How Much Water Per Person? Europe Cannot Agree
Ask five European governments how much water a household should keep, and you get five answers.
France: six litres per person for 72 hours. Two litres a day, covering drinking and basic hygiene.
Poland: fourteen litres per person, in the RCB guidance.
Germany: twenty litres per person, but for ten days rather than three. That works out at two litres a day.
The figure that appears in most European guidance and in the WHO’s short-term planning: three litres per person per day, so nine litres for three days.
The WHO’s full-use baseline: fifteen litres per person per day, which over three days would be forty-five.
The spread is more than sevenfold. For anyone trying to do the sensible thing, that is genuinely confusing, and the confusion is a reason people do nothing at all.
None of these figures is wrong. They answer different questions.
What each number actually measures
Two litres a day is survival drinking. Roughly 1.5 litres to drink and half a litre for preparing food. It assumes you are not really cooking, barely washing, and that the situation is short. It is a floor.
Three litres a day adds cooking properly. The moment you want to rehydrate anything, make coffee, or rinse a plate, two litres becomes tight. This is the figure most agencies converge on for a genuine three-day disruption.
Fourteen or fifteen litres a day is full domestic use. Drinking, cooking, washing, dishes, sanitation. It is the correct planning figure for a refugee camp, a long outage, or a municipality organising supply. It is not a figure for a cupboard in an apartment.
So the real difference is not disagreement about human biology. It is disagreement about what the guidance is for.
The assumption hiding underneath
Here is the part worth noticing, because it decides which number applies to you.
The low figures assume the tap mostly works. Two litres a day stored is a reserve sitting alongside a functioning water supply, to cover a short interruption or a boil notice.
The high figures assume the tap does not work at all, and that everything a household needs must come from storage.
Germany’s twenty litres for ten days makes sense in the first world. Poland’s fourteen litres for three days makes sense in the second.
Which means the useful question is not “what does my country say”, but “what happens to my tap when the power goes out?”
Why that question has different answers by floor
In a house, water and electricity are separate systems. Lose one, keep the other.
In an apartment block above roughly the third or fourth floor, mains pressure alone does not reach you. A pump pushes water up, sometimes to a roof tank. The pump runs on the building’s electricity.
So in a house, three litres a day of stored water is a reserve. In a ninth-floor flat, it is the entire supply, because the outage that takes your lights takes your taps at the same time.
The same national recommendation therefore means two different things to two people living a hundred metres apart.
The number to actually use
For a household in an apartment, nine litres per person is the honest three-day figure. Three litres a day, three days.
Two people: eighteen litres, a case and a half. Four people: thirty-six litres, three cases.
If you live in a house with mains pressure that does not depend on a pump, six litres per person is defensible, because your tap is more likely to survive the event you are preparing for.
If you want to go further, the next milestone is duration rather than volume. Move from three days to a week at three litres a day, rather than from three litres to fifteen.
And keep one empty container with a lid alongside the stored water. If supply is organised from a tanker, you need something to carry water in. That container costs a few euros and never needs rotating, and its absence is one of the most common gaps in national surveys.
What Europe agrees on
Underneath the arithmetic, the guidance converges more than the numbers suggest.
Every country in this comparison asks households to hold something rather than nothing. Every one treats water as the first item on the list rather than the fourth. Every one frames the first three days as the period when help is thinnest, which is why 72 hours is now the common European floor even where the national figure is higher.
The disagreement is about litres. The agreement is about the principle, and the principle is the part that matters, because a household with six litres is in a completely different position from a household with none.
This week
Count the people in your home, multiply by nine, and look at how much water is in the house right now rather than on shopping day.
Buy the difference in one trip. Write the month on the case. Put it under a bed.
Then, if you live above the fourth floor, treat that case as your supply rather than your reserve, because on the day it matters, that is what it will be.
Not sure where your household stands? The 72-hour check takes ninety seconds and names your weakest lifeline.
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