NHT’s Melissa Package: Grants, Low-Interest Loans and a Mortgage Pause for 20,000 Homeowners

Kingston, Jamaica, 6 November 2025

One week after Hurricane Melissa made landfall, the government has announced a comprehensive package of financial support for homeowners whose properties were damaged or destroyed, centred on three instruments: a special grant of up to $500,000 through the National Housing Trust, a home improvement loan of up to $3.5 million at two per cent interest, and an automatic six-month moratorium on mortgage payments for the approximately 20,000 NHT mortgagors in the seven hardest-hit parishes. Taken together, the package represents the most substantial financial intervention the NHT has deployed in response to a single weather event in its history.

The six-month moratorium, covering St Elizabeth, Westmoreland, Hanover, Trelawny, St James, Manchester and St Ann, is automatic. Mortgagors in those parishes do not need to apply. For contributors in other parishes who have been financially affected by the storm, individual applications will be considered by the trust. The prime minister also reminded the public that all NHT mortgagors are insured under the trust’s House Owners Comprehensive Policy, which covers damage from hurricane, storm, flood and fire, and that NHT branches have been mobilised to help mortgagors prepare and process their insurance claims efficiently.

The $3.5 Million Loan and What It Can Do

The home improvement loan at two per cent interest is designed both for immediate repair and for strengthening properties against future storm events. Contributors seeking to convert a timber roof to a slab roof, or to undertake other structural upgrades as part of the repair process, can direct the loan facility toward those improvements. This is an important provision: it creates a financing pathway for homeowners to rebuild to a higher standard than what they lost, rather than simply restoring what existed before Melissa. For families in St Elizabeth’s coastal communities, where the inadequacy of construction standards contributed significantly to the scale of the damage, the opportunity to rebuild stronger with NHT financing at two per cent is meaningful.

The $500,000 grant is available to contributors and, in a significant policy expansion, to their immediate family members, including parents helping adult children and children helping parents. This extension reflects a realistic understanding of how Jamaican families actually navigate financial difficulty: not as isolated individuals, but as extended household networks where those with more stable incomes support those who are most severely affected.

What This Means for Property Recovery in St Elizabeth

For NHT mortgagors in St Elizabeth, the automatic six-month pause on mortgage payments removes the immediate financial pressure of monthly obligations at the moment when all available cash needs to go toward repair, temporary accommodation and daily survival. The insurance policy that covers all NHT mortgagors for hurricane damage creates a parallel funding pathway that, if claims are processed efficiently, can deliver meaningful reconstruction support before the grant and loan programmes are fully deployed.

The gap that the package does not close is the one affecting the majority of damaged and destroyed homes in St Elizabeth: those built outside the NHT system, on unregistered land, without formal planning approvals and without any form of hurricane insurance. The NHT’s instruments are excellent tools for the formal housing sector. The wider housing challenge in western Jamaica, where informally built homes on unregistered land represent the majority of what was destroyed, requires a different and broader set of responses. The NHT package is essential. It is not sufficient on its own.