What moving to Germany actually costs before your first salary

The fees the German state charges are surprisingly small

Every fee in this section is fixed by regulation, published, and identical whether you apply in Manila or Pristina. The national visa costs 75 euro under § 46 (2) AufenthV. Once you are in Germany, the residence permit itself costs 100 euro — § 45 AufenthV sets the same amount whether the permit runs for under a year or longer, which surprises people who expect a longer permit to cost more. Extending it later costs 93 euro, or 96 euro if the extension is for three months or less, and changing the purpose of your stay costs 98 euro.

A few smaller items appear on the way: 18 euro for a certificate confirming your right of residence, 13 euro for a Fiktionsbescheinigung covering the gap while a decision is pending, 29 euro if someone formally undertakes to cover your living costs. One thing costs nothing at all, and it is worth knowing because employers sometimes claim otherwise: § 47 (2) AufenthV forbids charging a fee for changing the employment condition attached to your permit.

The accelerated skilled worker procedure under § 81a AufenthG has its own price, 411 euro, and it is the one fee on this page that is not really yours. The employer starts that procedure, holds your power of attorney and pays the 411 euro. If a company asks you to reimburse it, that is a negotiation, not a rule.

Registering your address is free in Berlin — the city's service portal lists the fee as none and gives you 14 days from moving in. Registration law is administered by the states, so a small charge for extra certificates is possible elsewhere, but the registration itself is not where your money goes.

Documents cost more than permits do

The paperwork behind the application is a bigger line item than the application. A statement of comparability for a foreign university degree from the ZAB costs 208 euro, and a second copy 104 euro. Many secondary sites still quote 200 and 100 euro; the fee schedule was raised in June 2024, and the older figure will leave you short at the payment stage.

For vocational and regulated qualifications the recognition procedure has its own fee, generally somewhere between 100 and 600 euro depending on the chamber and the profession, with separate charges for a rejection or a withdrawal. We have set that out with the individual tariffs in the guide on recognition costs and duration, together with the funding programme that can cover a large part of it.

Translations are the item most often underestimated, because nobody quotes a total until the documents are counted. There is no fixed price for a sworn translation on the open market, but § 11 JVEG sets what courts pay: 1.95 euro per 55 characters if the translator receives an editable file, 2.15 euro otherwise, 2.15 or 2.30 euro for difficult texts, and a minimum of 20 euro per order. Those rates bind courts, not private customers, so treat them as a floor rather than a quote. Ask the receiving authority which documents genuinely need a certified German translation before you order a stack of them — several missions accept English for employment contracts.

Money you have to show, and money you have to spend

These two get confused constantly. Proof of funds is money that has to exist and be visible; it is not a fee, and you get it back a month at a time after arrival. § 2 (3) AufenthG defines a secured livelihood as being able to cover your costs, including adequate health cover, without public funds, and ties the amounts for study and training permits to the BAföG rates, which the Interior Ministry publishes in the Bundesanzeiger by 31 August each year for the following one.

For the Chancenkarte, the missions work with 1,091 euro a month, so 13,092 euro for a twelve-month stay, usually on a blocked account. Students show 992 euro a month, 11,904 euro for the year. The Chancenkarte figure is not written into § 2 (3) AufenthG — it is the amount the Foreign Office applies in its leaflets, and the leaflets carry no date, so confirm the current figure with the mission handling your file before you transfer anything.

The alternative, a formal Verpflichtungserklärung by someone already in Germany, costs 29 euro instead of five figures on a blocked account, and that gap is exactly why it deserves a warning rather than a recommendation. § 68 (1) AufenthG makes that person liable for five years for every public euro spent on your living costs, housing, illness and care — and § 68 (1) sentence 4 keeps the undertaking alive even after you are granted a residence permit. Nobody should sign it as a favour without reading the paragraph first.

The gap almost nobody budgets for: health cover before your first working day

Statutory health insurance for employees does not start when the visa is stamped. It starts when you take up residence and begin the job. The Beijing embassy leaflet (Stand December 2025) says so plainly: if you enter Germany before that, private health insurance has to be taken out until the employment relationship begins and statutory membership becomes possible.

In practice that gap is rarely a single day. Flights are booked around the visa decision rather than the start date, the Ausländerbehörde appointment lands where it lands, and a two-week or four-week gap between landing and the first working day is ordinary. That entire period needs its own cover, and the visa section will ask to see it before it issues anything.

Once the job starts, health insurance stops being a separate bill and becomes a payroll deduction shared with your employer. Which system you land in, and whether you have a choice at all, depends on your salary — we have set the public versus private question out separately.

Housing is where the real money goes

The deposit is the largest single sum most people pay in their first month, and German law caps it. § 551 (1) BGB limits a rental security to three times the monthly rent excluding service charges — cold rent, not the figure at the bottom of the advert. Two further rules in the same paragraph are worth memorising because landlords rarely volunteer them: § 551 (2) gives you the right to pay in three equal instalments, the first at the start of the tenancy and the others with the following rent payments, and § 551 (4) makes any agreement worse than that unenforceable. If a landlord demands the full deposit before handover as a condition, the demand is not the law speaking.

Agent commission is the item where newcomers most often pay money they never owed. § 2 (1a) WoVermRG puts the cost on whoever commissioned the agent — for an ordinary flat advertised by the landlord's agent, that is the landlord, and the agent may not charge you at all. Where a commission is genuinely due because you engaged the agent yourself, § 3 (2) caps it at two months' rent plus VAT, calculated on the rent without separately billed service charges, and § 3 (3) forbids registration fees, writing fees or expense claims alongside it.

For the rent itself, the most recent official figures come from the housing programme of the 2022 Mikrozensus: 7.40 euro per square metre of net cold rent on average across Germany, 8.10 in large cities, 6.40 in small towns and rural districts. The number that matters for someone arriving now is a different one from the same table — households that moved in from 2019 onwards pay 8.40 euro per square metre and spend 29.6 percent of their net household income on rent, against 27.9 percent across all tenants. New contracts cost more than the average, and the average is four years old. Treat it as a floor.

Your first salary arrives later than your first rent

§ 614 BGB is one sentence long and it decides how much cash you need on arrival: remuneration is due after the services have been performed, and where pay is measured in periods, after each period ends. German employers pay monthly in arrears, typically in the last days of the month or the first days of the next. Start work on the 15th and your first transfer is realistically five to six weeks after you landed.

Meanwhile the outgoings start immediately. The deposit and the first rent are due at handover, the broadcasting fee begins with the dwelling — 18.36 euro a month, charged per dwelling and not per person, so a shared flat pays it once, while a room in a student hall that opens onto a public corridor counts as a dwelling of its own. Add ordinary living costs, for which the state's own benchmark for a single person is the 1,091 euro a month it wants to see from Chancenkarte applicants.

Add up the official items on this page and a single skilled worker pays the German state well under 400 euro: 75 for the visa, 100 for the permit, 208 if a degree assessment is needed. That addition is mine, from the individual figures above — no authority publishes a total, and anyone quoting you one has made it up. The money that actually decides whether the move works is the part no regulation fixes: the deposit set by your rent, and roughly two months of living costs to bridge the gap until payroll catches up.

The costs you should never carry

Some of what candidates are asked to pay is not a cost of moving at all. Placement fees charged to the worker, deposits for a job offer, payment for an employment contract, and language courses priced far above the local market as a wrapper for a placement fee are the recurring patterns, and our guide on recruitment scams sets out what German law allows to be charged and what it does not.

The honest split is simple: fees fixed in a regulation are yours, the accelerated procedure is the employer's, placement is paid by the employer, and everything else is a negotiation you are allowed to have. Working out which side of that line a particular invoice falls on is free for you here, because employers pay our fee.

The honest answer

Budget for three months of cold rent plus two months of living costs, and treat the official fees as rounding. That is where the arithmetic lands: the state charges you well under 400 euro, while the deposit alone will be three times whatever your rent turns out to be, and § 614 BGB guarantees that no salary arrives before you have worked a full period.

If that total is out of reach, the sequence to fix it is not to cut the deposit — you cannot — but to shorten the gap. Ask for a start date close to your arrival, ask whether the employer runs the accelerated procedure under § 81a AufenthG, ask whether they cover the first weeks of accommodation, and get the health cover for the days between landing and starting sorted before you book the flight. Those four questions move more money than any comparison of visa fees.