Germany has not added up the cost of its indoor air

Markets · Jun 2026 · 6 min read · 20 sources

In 2017, the environmental health researcher Guillaume Boulanger and colleagues put the cost of indoor air pollution in France at about EUR 19 billion a year. In Germany, researchers have published cost figures for two indoor factors, radon and secondhand smoke. As of September 2026, no German agency has calculated a total, as far as I could find.

Written by

Christian Huser
neuecon partners

A total for indoor air would show which part of the cost falls on builders, landlords and public building managers.

A white exhibition hall under a grid of light, a figure at the balustrade.

A new carpet at the US environment agency affected at least 122 people

In October 1987, the US Environmental Protection Agency had about 27,000 square yards of new carpet laid in its headquarters at Waterside Mall in Washington. In 1991, William Hirzy and Rufus Morison, both scientists at the agency, described what followed. The air and the fumes from the carpet affected at least 122 people. Seventeen could no longer work at their usual desks. At least 6 developed a lasting sensitivity to chemicals. The suspected cause was 4-phenylcyclohexene, a trace compound in the latex glue on the back of the carpet. The agency removed the carpet in September 1988, almost a year after it was laid.

The carpet is one case in one building. To know what indoor air costs a country, someone has to add up the illness in all its buildings and put a price on it. Researchers in France, England and Australia have each done that for part of the problem. In a report for The Built Review, I analysed 20 sources to see how they did it and what Germany has.

Each of the three studies counted something different

The French figure is the broadest. Boulanger and colleagues made it for ANSES, the French agency for food, environmental and occupational health and safety. They counted six pollutants: benzene, trichloroethylene, radon, carbon monoxide, fine particles and secondhand smoke. For the year 2004, they arrived at about EUR 19 billion, about 1% of French gross domestic product. Fine particles make up about three quarters of it. ANSES calls the figure an order of magnitude, given for illustration.

The English figure counts housing instead of pollutants. In 2021, the Building Research Establishment (BRE), a commercial research and certification body, put the cost of poor housing in England to the National Health Service at GBP 1.4 billion a year, for the first year of treatment. Homes that are too cold account for GBP 857 million of it. BRE's wider measure of the cost to society, which adds lost productivity and later costs, reaches GBP 18.5 billion.

The Australian figure comes from a model. In 2025, the health policy researcher Yuxi Li and colleagues calculated what Australia would gain if no home had indoor mould. Per million people, they put the fall in health spending at about USD 78 million and the rise in income at about USD 116 million. Both figures are totals over 20 years, with future amounts reduced by 3% a year to their value today. Their paper is a preprint, which other researchers have not yet reviewed for a journal.

The three figures measure different things, in different currencies and for different periods. But each puts a price on illness from indoor conditions across a whole country.

German researchers have priced radon and secondhand smoke

German researchers have made two pieces of such a calculation. Radon is the better documented of the two. In 2024, the radiation protection researcher Felix Heinzl and colleagues attributed about 2,800 lung-cancer deaths a year in Germany to radon in buildings. That is 6.3% of all lung-cancer deaths in the country. The Federal Office for Radiation Protection confirms the figure. In 2011, the health economist Florian Haucke and colleagues at Helmholtz Zentrum München calculated about EUR 340 million a year for treatment and lost production, in the prices of 2006. They wrote the report for the Federal Office for Radiation Protection, and it gives their own view. Their model assumes about 1,900 radon deaths a year, fewer than the 2,800 that Heinzl and colleagues count.

For secondhand smoke at home, there is one figure. In 2020, the economist Tobias Effertz of the University of Hamburg put the cost of illness among people who live with smokers at EUR 1.3 billion a year. In 2022, the epidemiologist Anne Starker and colleagues at the Robert Koch Institute cited that figure. I have not seen Effertz's original. I found no German cost figure for any other indoor factor.

In 2026, a parliamentary group in the Bundestag asked the federal government for the costs and benefits of radon protection in euros. On 3 August 2026, the government answered without a figure. It said that a report on the cost of radon protection is due by December 2028.

The environment agency's cost accounts leave indoor air out

The Umweltbundesamt, the German Environment Agency, already works on indoor air. Its Committee on Indoor Air Guide Values sets a precautionary value and a hazard value for individual pollutants, by a method published in the Bundesgesundheitsblatt since 1996. The agency also prices environmental damage. In 2024, it put the damage from greenhouse gases and air pollutants from road traffic, electricity and heat in 2022 at EUR 301 billion or more. Indoor air is not in that sum. The agency's handbook of cost rates, in its version of February 2026, does not mention indoor air, radon, secondhand smoke or mould.

The agency's own researchers say that Germany needs more data. In 2026, the environmental health researcher Myriam Tobollik and colleagues tried to estimate how many years of healthy life German children and adolescents lose to 17 environmental factors. They could estimate 5. The agency's German Environmental Survey had measured fine particles in 74 homes over seven days. Tobollik and colleagues judged that too few for an estimate for the population.

A mix of pollutants makes a total hard to calculate

The strongest objection comes from a report for the agency itself. In 2021, the economist Aaron Best and colleagues wrote that costs are hard to add up across environmental risks, because pollutants occur together and the share of each one in an illness is hard to separate. Indoor air is such a mix of volatile organic compounds, formaldehyde, mould and radon.

The objection is fair, and the same report prices pollutants anyway. Best and colleagues calculated the cost of fine particles, ozone and lead in Germany for 2016. Boulanger and colleagues faced the same mix in France and gave their figure as an order of magnitude.

I think the missing total is a political choice

So the calculation can be done, and the Umweltbundesamt already does it for traffic, electricity and heat. I think the missing total is a political decision. A total would show which part of the cost falls on builders, landlords and public building managers. Without one, a debate about renovation weighs only the price of the renovation.

The calculation itself would cost little. In France, it fitted within the budget of the national indoor air observatory, EUR 1.5 to 2.7 million a year. The expensive part was measuring the air in homes. In 2019, three French inspectorates put the cost of the French survey of homes from 2003 to 2005 at EUR 3 to 4.6 million. A German total would need a survey of the same kind. In its round of 2014 to 2017, the German survey measured fine particles in 74 homes.

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