Utility debts: where most proceedings are recorded in Ukraine

Utility debts: where most proceedings are recorded in Ukraine

As of 2024, more than 700 thousand proceedings were recorded in Ukraine to collect debts for housing and communal services, which is a third more than at the beginning of the full-scale invasion. More debtors live in the Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv and Donetsk regions, where the largest debts are for heating, water supply and electricity.

Opendatabot analysts report this. Most debtors live in the Dnipropetrovsk region, where there are more than 100 thousand industries or 14.3% of the total.

The Kharkiv region ranks second with 94.8 thousand industries, and the Donetsk region is in third place with 79.7 thousand industries. As of February 2022, there were 512,359 proceedings in the Unified Register of Debtors. At the end of last year, their number increased to 659,684, and at the beginning of 2024 it reached 701,051 production, an increase of 6.3% compared to the previous half of the year.

The majority of debts are due to non-payment for heating, which amounts to 36.9% of all production or 258.8 thousand cases. In second place are debts for water supply – 18.6% or 130.2 thousand cases.

Debts for electricity supply take third place with 67.9 thousand cases or 9.7%. Other utilities for which Ukrainians are in debt include:

• housing services – 67.1 thousand or 9.6%;
• gas supply – 59.7 thousand or 8.5%;
• waste removal – 7.6 thousand or 1.1%.

In 15.6% of cases (approximately 109 thousand productions), analysts were unable to determine the scope of the debt collector. Since the beginning of the full-scale war in Ukraine, there has been a moratorium on the forced collection of debts for utilities and disconnecting debtors from networks. This moratorium was lifted in 2024, and restrictions now only apply if a consumer’s building has been damaged as a result of hostilities.