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Could your home hold for three days?
Europe now asks every household to be able to stand on its own for 72 hours. It is a reasonable ask, and most of us have never actually checked.
The European Preparedness Union Strategy asks every household in the Union to be able to sustain itself for at least three days. The reasoning is plain: in a serious disruption, the first hours are the ones that decide everything after.
European Commission
This is not a prepper number.
In March 2025 the European Commission published the Preparedness Union Strategy and asked something it had never asked before: that ordinary households across the Union be able to stand on their own for at least 72 hours.
The document is a Joint Communication of the Commission and the High Representative, published on 26 March 2025 and catalogued as JOIN(2025) 130 final. It sets out thirty actions across seven areas, and one of those areas is population preparedness: the part that concerns your kitchen rather than a ministry.
Not because the sky is falling. Because storms, outages and supply interruptions are now ordinary, and the first three days are when help is thinnest. Finland, Sweden and France have told their citizens much the same for years. The 2025 blackout across the Iberian peninsula made the point without any help from a strategy document.
Water, food, light, medicine, documents, a way to hear what is happening. The Commission lists the things, not the brands.
The strategy talks about preparedness lessons in schools and a preparedness day. It is aiming at habit, which is another word for practice.
A standard nobody measures against is a leaflet. This page turns it into a number for your home, in ninety seconds.
Six questions about your home.
Answer for the house as it stands tonight, not as you intend it to be. The result is a reading, not a grade.
Your answers stay in this browser.
Your weakest lifeline sets the number.
Most people answer the readiness question with their best thing. The full cupboard. The solar on the roof. But a household does not hold for as long as its strongest lifeline. It holds for as long as its weakest one.
A full pantry does not help on the day the water stops. So the check takes the lowest of the five and reports that, rather than averaging them into a comfortable middle. It is the less flattering method and the only useful one.
Three litres a person a day covers drinking and cooking. The WHO baseline for everything else is fifteen.
Days of real meals, not shelves of things nobody opens. What gets eaten counts. What gets stored does not.
Light, a charged phone, and news. Not running the house. Keeping the essential few things alive.
In winter this quietly becomes the lifeline that caps every other one.
The one almost nobody counts, and the one that fails first. Cards and networks go down long before taps do.
Check it yourself.
Everything on this page comes from public documents. Read them rather than taking our word for it. That is the whole point of citing them.
European Commission, topic page. The 72-hour recommendation and the seven areas of action.
26 March 2025. The plain-language summary of what was adopted and why.
Basis Land is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, funded by, or endorsed by the European Union or any of its institutions. The 72-hour figure is theirs, published for everyone. The reading on this page is ours, and the responsibility for it is ours too.
Three days is the floor, not the ceiling.
The check gives you a rough number once. Range keeps it, in days, across four lifelines, as the house changes.
Open RangeOff-grid is a practice, not a place.