of natural events in 2025 of €325m, including €40.81m for the September floods in Ibiza and €42.64m for the October floods in western Andalusia.

How a claim works

The Consorcio’s claim process is short, and that is deliberate.

No declaration. Since 1986 no official disaster-area declaration has been needed. If the policy, the damage and the event meet the legal definitions, the policyholder qualifies.
Direct claim. The policyholder claims from the Consorcio itself, not from the private insurer, quoting the ordinary policy.
Assessment and payment. The Consorcio assesses the damage and pays the claim, with no deductible for homes and a 7% deductible for business property.

The condition that sits in front of all this is the ordinary policy. A household without home insurance has no Consorcio cover at all.

Speed is the other half of the design. Because the Consorcio does not wait for a declaration and handles the claim itself, the bottleneck after a disaster is assessment capacity, not paperwork between institutions. In the DANA, that meant a little over a year to pass €4,000m in payments, and by June 2026 about 84% of the claims received had been paid, on the Consorcio’s own counts as reported by SegurosNews. Each of those claims went through one institution from start to finish.

The Valencia DANA, step by step

The depresión aislada en niveles altos (DANA) of autumn 2024 killed 232 people according to the figure in the Commission’s EU Solidarity Fund proposal, summarised by the European Parliament’s Legislative Observatory on 3 October 2025. Spain declared €20.28bn of direct damage, and the Commission accepted €18.08bn as plausible. The Consorcio’s response can be followed through its published totals:

28 October – 4 November 2024: the DANA hits, mainly in Valencia province, with damage also in Castilla-La Mancha and Andalusia.
10 March 2025: the European Commission announces almost €1.6bn of EU support for Spain, combining the Solidarity Fund with €645m of cohesion funds reallocated under RESTORE.
25 November 2025: the Consorcio passes €4,000m in payments, on 210,106 claims, according to the Spanish government’s press office, La Moncloa. By then 95.4% of the claims came from Valencia province.
31 December 2025: the Consorcio’s annual report records 251,206 claims and €4,159.7m paid, and calls the DANA the most severe event in its history.
27 March 2026: €4,378,657,847 paid on 212,237 claims. SegurosNews breaks that down as €1.20bn for vehicles across 132,352 payments, €1.10bn for homes and residential communities across 62,196, €1.11bn for shops and warehouses across 12,862, and €0.88bn for industry across 3,956.
5 June 2026: €4,484m paid, final cost estimated at about €4,800m.

The EU Solidarity Fund grant for the disaster came to €946,153,691, paid as a €100m advance and an €846m balance in 2026, the second-largest grant in the Fund’s history. Even so it is about a fifth of what the Consorcio alone expects to pay. The Valencia 2024 case study sets out how the remaining damage was split.

Two details in the breakdown stand out. Vehicles took the largest share by value, a reminder that the Consorcio covers motor own-damage policies: more than 130,000 vehicle payments had been made by March 2026. And homes, at €1.10bn, were not the largest category. Shops, warehouses and industry together took close to €2bn, even after the 7% business deductible.

Take-up and the protection gap

The Consorcio is only as wide as private insurance. UNESPA data for the end of 2025, reported by elDiario.es, put the share of Spanish homes with insurance at 80.8%, so 19.2% of homes, about 5.2 million, have no policy and no Consorcio cover. In about ten provinces, four homes in ten are uninsured. Valencia province, by contrast, rose from 78.4% before the DANA to 84.5% at the end of 2025.

EIOPA’s dashboard reflects the strength of the system for those inside it. Spain’s total protection-gap score fell to 5 in 2025 from 6 in 2024, with a current flood score of 1 on EIOPA’s 0–4 scale, the lowest band. The historical record is less flattering: only 25% of Spain’s flood losses between 1980 and 2024 were insured, according to the same dataset. The current score describes the system as it is now; the historical share records four decades of losses, including damage to public infrastructure that no private policy covers. The protection gap page explains how EIOPA builds the scores.

The criticisms

The Consorcio is widely admired abroad, but it is not free of problems.

Uninsured homes. The 19.2% without home insurance get nothing from the Consorcio, and in the provinces where four homes in ten have no policy the gap is twice the national figure.

No risk signal. A flat national tariff means a ground-floor flat in a dry riverbed pays the same rate as one on a hill. The Consorcio defends this as protection against anti-selection; others see it as a subsidy to building in the wrong places.

One event can drain a year. The 612% loss ratio of 2024 shows how quickly a single DANA can consume a year’s income. The reserve absorbed it, but the cost of the next event of that size is not guaranteed to fit.

Narrow peril list. Businesses pay a 7% deductible, and hail and ordinary heavy rain fall outside the legal definitions, leaving those claims to private policies.

The Consorcio has responded with a new three-year action plan for 2026–2028 that adds a strategic axis on high-impact situations, according to its 2025 annual report.

Spain next to its neighbours

France also charges a flat surcharge, but on the premium, and its claims depend on a government decree; the CatNat page explains the difference. Norway runs a flat-rate system too, through a mandatory pool of private insurers rather than a public body, as described on the Norway page. The side-by-side comparison follows the same flooded house through the Spanish, French and British systems, and the overview of European schemes groups all six by model.

Consorcio de Compensación de Seguros: how Spain pays