Insurance by country
Drone insurance in Europe
There is no single rule below 20 kg. This comparison shows where national law requires cover, the threshold that triggers it, and where the official position remains unclear.
The European baseline
Regulation (EC) No 785/2004 sets the European aviation-insurance framework relevant to aircraft of 20 kg and above. For the lighter drones most travellers carry, national law can impose a lower threshold, limit the duty to certain subcategories or commercial work, or leave recreational cover optional.
This means an insurance answer copied from one country is not portable. Check the destination, the aircraft mass, the operation and whether the flight is professional.
Requirements by country
| Country | Short answer | National detail |
|---|---|---|
| 🇬🇧 United Kingdom | Required for commercial flights | Cover is required for any flight made for a commercial reason, under assimilated Regulation (EC) 785/2004 and the Civil Aviation (Insurance) Regulations 2005. For recreational flying the CAA treats it as optional, and the regulation excludes model aircraft below 20 kg. The exemption is from the mandate, not the liability. |
| 🇪🇸 Spain | Not required by national law | AESA's own pages disagree, so treat this with care. The announcement of the 2024 decree said the insurance obligation was abolished for Open-category A1 and for A3 under 20 kg, leaving EU Regulation 785/2004 to cover 20 kg and above; but AESA's consumer-facing pages state that civil liability cover is required. We have not been able to reconcile the two against the decree text. Insurance is inexpensive and required for most commercial work in any case — the safe course is to carry it. |
| 🇮🇹 Italy | Required for all flights | ENAC requires third-party liability cover for drone operations, and it applies further down than most people expect: a drone under 250 g still needs registration and insurance if it carries a camera or microphone, even though it needs no pilot certificate. ENAC does not publish a minimum sum insured. |
| 🇫🇷 France | Not required by national law | There is no national insurance requirement for light drones in France. EU law only mandates third-party liability cover above 20 kg. Insurance is still strongly recommended, and it is required for most commercial work. |
| 🇩🇪 Germany | Required for all flights | Germany requires third-party liability cover with no weight threshold at all. The duty sits in the Aviation Act rather than in the drone rules, which is why it catches everything: the Act lists model aircraft as aircraft and adds unmanned systems flown for non-recreational purposes, and the insurance provision contains no exemption for either. The minimum sum for an aircraft under 500 kg is 750,000 Special Drawing Rights. You cannot complete registration without a policy number, and flying uninsured is a separate offence carrying the highest penalty band. |
| 🇵🇹 Portugal | Required above 900 g | Portuguese law sets the threshold at 900 g, not at the EU's 20 kg. Decreto-Lei 58/2018 article 10 requires third-party liability cover for any drone with a maximum operating mass above 900 grams, and Portaria 2/2021 sets the minimum capital — in force since 3 February 2021. Note that the registration articles of that decree-law were repealed in 2021 but the insurance article was not. We have not been able to read the minimum sums in Portaria 2/2021 from an official source, so we do not quote a figure. |
| 🇬🇷 Greece | Required for professional use, and from 4 kg privately | Greece requires third-party liability cover for any drone used professionally, at any weight, and for private-use drones from 4 kg. The 2016 national UAS regulation sets the sums at €150,000 for damage to third-party property and €1,000,000 for bodily injury. The HCAA portal states the 4 kg private threshold without naming the instrument it comes from, and it does not match the 2016 regulation's own wording, which is framed by category and commercial use rather than by weight — so the two official statements are not fully reconcilable. Carry cover either way. |
| 🇳🇱 Netherlands | Not required by national law | There is no national insurance requirement for light drones in Netherlands. EU law only mandates third-party liability cover above 20 kg. Insurance is still strongly recommended, and it is required for most commercial work. |
| 🇦🇹 Austria | Required for all flights | Austria requires third-party liability cover with no lower weight threshold at all, and it is a condition of registration — you supply the policy number when you register. The Aviation Act requires the keeper of an aircraft or self-flying device to hold cover of at least the amounts in section 151, which for a maximum take-off mass under 500 kg is 750,000 Special Drawing Rights. That captures every consumer drone. Note the sum is denominated in SDR rather than euro, so any euro figure is an approximation at the day's rate. This is materially stricter than the EU regime, which only bites from 20 kg. |
| 🇭🇷 Croatia | Not required by national law | There is no national insurance requirement for light drones in Croatia. EU law only mandates third-party liability cover above 20 kg. Insurance is still strongly recommended, and it is required for most commercial work. |
| 🇮🇸 Iceland | Not required by national law | There is no national insurance requirement for light drones in Iceland. EU law only mandates third-party liability cover above 20 kg. Insurance is still strongly recommended, and it is required for most commercial work. |
| 🇧🇪 Belgium | Required for all flights | Belgium requires every Open-category operator to hold third-party liability cover, at any weight — that is a national rule in the royal decree, not the EU one. But be careful with the sum: the decree sets no minimum for Open-category cover. The 750,000 SDR figure comes from the EU insurance regulation, which only applies from 20 kg and in the Specific category. So cover is compulsory for a 500 g hobby drone here, while the SDR floor is not. Model aircraft owners have had their own insurance duty since a 2022 amendment. |
| 🇨🇭 Switzerland | Required above 250 g | Switzerland requires liability insurance for every drone above 250 g, with a minimum cover of CHF 1 million. |
| 🇵🇱 Poland | Required from 250 g to 20 kg | This is new and most guides have not caught up. Since 13 November 2025 third-party liability insurance has been compulsory in Poland for drones between 250 g and 20 kg, with a minimum guarantee of 50,000 Special Drawing Rights per event, under a finance ministry regulation of October 2025. There is no exemption for recreational or private flying, and the policy must be in force no later than the day before you operate. Above 20 kg the EU regulation takes over; below 250 g the national duty does not apply. Flying without cover carries a 4,000 złoty administrative fine. |
| 🇨🇿 Czech Republic | Required for A2/A3 and Specific | Czech law requires liability insurance well below the EU's 20 kg, and it is set out with unusual precision. The aviation act imposes it on operators in subcategory A2, on operators in A3 where the drone exceeds 4 kg, and on the whole Specific category. A decree then fixes the minimum sum per claim: 1,000,000 CZK for A2 and A3, rising through 2,000,000, 5,000,000 and 10,000,000 CZK in the Specific category by weight band. A1 is not named, so a small C0 drone carries no national duty. One warning: the authority's own FAQ page still states the pre-2023 position that recreational operation under 20 kg is exempt. That page was last touched in December 2023 and predates the decree — the dedicated insurance page, updated in 2026, is the one that governs. |
| 🇭🇺 Hungary | Required above 250 g | Hungary fills the gap the EU regulation leaves below 20 kg, and it does so with published sums. A government decree on compulsory aviation liability insurance sets the minimum cover for unmanned aircraft at 3,000,000 HUF per event and 6,000,000 per year between 250 g and 4 kg, rising to 5,000,000 and 10,000,000 above 4 kg and below 20 kg. The trigger is 250 g or more — or commercial use at any weight, so a sub-250 g drone flown for money needs cover too. The authority is explicit that the policy must already exist at the moment you register. |
| 🇮🇪 Ireland | Not required by national law | There is no Irish requirement below the EU threshold. The statutory instrument gives the IAA a conditional power — operators shall be insured where directed by the authority — rather than imposing a blanket duty, and it names no weight and no minimum sum. One caveat worth carrying: the IAA's own FAQ words it as insurance being required «unless for recreational purposes and under 20 kg», which reads as expecting commercial operators to be covered at any weight. The binding instruments do not say that, and we are not going to resolve the tension in either direction. Commercial work is normally insured regardless. |
| 🇩🇰 Denmark | Required, except drones under 250 g | Denmark extended the EU's 750,000 SDR minimum down below the 20 kg line by national rule, so cover is required where most of Europe does not require it. Since 1 July 2025 there is an exemption for drones under 250 g with a top speed of 19 m/s owned and flown by private individuals for hobby purposes, and for toy-directive drones. Note how the exemption is framed: it turns on private use as well as size, so a commercial sub-250 g operation still appears to need cover. A page saying every drone in Denmark must be insured is now wrong for hobby flyers. |
| 🇸🇪 Sweden | Not required by national law | There is no national insurance requirement for light drones in Sweden. EU law only mandates third-party liability cover above 20 kg. Insurance is still strongly recommended, and it is required for most commercial work. |
| 🇳🇴 Norway | Required, except drones under 250 g | Norway requires liability cover far below the EU's 20 kg line: all drones and model aircraft other than toys must be insured, with a minimum of 750,000 Special Drawing Rights. Since the drone regulation was replaced on 1 November 2024 there is an exemption for drones under 250 g including payload flown in the open category, and for anything CE-marked as a toy. Luftfartstilsynet's Norwegian and English pages cite different paragraph numbers of the regulation for this, so we name the requirement without naming the paragraph. |
| 🇫🇮 Finland | Not required by national law | There is no national insurance requirement for light drones in Finland. EU law only mandates third-party liability cover above 20 kg. Insurance is still strongly recommended, and it is required for most commercial work. |
| 🇷🇴 Romania | Not required by national law | Romania requires third-party insurance only above 20 kg. We read the Air Code — Law 21/2020 — and its insurance article, 33, binds aerodrome operators, not drone operators; we found no article adding a national duty for light drones. One caveat: the authority's detailed UAS regulation sits behind a site we could not load, so a narrower provision there cannot be excluded. |
| 🇧🇬 Bulgaria | Required for commercial flights | The authority's own answer to «do I need insurance?»: «as a UAS operator you are always required to hold third-party insurance for your drone if it weighs over 20 kg. For commercial activities, third-party insurance is required regardless of the weight of the UAS.» So a hobby flight below 20 kg needs no cover under national law, but any paid work does, down to the smallest drone. The page does not cite the article behind the general rule; the light-UAS-operator-certificate route cites Ordinance N-6 of 11 April 2023, Article 52. |
| 🇸🇮 Slovenia | Required for all flights | Article 5 of the 2024 decree requires every drone operator to hold compulsory insurance under the road and transport insurance act, and it sets no weight threshold and no exemption for the open category — so the duty reaches far below the EU's 20 kg. Two things are worth knowing alongside it. The minimum sums come from the general transport insurance act, which refers back to the EU insurance regulation. And the decree's own penalty chapter contains no offence for failing to hold that cover, so the duty exists without a published fine behind it. |
| 🇸🇰 Slovakia | Required for A2/A3 and Specific | Section 45c of the Civil Aviation Act, Act 143/1998, carries the duty, and the authority's insurance page sets the scope: cover is required for A2, A3, Specific and Certified operations and not for A1. One policy may cover all of an operator's drones, with a minimum equal to that for manned aircraft under 500 kg under EU Regulation 785/2004. |
| 🇱🇺 Luxembourg | Required for all flights | Luxembourg requires third-party liability insurance. The registration page states that «a third-party insurance number is necessary to complete any application», and the directorate's FAQ presents the cover as obligatory when piloting a drone. The parliamentary record on the 2025 law shows the insurance amounts are graduated by drone weight. We could not read the article of the new law or regulation that carries the duty — the legal database would not render for us — so we cite the two live official pages rather than a section number. |
| 🇲🇹 Malta | Required for all flights | Malta is unambiguous and unusually broad here. The authority states that all drone operators flying in Malta need valid third-party insurance irrespective of the weight of the drone and irrespective of whether the flight is recreational or commercial. The same requirement is repeated on its pages for visitors and for open-category operators, and the policy is uploaded as part of registration. We have not been able to read the national instrument behind it — the regulatory instrument that carries Malta's drone rules is published as a scanned PDF with no machine-readable text — so we cite the authority's own published rule rather than a section number. |
| 🇨🇾 Cyprus | Not required by national law | Cyprus does not require third-party insurance for ordinary Open-category flying, and we found no national instrument that goes below the EU threshold of 20 kg. But two situations do carry a hard requirement, and both are easy to walk into: an operational authorisation in the Specific category demands third-party cover of at least €1,000,000 for the whole duration of the operation, and so does a flight in Zone B near Larnaca or Paphos airport. Insurance broker pages claiming that every drone operator in Cyprus must be insured, sometimes at 750,000 SDR, do not match anything the authority publishes; we could not source that figure and do not repeat it. |
| 🇪🇪 Estonia | Not required by national law | Estonia requires third-party liability insurance only above 20 kg. The authority's FAQ: «the operator of an unmanned aircraft system must have third-party liability insurance if the maximum take-off mass of the unmanned aircraft exceeds 20 kg». We checked for a national duty below that and found none. Specific-category operations carry insurance as a condition of the authorisation, as everywhere. |
| 🇱🇻 Latvia | Required, except drones under 250 g | Latvia requires third-party liability insurance for drone flights in its airspace under Article 117.10 of the Law on Aviation, implemented by Cabinet Regulation No. 447 of 29 June 2021: «to operate unmanned aircraft in the airspace of the Republic of Latvia, the UAS operator or the aircraft's owner shall insure their general civil liability». The exemption is narrow — drones under 250 g that also cannot exceed 19 m/s — and the minimum cover for open-category A1 and A2 flying is €50,000. Above 20 kg the EU minimums take over. We previously wrote that Latvia had no national requirement below 20 kg. That was wrong, and it has been wrong since 2021. |
| 🇱🇹 Lithuania | Not required by national law | Lithuania requires insurance only above 20 kg. The agency's FAQ: «it is mandatory to insure an unmanned aircraft if the maximum take-off weight with cargo is more than 20 kg». The Administrative Offences Code fines uninsured operation, which confirms the duty exists at that threshold. We found no national requirement below it. |
| 🇱🇮 Liechtenstein | Required above 250 g | Anyone operating a drone over 250 g must hold liability cover of at least CHF 1 million — the Liechtenstein police state this in those terms — and the certificate must be issued to the pilot and carried during the flight. This is stricter than the EU baseline, where Regulation 785/2004 only requires cover above 20 kg, so a visitor legal at home may be uninsured by local standards. |
| 🇹🇷 Turkey | Not confirmed — check with the authority | A standalone 2017 regulation sets minimum third-party cover for unmanned aircraft at reduced rates. The new instruction contains no insurance article, and the minimum figures sit in a table we could not retrieve. The superseded rules required cover for commercial work and from 25 kg. Treat the position as unresolved and ask SHGM. |
| 🇷🇸 Serbia | Required for all flights | Third-party liability insurance is required for registered aircraft, as part of any approval request, and expressly for foreign operators, whose policy must cover the territory of Serbia. No minimum sum insured appears anywhere in the Rulebook, so we do not publish one. |
| 🇲🇪 Montenegro | Required for all flights | The Agency requires all operators to hold third-party liability cover, and states that foreign visitors must have a policy covering the territory of Montenegro or the EU — so an EU-wide drone policy satisfies it. No minimum sum insured is published on any Agency page, so we do not quote one. |
| 🇦🇱 Albania | Not confirmed — check with the authority | Order 143 uses only the conditional EU wording — the operator confirms it will have adequate insurance where applicable law requires it — and we found no Albanian instrument setting a weight threshold or a minimum sum for drones. So there is no verified figure and no verified threshold. Carry cover, but do not assume Albanian law specifies what it must be. |
| 🇧🇦 Bosnia and Herzegovina | Required for all flights | The rulebook requires cover for third-party ground damage in Bosnian territory and states no weight threshold, while the Directorate's English guidance says the non-commercial requirement starts above 1 kg — an unresolved conflict in its own materials. No minimum sum is published. Commercial operations need cover at any weight. |
| 🇲🇰 North Macedonia | Required above 500 g | Third-party liability cover is required for any drone with a maximum take-off weight above 500 g, and for a visitor it must be an international policy that covers North Macedonian airspace. Note that the Agency's own registration form states the requirement differently, citing the EU threshold and national compulsory insurance law; the 500 g figure here comes from the guide written for foreign operators. No minimum sum insured is published, and the pilot is liable for damage to third parties whatever the policy says. |
What to verify in a policy
- Third-party aviation liability: damage or injury caused to someone else.
- Territory: every country on the itinerary, not simply “Europe” in marketing copy.
- Purpose: recreational, professional or both.
- Aircraft and payload: mass, model, serial number and specialist equipment where required.
- Operation: Open or Specific category, including any authorised activity.
- Exclusions: privacy, data, indoor work, competitions, autonomous flight and loss of the aircraft.
The insurer, not a comparison table, must confirm that a specific policy meets the destination rule. Keep the certificate and territorial wording available during the flight.
Common questions
Is drone insurance required everywhere in Europe?
No. EU law creates a common liability-insurance baseline for aircraft of 20 kg and above, while national law decides what applies below that. The threshold and scope therefore change at the border.
Does travel insurance cover my drone?
Do not assume it does. Equipment cover and third-party aviation liability are different risks. Ask the insurer to confirm the aircraft, activity, territory and liability cover in writing.
Does commercial work always require insurance?
Not under one Europe-wide rule for every small drone, but several countries require it for commercial work and clients or operational authorisations commonly demand it. Check both national law and the contract.
Official sources
Primary sources used for this guide, checked September 2026. Open the live national source again before flying; geographical zones and temporary restrictions can change between reviews.
- European framework Regulation (EC) No 785/2004 — insurance requirements for air carriers and aircraft operators
- National sources directory EASA — national aviation authorities