Design-based and model-assisted estimation procedures are widely applied by most of the European national statistical institutes. There are, however, situations were model-based approaches can have additional value in the production of official statistics, e.g. to deal with small sample sizes, measurement errors and discontinuities due to survey redesigns. In this paper several cases are identified where design-based estimators do not result in sufficiently reliable estimates and model-based procedures are more appropriate for producing official releases