The life-cycle cost can be regarded as a benchmark variable in decision making problems involving

insurance policy making for existing structures in seismic risk prone  areas. The problem of evaluating the life-cycle cost involves uncertainties in both loading and structural modeling parameters. The present study is a preliminary study aiming to calculate the expected insurance premium for a generic structure subjected to seismic hazard in its service lifetime based on probabilistic loss estimation. A methodology is presented that takes into account both the uncertainty in the occurrence of future events due to seismic hazard and also the deterioration of the structure as a result of a series of events. The expected insurance premium can then be evaluated  on the time-dependent probabilities that the structure exceeds a set of discrete limit state thresholds. It can be argued that the evaluated insurance premium can be influenced by possible seismic upgrading operations undergone by the structure. Further, the choice of upgrading the structure allows the insurer to discriminate amongst structures (citizens), and, consequentially, to alleviate adverse selection and moral hazard problems. Thus, private and public insurance programs are compared under alternative upgrading policy. Finally, the methodology is implemented in an illustrative numerical example which considers a generic structure subjected to seismic hazard in both upgraded and non-upgraded configurations.  It is demonstrated how the evaluated premium can be affected by the decision to upgrade the structure.