I lost or broke my hardware wallet: are my bitcoin gone?

Almost certainly not. The device is a reader, not a vault — but what decides whether you get them back is not the device.

What can actually lock you out

Not losing the device. The things that only lived on it, or next to it:

• The address type. The same phrase derives four different wallets depending on the standard (BIP-44, 49, 84, 86). If the device used one and you restore into another, you see a zero balance with no error.
• The passphrase, if you had one. Any string produces a valid wallet and only the right one opens yours. There is no "wrong password" message because there is nothing to compare against.
• The signing scheme. If it was multisig, one phrase is not enough: you need the full policy and every cosigner.
• Which make and model it was. Sounds trivial until you sit down to restore and do not know which derivation to try.

What to do, in order

1. Do not buy anything yet. First confirm your backup is enough. A new device does not fix an incomplete backup, and finding that out with the device in your hand changes nothing.
2. Find what you wrote down besides the words. Address type, whether there was a passphrase, which wallet created it. None of that can spend a satoshi, and it is exactly what you need.
3. Check the backup before restoring onto a new device. The question is not "can I write my twelve words again?" but: given only what you wrote down, can software that has never seen your wallet reproduce your first address?
4. If the device broke but you still have it, do not throw it away or send it for repair with the seed inside. A device that still boots can show you the extended public key — which is precisely the piece you are missing.

And the uncomfortable question

If losing a single object put you here, it is worth asking what other object could do the same. The email that recovers the phone, the phone that recovers everything else, the passphrase that exists only in one person's head: there is almost always more than one single point of failure, and they are almost never all visible at once.

Six questions are enough to map that and find where a single loss locks you out. It asks for no secrets, runs in your browser, and the page declares connect-src 'none': it cannot send anything anywhere.

And if what you want is to check the backup you already have, the ceremony derives your first address from the extended public key and matches it against what your wallet shows. Under two minutes, and it never asks for the seed.