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Finding accommodation is the task that decides how the rest of your first year in Germany goes. Your address is not just where you sleep. It is what lets you register with the authorities, and registration is what unlocks your tax number, your bank account, your health insurance paperwork and your residence permit appointment. Nothing else moves until this moves. This chapter walks you through the German rental market as it actually works in 2026: where to search, what a Besichtigung (viewing appointment) is really testing, which questions a landlord is allowed to ask you and which ones you are entitled to leave unanswered, how the rent is built up, what the deposit rules are, which clauses in a standard contract do not hold up, and what to do when the search itself is being poisoned by discrimination.
Two things are worth saying at the start. First, German tenancy law is genuinely protective, and much of that protection is mandatory: the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch (BGB, the Civil Code) repeatedly says that an agreement deviating to the tenant’s disadvantage is void, which means a clause in your contract can be printed, signed and still legally worthless. Knowing which ones is worth real money. Second, the protection begins the day you sign. Before that, during the search, you are in the weakest position you will ever occupy, competing against dozens of applicants in a market with a structural shortage. This chapter is organised around that asymmetry.
What the German Housing Market Actually Looks Like
Germany is a country of tenants. Renting is not a temporary stage before buying; it is a normal, permanent, respectable way to live, and that is why the law around it is so developed. The consequence for you is that rental housing is the default option and the competition for it is real, especially in Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Stuttgart and Cologne. In smaller cities and rural areas the picture inverts and you may find landlords competing for you. Where you are looking matters more than any other single factor.
Most rental housing is Wohnungen (flats or apartments) in multi-unit buildings. You will quickly meet the distinction between Altbau (literally old building, usually meaning pre-1949 stock) and Neubau (new building). Altbau flats have high ceilings, tall windows, stucco and character, and often thinner insulation and higher heating bills. Neubau flats have better energy performance, lifts and modern bathrooms, and less charm and often more noise transmission. Häuser (houses) exist mostly in suburbs, small towns and the countryside, from freistehende Einfamilienhäuser (detached single-family houses) to Reihenhäuser (terraced houses) and Doppelhaushälften (semi-detached halves).
Two conventions confuse newcomers. The first is room counting: a “3-Zimmer-Wohnung” means three rooms in total including the living room, but not counting the kitchen or bathroom. So a three-room flat is roughly what an English speaker would call a two-bedroom flat. The second is that a very large share of German rental flats come with no kitchen at all. An advert saying “ohne Einbauküche” means the previous tenant took theirs out, and you are expected to buy and install one, then sell or remove it when you leave. Where a kitchen is included the advert says “EBK” or “Einbauküche vorhanden”, and it is a genuine selling point worth thousands of euros. Also watch for “Wohnfläche” (living area), which is the figure everything is calculated from and which is measured under the Wohnflächenverordnung, with balconies usually counted at only a quarter or half.
Then there is the WG, short for Wohngemeinschaft: a shared flat where each person has a private room and shares kitchen and bathroom. WGs are not only for students in Germany. Professionals in their twenties and thirties live in them routinely, and for a newcomer a WG is often the fastest way into a city, because the existing tenants choose you personally rather than a management company scoring you on paper. In a WG you are usually an Untermieter (subtenant) of the Hauptmieter (main tenant), which matters for your registration and is discussed later in this chapter.
Kaltmiete, Warmmiete and the Nebenkosten Trap
Every German rental advert quotes at least two numbers, and confusing them is the most common budgeting mistake newcomers make. The Kaltmiete (cold rent) is the base rent for the space itself and nothing else. The Nebenkosten (additional costs), also called Betriebskosten (operating costs), are the running costs of the building that the landlord is allowed to pass on to you. The Warmmiete (warm rent) is the Kaltmiete plus the Nebenkosten, and it is the number that actually leaves your bank account each month. When a landlord asks whether you can afford the flat, they mean the Warmmiete. When the law caps your deposit at three months’ rent, it means the Kaltmiete. Read every advert twice to see which number is on display.
What can go into the Nebenkosten is not a matter of taste. Section 556 of the BGB allows the parties to agree that the tenant carries Betriebskosten, and the Betriebskostenverordnung (BetrKV, the Operating Costs Ordinance) then sets out a closed catalogue of what those are: property tax, water and waste water, heating and hot water, lift, street cleaning and refuse collection, building cleaning, garden maintenance, lighting, chimney sweeping, building insurance, the caretaker, communal aerial or cable, communal laundry facilities, and a residual category of other operating costs that must be named in the contract. Two things are conspicuously not in that catalogue: the landlord’s administration or management costs, and repairs and maintenance. If either appears on your Nebenkostenabrechnung (annual statement of additional costs), it does not belong there.
The Nebenkosten you pay monthly are normally a Vorauszahlung (advance payment), an estimate settled once a year against actual consumption. This produces either a Nachzahlung (back-payment) or a Guthaben (credit). Section 556(2) of the BGB says these advance payments may only be agreed “in angemessener Höhe”, at a reasonable level, and that rule exists because of a specific trick: quoting a low Nebenkosten figure makes the Warmmiete look competitive, and the shortfall arrives twelve months later as a four-figure demand. If a flat’s advertised Nebenkosten look far below comparable flats of the same size, ask to see the last statement before you sign.
The annual statement is governed by a deadline that is worth memorising. Under section 556(3) of the BGB, the landlord must deliver the statement to you no later than the end of the twelfth month after the billing period ends. Miss that deadline and the landlord is barred from claiming any back-payment, unless they can show the delay was not their fault. Your side has a mirror-image deadline: objections to the statement must be raised within twelve months of receiving it. You also have the right to inspect the underlying receipts, which the landlord may now provide electronically, and any agreement worsening these rules for you is void. If a statement looks wrong, asking for the Belege (receipts) is not an aggressive act; it is a statutory right and a routine request.
Note finally what is usually not in the Nebenkosten at all: electricity for your own flat, and internet. Those are contracts you sign yourself with providers you choose. Gas may be either, depending on whether heating is central to the building or individual to your flat.
Finding Accommodation: Where to Search, and the Routes Most People Miss
The large portals are the obvious starting point and they are where most listings appear. ImmoScout24 is the biggest and has the deepest coverage in most cities. Immowelt is the main alternative. Kleinanzeigen, the classifieds site formerly known as eBay Kleinanzeigen, carries a large volume of private landlord listings and sublets and is worth watching precisely because it is less professionalised. For shared flats and rooms, WG-Gesucht is the dominant platform nationally and is also widely used for Zwischenmiete (temporary sublets). Most portals let you save a search and receive alerts, and in a tight market that alert is the entire game: the flats that get let are the ones where someone replied within the first hour.
What newcomers systematically miss is that in the tightest markets the portals are the most competitive and least rewarding channel, because you are one of two hundred replies. Three other routes are worth more effort than they get. The first is the Wohnungsbaugenossenschaft (housing cooperative). You buy Genossenschaftsanteile (cooperative shares), which are an investment returned when you leave rather than a fee, and in exchange you get access to a stock of flats let at moderate rents with effectively permanent security of tenure. Waiting lists are long, which is exactly why you should join one in your first month rather than your third year. The second is the städtische Wohnungsbaugesellschaft, the municipal housing company that most large cities operate, with its own application portal and its own stock.
The third route is people. A great many flats in Germany are passed on before they are ever advertised, through colleagues, neighbours, WG residents and notice boards. Tell your employer’s HR department you are looking, because many companies keep relocation contacts or even company flats. Tell everyone you meet. Look at the Schwarzes Brett (notice board) in supermarkets, universities and Bürgerhäuser. Local newspapers still carry a Wohnungsmarkt section, especially at weekends and especially outside the big cities, and the audience reading it is smaller and older than the portal audience, which is an advantage for you.
Be organised about the search itself. Prepare one PDF Bewerbungsmappe (application folder) containing everything a landlord may legitimately ask for, so you can send it the moment a listing appears rather than assembling it after. That folder is the subject of the next two sections, because what belongs in it is a legal question, not a matter of eagerness.
The Provision: Who Pays the Estate Agent
If a Makler (estate agent) is involved, the rule since 1 June 2015 is the Bestellerprinzip, the ordering principle: whoever hires the agent pays the agent. It is set out in section 2(1a) of the Wohnungsvermittlungsgesetz (WoVermRG, the Housing Brokerage Act), and it says the agent may not demand, be promised, or accept a fee from the flat-seeker, unless the agent obtained the landlord’s instruction to offer that flat exclusively because of the search mandate the seeker gave them first. In plain terms: if the agent is working for the landlord, which is the overwhelmingly normal case for an advertised flat, the landlord pays and you pay nothing. Any agreement that deviates from this, or that pushes a landlord’s fee onto you, is void under section 2(5).
Several related rules follow from the same statute and they are all useful. Under section 2(1), an agent earns a fee only if a tenancy actually comes about as a result of their work, and the brokerage contract itself requires Textform (text form: an email or written document, no signature needed). Under section 2(4), advance payments may not be demanded, agreed or accepted at all, which is a clean, statutory answer to a whole family of scams. Under section 3, where the seeker does legitimately owe a fee, for example because they hired the agent to search on their behalf, it must be expressed as a fraction or multiple of the monthly rent and may not exceed two months’ rent plus VAT, calculated on the rent excluding separately billed Nebenkosten. No registration fees, writing fees or expense reimbursements may be added on top.
So if someone shows you a flat you found advertised and then asks you for a Provision (commission), that request is very probably unlawful. It is not rude to say that you understand the Bestellerprinzip to apply and to ask on whose instruction they are acting. Note the distinction from buying: when you buy a property rather than rent one, a different and more recent set of rules applies, and the agent’s fee is typically shared. This chapter is about renting.
Social Housing and the Wohnberechtigungsschein
Germany has a large stock of geförderter Wohnraum (subsidised housing) let well below market rent, and access to it runs through a document called the Wohnberechtigungsschein (WBS, housing entitlement certificate). Under section 27 of the Wohnraumförderungsgesetz (WoFG, the Housing Promotion Act), the owner of such a flat may only let it to someone who first hands over a WBS. There is no way around this: no WBS, no flat, regardless of how much the landlord likes you.
The WBS is issued on application by the local authority, usually the Wohnungsamt or the Bürgeramt, and it is valid for one year. Two points matter enormously for foreign residents and are widely misunderstood. There is no citizenship requirement. Section 27(2) requires only that you are in Germany on a non-temporary basis and are legally and factually able to establish a residence as your centre of life and run an independent household. A residence permit that is not purely short-term will normally satisfy this. The second point is that the WBS is granted if your household income stays under the limit in section 9(2) of the WoFG, or under whatever different limit your Bundesland has set, and those Land limits vary a great deal. Many working people assume they earn too much and never apply. Check the actual figure for your Land before assuming.
The certificate states the dwelling size you qualify for, in rooms or square metres, so it both opens a door and defines its width. Apply early, because the certificate is valid for a year and the waiting lists are measured in years. If you are near the income line, it also pays to check whether you qualify for Wohngeld, the state housing benefit, which is a separate thing from a WBS and is available to renters on low and moderate incomes.
The Besichtigung and What It Is Really Testing
The Besichtigung is the viewing appointment, and in a tight market it takes one of two forms. The Massenbesichtigung (mass viewing) is a twenty-minute slot in which forty people file through a flat, and it is not a viewing so much as a filtering event: the landlord or agent is there to collect application folders and form quick impressions. The Einzeltermin (individual appointment) is a real viewing, usually a sign that the market is looser or that you have already been shortlisted, and it is where you can actually ask questions.
Bring your application folder printed as well as ready to email. Arrive on time, which in Germany means a few minutes early. Dress as you would for work. Be prepared to introduce yourself in a sentence: what you do, who is moving in, and from when. If your German is limited, say so calmly in German and continue in English; competence and courtesy count for more than fluency, and as you will see in a moment, a hard German-language requirement is legally questionable anyway.
Use the viewing to inspect, not just to impress. Check mobile reception and look for a Glasfaser (fibre) or cable connection, because internet availability at a given address in Germany is not a given. Open windows and look for Schimmel (mould), especially in bathroom corners and behind furniture. Ask what the heating system is and ask to see the Energieausweis (energy certificate), which the landlord must show you and which tells you what the heating will cost. Ask what the last Nebenkostenabrechnung came to. Ask whether the flat is being handed over renoviert or unrenoviert, and get the answer in writing later, because that single word changes your legal position on decorating. Measure or at least sanity-check the floor area, since the advertised Wohnfläche is not always accurate and a shortfall of more than about ten percent against the contract has long been treated by the courts as a defect entitling you to reduce the rent.
Ask, too, why the previous tenant left and how long they stayed. A flat with high turnover in a tight market is telling you something. And ask what the Kaltmiete was for the previous tenant, because as the Mietpreisbremse section below explains, that figure can be legally decisive and the landlord may be obliged to volunteer it anyway.
The Mieterselbstauskunft: What a Landlord May and May Not Ask
The Mieterselbstauskunft is the self-disclosure form a landlord hands you, and it is where the search stops being a matter of etiquette and starts being a matter of law. In January 2024 the Konferenz der unabhängigen Datenschutzaufsichtsbehörden (the conference of Germany’s independent data-protection authorities) published an Orientierungshilfe, a formal guidance document, setting out exactly which questions are lawful when letting a home. Its governing principle is simple: a landlord may only collect data that has an objective connection to the tenancy, and, in its own words, unlawful questions do not have to be answered. The form in your hand is not the law. This guidance is much closer to it.
Questions the guidance treats as permitted are the ones that go to identity and to your ability to pay. Your name and address. The number of people moving in and whether they are adults or children. Your profession and your employer. Your net income, and the amount left over after your regular monthly commitments, though even here you may answer by confirming that you exceed a stated threshold rather than naming a precise figure. Whether insolvency proceedings have been opened against you, whether you have given a Vermögensauskunft (a sworn statement of assets in enforcement proceedings), and whether there are eviction titles against you for rent arrears. Whether you intend to keep pets, unless they are small caged animals like hamsters, budgerigars or fish, which need no permission at all. And for social housing, your WBS details.
The list of impermissible questions is longer and more useful. A landlord may not ask your nationality: the guidance states flatly that the question is not necessary and therefore not permitted. Blanket questions about religion, race or ethnic origin are unlawful. Questions about criminal convictions and about ongoing criminal investigations are unlawful, because the only legitimate concern in a tenancy is your creditworthiness. Questions about marriage plans, about pregnancy, and about whether you want children are unlawful, because they belong to the core of private life; the guidance adds a neat legal reason, which is that taking in a spouse or your own children needs no permission from a landlord in the first place, since close family members are not third parties. Membership of a political party or a tenants’ association may not be asked about. Nor may the length of your employment, on the reasoning that in a mobile society it proves nothing about the future. Nor may the reasons behind your monthly commitments. And where a public body pays your rent directly, questions about your income are not permitted at all.
Two procedural points from the same guidance are worth having. A landlord may ask to see your Personalausweis or passport to verify your identity, and may record that they checked, but making a copy of it is explicitly unlawful. And the consent boxes on these forms are not a valid workaround: the authorities say consent is not the right instrument here, and that consent extracted by making the contract depend on it is not freely given and therefore not effective.
What follows from all this is the practical rule German lawyers describe as the Recht zur Lüge, the right to lie. Because unlawful questions need not be answered, an untrue answer to an unlawful question carries no consequence: the landlord cannot later challenge the contract or terminate on the basis of an answer they were never entitled to ask for. An untrue answer to a lawful question, above all about your income or arrears, is a different matter entirely and can cost you the tenancy. The distinction is worth learning precisely because a form that asks about your pregnancy and your salary in adjacent boxes is inviting you to treat the two as equivalent, and they are not.
Finally, your data is not the landlord’s to keep. The guidance is clear that the records of applicants who do not get the flat must generally be deleted within six months, that period being tied to the window for anti-discrimination claims, and that landlords keeping blacklists of “problematic” applicants, or screening new applicants against a stored database, are generally acting unlawfully.
Schufa and the Newcomer Problem
Almost every landlord in a competitive market will ask for evidence of creditworthiness, and in Germany that means the Schufa, the country’s dominant credit agency. This is where new arrivals hit a wall that has nothing to do with their finances: a person who moved to Germany three months ago has no German credit history, so there is little or nothing in their file. An empty file is not a bad score. But it is an absence where a landlord expects a number, and in a stack of forty applications an absence loses to a number.
Understanding which Schufa document is being asked for helps more than you would expect. The Datenkopie under Article 15 of the GDPR is your legal right to a free copy of everything held about you, and it is the right document for checking your record for errors. It is not the right document to hand a landlord, and the data-protection authorities say so directly: landlords may not require it, because it reveals far more about your finances than assessing a tenancy requires. What is appropriate is a purpose-built Bonitätsauskunft, a creditworthiness report designed to be shown to landlords, containing only the relevant summary. That one is a paid product. You order it yourself and you present it yourself; a landlord querying a credit agency about you directly is only permitted in narrow circumstances, and not at all once you have already provided adequate evidence.
One demand you can simply refuse is the Mietschuldenfreiheitsbescheinigung, a certificate from your previous landlord confirming you left no rent arrears. The Bundesgerichtshof (BGH, the Federal Court of Justice) held in 2009 that a previous landlord is under no obligation to issue such a certificate, and the data-protection authorities draw the obvious conclusion: since it cannot be obtained as of right, it cannot be demanded of you. If you have one, by all means use it. If you do not, say that your previous landlord is not obliged to provide one, and offer bank statements showing rent paid instead.
So what do you offer when your Schufa file is thin? Offer what actually answers the question the landlord is asking, which is whether the rent will arrive. An Arbeitsvertrag (employment contract) showing your salary and, ideally, that it is unbefristet (permanent). Your last three Gehaltsabrechnungen (payslips). Bank statements from your home country showing rent paid on time, with the irrelevant lines blacked out. A Bürgschaft (guarantee) from an employer, a relative or a friend resident in Germany, which is often the single most effective document a newcomer can produce. A letter from your employer confirming your position, which carries weight in a market where employer stability is read as tenant stability. What you cannot do is buy your way past the problem with a bigger deposit, because as the next section explains, the deposit is capped by statute and the cap is not negotiable. Our chapter on kredīti un aizdevumi Vācijā explains the Schufa score itself, how the file is built, and how to correct errors in it.
Discrimination in the Rental Market Is Real, and It Is Illegal
It is not useful to pretend otherwise: applicants with foreign-sounding names get fewer viewing invitations than identical applicants with German-sounding names, a pattern that has been demonstrated repeatedly in controlled testing studies. If you are being ignored, the problem may genuinely not be you. The Allgemeines Gleichbehandlungsgesetz (AGG, the General Equal Treatment Act) prohibits this, and it is worth knowing precisely what it covers, because the precise version is more useful than the slogan.
Section 19(1) of the AGG prohibits discrimination on grounds of race, ethnic origin, gender, religion, disability, age and sexual identity in what the law calls Massengeschäfte, mass transactions that typically happen without regard to the person in a large number of comparable cases. Section 19(2) goes further for race and ethnic origin, prohibiting that discrimination in other civil-law relationships as well. The reason this distinction matters is section 19(5), which says that letting residential accommodation is generally not a Massengeschäft where the landlord lets no more than 50 dwellings in total. Read those provisions together and the actual rule emerges: against a small private landlord, the protections covering religion, gender, age, disability and sexual identity mostly do not apply, while the protection against racial and ethnic discrimination applies regardless of how many flats the landlord owns. The Antidiskriminierungsstelle des Bundes (the Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency) states this the same way. Against a large housing company, the full list applies.
There is one exception you should know about because landlords sometimes invoke it. Section 19(3) permits differential treatment in letting where it serves to create and maintain socially stable resident structures and balanced settlement patterns. This is a real provision, but it is not a blank cheque: the data-protection authorities’ guidance notes that it requires a coherent, documented housing-policy concept behind it, not a landlord’s private preference. A landlord who simply prefers not to let to foreigners is not covered by it.
If you are discriminated against, the AGG gives you a route, and two features of it decide whether the route works. The first is section 22, which shifts the burden of proof: once you prove indicia that suggest discrimination on a protected ground, the other side must prove that no breach occurred. This is why evidence-gathering matters and why testing works. If you suspect a listing is being withheld from you, having someone with a German name enquire about the same flat shortly afterwards, and documenting both responses, converts a feeling into indicia. Keep every email, note every phone call with its date and time, and screenshot listings that stay online after you were told they were taken. Do not, however, fabricate documents; the Anti-Discrimination Agency’s own guidance warns that forging documents is a criminal matter and advises against submitting fictitious paperwork in testing.
The second decisive feature is section 21(5): claims must be asserted within two months. That is a short deadline and it is the reason many valid complaints fail. Within that window you can demand that the discrimination be stopped, sue for an injunction where more is feared, claim damages, and claim monetary compensation for the violation of your personality rights. What you generally cannot do is force the landlord to give you that particular flat. The sums are not trivial: the Anti-Discrimination Agency documents a Berlin case in which a court awarded 30,000 euros, 15,000 to each of two claimants, where a landlord raised rents selectively for Turkish, Arab and Muslim households, the court noting expressly that the amount should have a deterrent effect. The same source records a case in which a landlord’s requirement that applicants speak German was treated as probable indirect discrimination on grounds of origin, on the reasoning that it would exclude every newly arrived person from the housing market.
Practically, do not start with a lawsuit. Contact the Antidiskriminierungsstelle des Bundes at antidiskriminierungsstelle.de, which advises free of charge, or a local Antidiskriminierungsberatungsstelle. Many cities also have a “Fair mieten” advice service specifically for housing. Because of the two-month clock, make that call in the first week, not after you have finished being angry.
Reading the Mietvertrag Before You Sign
The Mietvertrag (rental contract) is usually a standard form, and standard forms in Germany are subject to strict judicial control, which means a surprising number of the clauses in circulation are void. Start with the basic division. An unbefristeter Mietvertrag (indefinite contract) is the normal case and continues until someone terminates it. A befristeter Mietvertrag (fixed-term contract) ends automatically on a date.
Here the original advice most guides give is wrong, and section 575 of the BGB is worth reading carefully. A landlord may not simply choose to offer a fixed term. A fixed term is only valid if, at the time of signing and in writing, the landlord states one of exactly three statutory reasons: that they want the property for themselves, their family or their household; that they intend to demolish, substantially alter or repair it in a way a continuing tenancy would seriously impede; or that they intend to let it to someone obliged to provide services. If no such reason is stated in writing, the statute says the tenancy simply counts as concluded for an indefinite period. In other words, an unexplained fixed term does not shorten your tenancy; it just fails. If a genuine fixed term exists, you may demand from four months before expiry that the landlord confirm within a month whether the reason still applies, and if it has fallen away you can demand an extension for an indefinite period.
Notice periods are equally misdescribed in most guides. Under section 573c of the BGB, notice given by the third working day of a month takes effect at the end of the month after next, which is the familiar three months. The landlord’s period, not yours, lengthens with the tenancy: it extends by three months after five years and by another three after eight, giving three, six and nine months. Your period stays at three months for the whole tenancy. And section 573c(4) makes any agreement deviating from this to your disadvantage void, so a clause purporting to bind you to six or twelve months’ notice in an ordinary indefinite tenancy does not hold. Termination itself must be in writing under section 568 of the BGB, meaning a signed paper letter; an email does not satisfy it. Registered post is not a legal requirement, only sensible evidence. Separately, section 550 provides that a lease for more than one year that is not in written form counts as indefinite, though it cannot be terminated before one year after handover.
The landlord’s ability to terminate you is heavily restricted and normally requires a berechtigtes Interesse (legitimate interest), the most common being Eigenbedarf, the landlord’s own need of the flat for themselves or close family. Eigenbedarf must be specifically reasoned and can be challenged, and if it turns out to be fabricated the landlord can be liable in damages. This is the core of German tenant protection and it is the reason a German tenancy is worth holding on to.
Watch for three clause families. Staffelmiete (stepped rent), under section 557a of the BGB, fixes increases in advance; each step must be stated as a euro amount and not a percentage, each level must hold for at least a year, ordinary increases to the local comparable rent are excluded while it runs, and your right to terminate may be excluded for at most four years. Indexmiete (index rent), under section 557b, ties the rent to the consumer price index published by the Statistisches Bundesamt; it must also hold for a year at a time, ordinary increases are excluded, and each change must be declared in Textform showing the index movement and the amount. Ordinary rent increases to the ortsübliche Vergleichsmiete (local comparable rent) run under section 558: the rent must have been unchanged for fifteen months, and the Kappungsgrenze (capping limit) allows a maximum of 20 percent over three years, reduced to 15 percent in areas the Land has designated as tight. Most guides quote the 20 and omit the 15, which is the figure that applies in exactly the cities where you are most likely to be reading this.
The Kaution: Three Months, and Your Right to Pay in Three Parts
The Kaution (security deposit) is governed by section 551 of the BGB, and almost every popular description of it is subtly wrong. The statute says the deposit may amount to at most three times the monthly rent excluding the Betriebskosten shown as a lump sum or advance payment. Two things follow. First, three months is a ceiling, not a standard: a landlord may ask for less, and nothing entitles them to ask for more, no matter how thin your Schufa file is or how much you want the flat. Second, the multiplier applies to the Kaltmiete, not the Warmmiete, so a landlord calculating three times the warm rent is overcharging you.
Then comes the provision newcomers most often do not know they have. Section 551(2) gives you the right to pay the deposit in three equal monthly instalments. The first is due at the start of the tenancy and the other two fall due with the next two rent payments. This is your right, not a concession to negotiate: a contract clause demanding the whole sum up front is a deviation to your disadvantage, and section 551(4) makes any such deviation void. Given that you are simultaneously paying for a move, often buying a kitchen, and possibly still paying rent somewhere else, spreading the deposit over three months is worth real money at exactly the moment you have least.
The landlord’s duties are equally concrete. Under section 551(3) the money must be deposited with a bank at the rate customary for savings with three months’ notice, or in another form if you agree one, and in either case it must be held separately from the landlord’s own assets. That separation is what protects your deposit if the landlord goes insolvent. The returns belong to you and increase the deposit. Student and youth homes are exempted from the duty to pay interest. If your landlord asks you to transfer the deposit to their ordinary current account, they are describing an arrangement the statute does not permit.
An alternative worth knowing is the Mietkautionsbürgschaft, a deposit guarantee from a bank or insurer: you pay a small annual premium and they guarantee the sum, so your cash stays with you. It costs money you never get back and the landlord must agree to accept it, but for a newcomer facing a deposit, a kitchen and a move in the same month, it is sometimes the difference between taking the flat and not.
At the end of the tenancy the deposit is returned once the landlord has had a reasonable period to check the flat and settle outstanding claims. There is no statutory number for that period, and courts have accepted anywhere from three to six months, longer where a pending Nebenkostenabrechnung justifies retaining a proportionate part. What the landlord may not do is keep it for normal wear and tear, which is what the rent pays for.
Mietpreisbremse: What It Limits, and Where
The Mietpreisbremse (rent brake) caps what a landlord may charge a new tenant. Under section 556d of the BGB, in an area with a strained housing market the rent at the start of the tenancy may exceed the ortsübliche Vergleichsmiete by no more than 10 percent. The local comparable rent is normally evidenced by the Mietspiegel, the official rent index most cities publish.
Its status is the thing most guides now get wrong, in both directions. The rule does not apply everywhere automatically. It only applies where the government of your Bundesland has issued a Rechtsverordnung (statutory ordinance) designating the area, so it binds in central Munich and does not bind in most rural districts. Those ordinances were due to lapse at the end of 2025, and an extension law passed by the Bundestag, approved by the Bundesrat on 11 July 2025 and in force from 23 July 2025, extended them by four years. The statute now says that an ordinance must cease to have effect at the latest at the end of 31 December 2029. So the Mietpreisbremse is in force, and any page telling you it expires in 2025 is out of date. Note the precise wording, though: 2029 is the outer limit for those ordinances, and an individual Land’s ordinance may run out sooner.
The exceptions are where the money actually is. Under section 556e, if the previous tenant was already paying more than the capped figure, that higher Vormiete may be charged again, and if the landlord modernised in the three years before your tenancy began, the cap rises accordingly. Under section 556f, the cap does not apply at all to a dwelling first used and let after 1 October 2014, which exempts essentially all new construction, and neither section 556d nor 556e applies to the first letting after a comprehensive modernisation.
Section 556g is the part that turns this from theory into leverage. Where the landlord relies on one of those exceptions, they must tell you unprompted, in Textform, before you make your contract declaration, which exception applies and what the previous rent was. A landlord who does not give that disclosure cannot rely on the exception at all, and one who gives it late can only rely on it two years afterwards. If the rent is too high, you must object, which the statute calls a Rüge, in text form; you can then reclaim the overpayment. Move fast, because if you object more than 30 months after the tenancy started, or after it has ended, you can only recover rent that fell due after your objection. And note one detail that catches people out with stepped rents: under section 557a(4) the Mietpreisbremse applies to every single Staffel, not just the first, whereas under section 557b(4) it applies only to the starting rent of an index rent.
Raising a Rüge does not require a lawyer and does not entitle the landlord to retaliate; ordinary tenant protection continues to apply. In practice, the local Mieterverein is the right first call, both because they will check the Mietspiegel comparison for you and because the arithmetic of the comparable rent is where these disputes are actually won or lost.
Schönheitsreparaturen: The Clauses That Do Not Hold
Schönheitsreparaturen (decorative repairs) means painting walls and ceilings, treating radiators and interior doors and windows from the inside: cosmetic work, not structural repair. The default position under section 535(1) of the BGB is that this is the landlord’s job, because the landlord must hand the flat over in a condition fit for contractual use and keep it in that condition. Landlords shift the work to tenants by contract clause, and courts have spent two decades striking those clauses down.
The most valuable ruling for newcomers came from the BGH on 18 March 2015. Where a flat is handed over unrenovated, a standard-form clause imposing decorative repairs on the tenant without adequate compensation is void, because it would oblige the tenant to remove the previous tenant’s wear and hand the flat back in a better state than they received it. On the same day the court held that Quotenabgeltungsklauseln, clauses making a departing tenant pay a proportion of the cost of decorating intervals not yet complete, are void generally, because the tenant’s share cannot be reliably calculated in advance. Clauses with starre Fristen, rigid decorating deadlines that take no account of the flat’s actual condition, have long been void too. When such a clause falls, it falls entirely: the obligation does not shrink to a reasonable version, it reverts to the landlord under section 535.
The BGH added a sequel on 8 July 2020 that is worth knowing. If you were given an unrenovated flat and the clause is void, you may actually demand that the landlord decorate once the condition has substantially deteriorated compared with move-in, but because fresh decoration hands you a better flat than you were contractually owed, you must contribute to the cost, which the court said will normally mean half.
Two adjacent clauses deserve the same scepticism. An Endrenovierungsklausel, requiring you to decorate on departure regardless of condition or of how long you stayed, is void. A Kleinreparaturenklausel, making you pay for small repairs, can be valid but only within limits developed by the courts: there is no statutory figure, but the clause must cap both the cost of a single repair and the total per year, and it may only cover items you regularly touch and use. Crucially, it must never require you to contribute to a repair that exceeds the cap; a clause making you pay the first hundred euros of a nine-hundred-euro repair is void. Because none of these figures are in a statute, the number in your contract is not self-validating, and this is exactly the kind of clause worth having a Mieterverein read.
The practical instruction that follows is short: get the words “renoviert” or “unrenoviert” recorded in the handover protocol, and photograph everything on the day you move in. Whether the flat was unrenovated at handover is the fact that decides the whole question years later, and it is the fact nobody can reconstruct without evidence.
The Übergabe and the Übergabeprotokoll
The Übergabe is the handover, and the Übergabeprotokoll (handover protocol) is the record you and the landlord sign on the day. It is the cheapest insurance in German tenancy law and skipping it is the single most expensive mistake a new tenant makes, because it is the document that decides, years later, whether the scratch on the floor was yours.
Record the Zählerstände (meter readings) for electricity, gas, water and heating, with the meter numbers, because these are what your utility billing starts from. Record the number of keys you receive, for every door, letterbox and cellar. Record every Mangel (defect) you can find, however small: chipped tiles, a scratched worktop, a window that does not close, a mark on the parquet, mould traces. Photograph each one, and photograph the flat generally, with a timestamp. State in the protocol whether the flat is handed over renoviert or unrenoviert. Both parties sign, and you keep a copy.
Recording a defect at handover does two things at once. It protects your Kaution, because a defect written down on day one cannot be deducted from your deposit on the last day. And it preserves your right to have it fixed, because under section 535 the landlord owes you a flat in contractual condition, and under section 536 the rent is reduced by operation of law for as long as a defect meaningfully impairs use, with any agreement to the contrary void in a residential tenancy. Do the same protocol when you leave, and insist on it even if the landlord suggests it is unnecessary.
Setting Up Utilities After You Move In
Strom (electricity) and, where you have it individually, Gas are contracts you sign yourself, and the German market is fully liberalised, so you can choose any provider. If you do nothing, you are automatically supplied by the local Grundversorger (basic supplier) at the Grundversorgung tariff, which is legal and reliable and usually among the more expensive options. That default is a safety net, not a plan. Comparison portals such as Verivox and Check24 are the normal way to compare, though they are commercial intermediaries and their rankings reflect commissions as well as price. Whatever you choose, send your Zählerstand when you register, watch the Vertragslaufzeit (contract term) and the Kündigungsfrist (notice period), and be aware that the headline first-year price often includes a bonus that does not repeat. Billing works by monthly Abschlag (instalment) against an estimate, settled once a year in the Jahresabrechnung.
Wasser (water) and Abwasser (waste water) are not a market. Your local Stadtwerke or municipal utility supplies them and there is no provider to choose; the cost normally arrives through your Nebenkosten. Müllabfuhr (waste collection) works the same way, organised by the municipality and billed through the Nebenkosten, with sorting rules that vary by city and matter more socially than you expect. Heating is either central to the building, in which case it is billed through the Nebenkosten and allocated largely by measured consumption, or individual to your flat, in which case it arrives on your own gas or electricity bill.
Internet is the one to start early. Installation regularly takes several weeks, occasionally longer if the line needs work or the previous tenant’s contract has to be terminated first, and it is common to be without a connection for a month after moving in. Order it the day you sign the contract, not the day you move. Contract terms are typically 12 or 24 months.
Finally, the Rundfunkbeitrag (broadcasting contribution), which funds public broadcasting and is payable by every household regardless of whether you own a television or ever watch one. It is charged per Wohnung and not per person, so a shared flat pays once between everyone rather than once each, which is worth agreeing with your flatmates early. According to rundfunkbeitrag.de it currently stands at 18,36 euros a month. You do not need to look for it: it finds you automatically, because the registration authorities pass new registrations on. Our chapter on komunālo pakalpojumu iestatīšana goes through each of these contracts in detail.
Temporary Housing and the Address Gap
Most people do not find a permanent flat before arriving, and the gap between landing and signing has to be bridged. That gap is not just a housing problem. It is a registration problem, because the Anmeldung, the compulsory registration of your address, requires a Wohnungsgeberbestätigung, a written confirmation from whoever provides your accommodation, and without the Anmeldung your tax number, your bank account and your residence permit all stall. So the question is not only where you will sleep but whether that place will give you the form. Our chapter on registration (Anmeldung) and legal documentation covers the form, the two-week deadline and the sequencing problem in detail.
Zwischenmiete (temporary sublet) is usually the best answer. Someone leaves for a few months and sublets their furnished flat, typically through WG-Gesucht or Kleinanzeigen. It is cheaper than a serviced apartment, it comes furnished, and it lets you learn a neighbourhood before committing. Two cautions apply. Check that the Hauptmieter actually has the landlord’s permission to sublet, in writing, since an unauthorised sublet endangers both of you. Under section 553 of the BGB a tenant who develops a legitimate interest after signing can demand permission to let part of the dwelling to a third party, and any agreement to the contrary is void, so a properly organised sublet is usually obtainable; a Hauptmieter who has not bothered to ask is a warning sign. And confirm before you pay that they will provide the Wohnungsgeberbestätigung.
Serviced apartments are furnished units with utilities, internet and often cleaning included, bookable by the week or month, and they are the expensive but reliable option: they will register you without argument and you can book from abroad before you arrive. Providers such as City Residences, Wunderflats and Homelike specialise in exactly this segment. Short-term platforms such as Airbnb work for a few days but are a poor fit for the gap, partly because per-night pricing punishes long stays, partly because several German cities restrict short-term letting through Zweckentfremdungsverbot rules, and partly because many hosts will not sign a Wohnungsgeberbestätigung. Hostels and budget hotels are fine for a fortnight and will not register you. Students and interns should look at the Studierendenwohnheime run by the local Studierendenwerk, which are the cheapest option in the country and have waiting lists to match, so apply the moment you have an admission letter. Our chapter on pagaidu mājokļu risinājumi compares these options in more depth.
There is a legal trap in this category that deserves its own paragraph. Housing let only for temporary use, which is what “Wohnen auf Zeit” listings claim to be, is carved out by section 549(2) of the BGB from three whole bodies of protection at once: the Mietpreisbremse, the rent-increase rules, and the protection against termination. Student and youth homes are similarly carved out by section 549(3). This is why furnished short-term flats can be advertised at rents that would be plainly unlawful in an ordinary tenancy. Whether a letting really is temporary depends on the actual purpose agreed, not on the label the landlord puts on it, and a contract described as temporary but intended as your ordinary home is not automatically outside the protections. But do not sign a “Wohnen auf Zeit” contract imagining you have the rights of a normal tenant, and above all do not treat a temporary let as a long-term solution.
One thing you must not do, however tempting: never register at an address you do not actually live at. A Scheinanmeldung, a sham registration, is an offence and the ceiling for it runs to 50,000 euros, and anyone offering to sell you an address for the paperwork is offering to make you a party to it.
Rental Scams and How to Recognise Them
A tight market with desperate newcomers attracts fraud, and the scams are formulaic enough to be worth listing by shape rather than by story. The recurring pattern is a flat priced clearly below the market, an owner who is conveniently abroad, an explanation of why a viewing is impossible right now, and a request for money before you have seen anything: a deposit, a first month, a “reservation fee”, or a transfer to prove you have the funds, sometimes dressed up as an escrow arrangement or routed through a fake version of a well-known platform. Keys will be sent by post once payment arrives. They never are.
The rules that defeat all of it are simple. Never transfer money before you have seen the flat in person, met the landlord or agent, and signed a contract. Never pay a Kaution in cash, and never pay it before the contract exists. Be aware that section 2(4) of the WoVermRG makes it unlawful for an agent to demand or accept advance payments at all, so a request for money up front from anyone calling themselves an agent is not merely suspicious but statutorily improper. Do not send scans of your passport, payslips or Schufa report to someone who has not yet shown you a flat. If you cannot attend a viewing yourself, send a friend rather than accepting a video tour as a substitute for one. Reverse-image-search the listing photographs, since stolen photos are the cheapest part of the operation. And treat urgency itself as the warning sign it is: the pressure to decide today is not a feature of the market, it is the mechanism of the fraud.
Tools That Help With Finding Accommodation
Much of what this chapter describes ends up as arithmetic and paperwork: is this rent actually lawful, is this deposit demand within the statutory ceiling, does this Nebenkostenabrechnung contain items that belong in it, is the floor area what the contract claims. Werkzeu.ge is a browser-based platform of tools for exactly this kind of German bureaucracy, and it is built by Cryon UG, the company behind WeLiveIn.de, so treat this as a recommendation from an interested party and judge it on whether it does the job. It is worth being blunt about one thing first: most of the housing tools are in the paid Plus tier, not the free one.
The ones that map onto this chapter are the Mietpreisbremse-Check, which tests an asking rent against the local comparable rent; the Kautions-Rechner, which works out the lawful deposit ceiling and the instalments; the Nebenkostenprüfer, for checking an annual statement against what the BetrKV actually allows; the Übergabeprotokoll-Generator, which produces the handover protocol described above; the Wohnflächen-Checker, for testing a floor-area claim; the Mieter-Suite, which bundles several of these; the Mietvertrag Creator, mainly useful if you are the one letting a property, for instance subletting a room; and Miete pret Kaufu, if you ever reach the point of comparing renting with buying. All eight sit in the Plus tier. The Schufa-Selbstauskunft tool, which drafts the German-language request letter for your credit record, is also Plus, and it is worth repeating that the underlying Datenkopie from Schufa is free by law even though the letter-drafting tool is not.
Two are free. The Formularamt is usable without any account at all and holds thousands of official federal, state and municipal forms, each with its source link, retrieval date and status, filled in your browser; it is where you will find Wohngeld and WBS paperwork among much else. The Wohngeld-Rechner, for estimating housing benefit, is free but requires a free account. The free tier carries ads.
Three limits are worth stating plainly rather than burying. The platform is in beta until 30 November 2026 and its own terms say tools may be incomplete or contain errors. It is explicitly not legal advice, which matters here more than in most chapters, because whether a specific clause in your specific contract is void is a legal question and a calculator cannot answer it; that is what a Mieterverein or a Fachanwalt für Mietrecht is for. And it prepares and generates documents but never submits anything on your behalf: no tool sends your Rüge to your landlord or your WBS application to the Wohnungsamt. You do that yourself. Current prices are on the cenu lapa, which is the only honest place to quote them from, since they are changing.
The tool that will save you the most money, though, is not software. Join the local Mieterverein, the tenants’ association affiliated to the Deutscher Mieterbund at mieterbund.de. Membership costs on the order of a cinema ticket a month, includes legal advice on your contract and usually Mietrechtsschutz (legal expenses insurance for tenancy disputes), and they will read your contract before you sign it. For anyone who has just told you that half the clauses in circulation are void, this is the obvious next step. Note that most associations require you to be a member for a period before covering a pre-existing dispute, so join when you sign, not when it goes wrong.
Ko darīt tālāk
If you have not arrived yet, book bridging accommodation that will give you a Wohnungsgeberbestätigung, and confirm that in writing before paying. Register on ImmoScout24, Kleinanzeigen and WG-Gesucht with saved searches and alerts switched on, and apply to a Wohnungsbaugenossenschaft and your municipal housing company in your first month, because those queues only reward people who joined early. Check the WBS income limit for your Bundesland instead of assuming you earn too much.
Assemble your application folder as one PDF: a short cover note, your employment contract, your last three payslips, identity page, and a Bonitätsauskunft or, while your Schufa file is still thin, a guarantor’s undertaking and bank statements showing rent paid on time. Leave out anything a landlord is not entitled to ask for. When a form asks about your nationality, your religion, your pregnancy or your criminal record, you now know those questions are unlawful and that unlawful questions do not have to be answered.
When you get an offer, slow down for one day. Send the contract to a Mieterverein before signing. Compare the asking Kaltmiete against the Mietspiegel and, if the flat is in a designated area, check the Mietpreisbremse and whether the landlord gave you the unprompted disclosure that the exceptions require. Check the deposit against three months’ Kaltmiete and remember your right to pay it in three instalments. Look for a fixed term without a written statutory reason, a notice period longer than three months, a decorative-repairs clause on an unrenovated flat, and a Kleinreparaturen clause without a proper cap: each of those is likely to be void, and each is easier to raise before you sign than after.
On handover day, complete the Übergabeprotokoll, record every meter reading and every defect, photograph the whole flat, and count the keys. Then do the Anmeldung within two weeks, order your internet the same week, and choose an electricity provider rather than drifting on the Grundversorgung. And if the search itself is going badly in a way that feels like it is about your name rather than your income, contact the Antidiskriminierungsstelle des Bundes quickly, because the AGG gives you a real route and only two months to take it.
Avoti
Šajā nodaļā sniegtā informācija ir balstīta uz tālāk uzskaitītajiem oficiālajiem avotiem un publikācijām, kas pēdējo reizi pārskatītas 2026. gada jūlijā. Tās ir vispārīgas vadlīnijas orientācijai, nevis individuālas juridiskas, nodokļu vai medicīniskas konsultācijas.
- BGB 551. pants
- BGB 556. panta d) daļa
- bundestag.de
- §556e BGB
- §556f BGB
- §556g BGB
- Valsts kases 557.a pants
- BGB 557.b pants
- BGB 573. panta c) daļa
- BGB 575. pants
- BGB 568. pants
- BGB 550. pants
- BGB 558. pants
- BGB 556. pants
- §2 BetrKV
- BGB 535. pants
- BGB 536. pants
- BGB 553. pants
- BGB 549. pants
- §2 WOVERMRG
- §3 WOVERMRG
- 19. pants AGG
- 21. pants AGG
- 22. pants AGG
- antidiskriminierungsstelle.de
- datenschutzkonferenz-online.de
- §27 WOFG
- bundesgerichtshof.de
- rundfunkbeitrag.de
