On 1 June 2026 Sweden replaced its shelter legislation with an Act that obliges the owners of the country’s roughly 64,000 civil-defence shelters to keep them, and their equipment, in good and usable condition. Finland’s roughly 50,500 shelters are subject to a different rule: they must be kept in a condition that allows them to be brought into use within 72 hours. In both countries protection therefore rests on an installed base whose value depends on whether ventilation, closures, valves, seals, filters and the organisation around them still work when needed, and whose condition is known only in part. That moves the economic question away from the size of the inventory. What matters is how an existing stock of protected spaces generates recurring work, and when that work is bought from external specialists rather than performed by an owner or a property-maintenance organisation. It matters equally when a defect becomes a repair, an authority order or a component replacement, and who bears the cost. The unresolved question is how much of the continuing duty to keep shelters ready reaches the market, and through which channels.