The 2026 statistics are in, and they tell two stories that sound like they contradict each other. Reported bicycle thefts fell in Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Austria and the UK. At the same time, the average insurance payout for a stolen bike hit an all-time high. Fewer bikes are being taken, and the ones that go are worth considerably more.
Across the EU-27, around 1.3 million bicycles are reported stolen every year, a figure the European Cyclists' Federation publishes with an immediate caveat: it is probably a significant underestimate. That caveat turns out to be the most important thing in this year's data.
Here is what the 2026 numbers actually show, and what they should change about how you look after your bike.
Reported thefts fell almost everywhere, and rose in the Netherlands
The declines are real and in several countries they are steep.
Germany recorded on the 245,868 logged the year before, according to the . Sweden went further: and the first time the national series has dropped below 50,000. Denmark reported 44,043, continuing a decline from a 1994 peak of 125,371. Austria logged . In England and Wales, police-recorded cycle theft fell .
Finland is roughly flat. 17,100 bicycle thefts came to police attention in 2025, about 500 more than the year before, which the insurance federation Finanssiala describes as a blip against a decline running since 2020.
Then there is the Netherlands, which has gone the other way for four years running. Dutch police registered 86,950 bicycle thefts in 2025, up 40.8% on 2020, and the first eight months of 2026 were higher again. Maastricht is up 39% this year, Delft 30%, Enschede 26%.
So there is no single European trend to report. Most of northern Europe is seeing fewer reports, the Netherlands is seeing more, and as the next section explains, "fewer reports" and "fewer thefts" are not the same sentence.
Police numbers count a minority of actual thefts
Every national figure above counts thefts that someone bothered to report. Most are not.
The Dutch national statistics office put a number on it this year. In the Veiligheidsmonitor 2025, CBS found that only 41.3% of bicycle theft victims notified police at all, and 39.3% filed a formal report. Roughly six in ten Dutch bike thefts never enter the statistics. Bicycle theft was also the most common property crime measured, affecting 5% of people aged 15 and over.
Austria's road safety board reached a similar place from a different direction. A KFV survey of 1,520 people, published in September 2026, found a third of theft victims filed no police report, and that nearly one household in four had a bike, e-bike or e-scooter stolen in the previous five years.
The reason people give is bleak and circular. KFV's Dr Armin Kaltenegger points to the low expectation of ever seeing the bike again as a main driver of the low reporting rate, with bicycle theft victims the least hopeful of any group. People do not report because bikes do not come back, and bikes do not come back partly because so little is reported.
In Sweden, researchers at VTI have estimated that around half a million bicycles are stolen each year while only about 70,000 thefts reach the police. Set that against the 46,496 reported in 2025 and the scale of the gap becomes hard to ignore.
The average stolen bike has never been worth more
This is where the second story starts, and it runs in the opposite direction to the first.
German insurers paid out €150 million for stolen bicycles in 2025, with an average claim of €1,270, which the insurance association GDV records as a new high. The number of insured bikes stolen fell to 115,000, about 15,000 fewer than the year before. Fewer claims, more money, because the bikes are worth more. Police-recorded losses tell the same story: an average of €1,454 per case in 2025, up from €1,373.
Finland shows the pattern in miniature. Thefts have trended down since 2020, yet insurers paid roughly €12 million for stolen bikes in 2025, and about 3,000 of the thefts involved e-bikes.
"Sähköpyörien ja muuten arvokkaiden pyörämallien yleistyminen näkyy selvästi korvaussummissa. Varkaat ovat valitettavan tarkkaan perillä siitä, millaisista pyöristä saa käytettynä parhaan hinnan."
"The spread of e-bikes and otherwise valuable models shows up clearly in the claim amounts. Thieves are unfortunately very well informed about which bikes fetch the best second-hand price."
Sweden counted 12,931 e-bike thefts in 2025, still close to 30% of all reported bicycle thefts even though that number itself fell by 11.9%. The pattern behind all of it is the one we covered in why e-bikes are a bigger theft target: a thief choosing between two bikes is choosing between two resale prices.
Nine in ten stolen bikes are never recovered
Three national statistics offices, working independently, land in almost exactly the same place.
Germany cleared 9.8% of reported bicycle thefts in 2025. Austria solved 9.3%, or 1,570 of 16,932 cases. Italy's statistics office Istat found that fewer than one stolen bicycle in ten is ever recovered, putting the figure at 9.5% against 61% for cars and 45.7% for motorcycles. In England and Wales, roughly 89% of recorded cycle thefts close with no suspect identified.
Istat also recorded the detail that explains much of the gap: only 21.6% of completed bicycle thefts in Italy are reported to police, the lowest reporting rate of any crime it measures. Car theft, by comparison, is reported close to 100% of the time. The difference is not that people care less about bikes. It is that cars are registered, so reporting one stolen is both necessary and useful.
Registration changes how a bike comes back. The peer-reviewed Patterns in Bike Theft and Recovery study of 1,823 thefts found an overall recovery rate of 15%, and that registered owners got their bike back through the police in 38% of cases against 32% for unregistered bikes, while unregistered owners leaned more on online channels (24% against 16%). Registration does not conjure a bike out of nowhere. It gives the police something to match against, which is the route that works when the bike has already left the owner's reach. In Belgium, the national MyBike register reports recovering 14.5% of registered stolen bicycles, against national recovery rates elsewhere in Europe of 2% to 5%.
What the 2026 numbers should change about your routine
The policy world has drawn its own conclusion from this data. In November 2025 the Benelux Union and North Rhine-Westphalia launched a joint strategy against cross-border bicycle theft, and one of its three pillars is linking national bicycle registration systems to each other.
"Bicycle theft is not a minor issue – it undermines public trust in sustainable mobility and discourages cycling. By addressing this problem across borders, with shared data and police cooperation, the Benelux and North Rhine-Westphalia can truly make a difference."
Frans Weekers, Secretary-General of the Benelux Union
The reason that matters to an individual bike owner became clear in a German case this March. Prosecutors in Osnabrück charged two suspects with stealing more than 75 pedelecs worth over €300,000, and one of them was running a workshop to falsify frame numbers and purchase documents. Organised thieves spend real effort defeating the frame number, which tells you exactly how much the frame number is worth.
Four things follow from this year's figures:
Write down your frame number before you need it. The KFV survey found only 37% of e-bike owners had noted theirs, and just 23% had registered the bike. If you do not know where yours is, here is where to look.
Report the theft even when you expect nothing. The reporting gap is what makes bike theft look like a minor crime to the people who allocate police resources. A report with a frame number attached is also the only version police can act on.
Insure for what the bike is worth now, not what you paid. With average claims at €1,270 in Germany, a lot of policies written a few years ago no longer cover the replacement.
Lock for the bike's resale value. Thieves are selecting on price, so an expensive bike on a cheap lock is the specific combination the 2026 data punishes.
The full cost of all this is not really measured in insurance payouts. ECF research found that 11% of theft victims stop cycling altogether and 23% cycle less often, and that 39% never replace the stolen bike. We looked at that wider bill in the real cost of bike theft in the Nordics. The numbers improved this year. They improved from a point where nine out of ten owners never see their bike again, which is not a standard worth settling for.
