The German lease: what to check before you sign

Is this a normal lease, or one of the contracts where the protections do not apply?

Read the line that says what kind of accommodation this is before you read anything else. § 549 (2) BGB provides that the rules on the rent at the start of the tenancy (§§ 556d to 556g), the rules on rent increases (§§ 557 to 561) and the rules protecting the tenant at the end of the tenancy do not apply to three kinds of housing: accommodation let only for temporary use, a furnished room that is part of the flat the landlord lives in themselves, and housing rented by a public body or a recognised welfare organisation for people in urgent need — the last only if the tenant was told about both the purpose and the exclusion when the contract was made.

§ 549 (3) BGB adds student and youth halls of residence: there, §§ 556d to 561 and the core termination-protection provisions do not apply either. A room in a hall is not a lesser version of a normal lease; it is a different legal object.

This matters more for people arriving from abroad than for anyone else, because the first German address is so often exactly one of these: a furnished sublet for the probation period, a room in a hall, a temporary let arranged by an employer. Everything further down this page — the rent cap, the ceiling on increases, the protection against being given notice — can be absent from your contract without anyone breaking a rule.

The practical consequence is a question to ask before signing, in writing: is this let as accommodation for temporary use only. If the answer is yes, the price you are being quoted is not measured against anything, and the contract is worth comparing against a second offer rather than against the law.

Does a fixed end date in the contract actually bind you?

Only if the landlord gave a reason, and gave it in writing at the moment you signed. § 575 (1) BGB allows a lease for a fixed period in three cases: the landlord wants the rooms afterwards for themselves, their family or their household; they want to demolish, substantially alter or repair the rooms in a way a continued tenancy would seriously impede; or they want to let the rooms to someone obliged to provide services. The provision then says that otherwise the tenancy counts as concluded for an indefinite period.

So a contract that says the tenancy ends after twelve months and gives no reason is not a twelve-month contract. It is an ordinary open-ended tenancy with an inoperative sentence in it, and § 575 (3) BGB puts the burden of proving the reason on the landlord, not on you.

§ 575 (2) BGB gives you a second lever near the end: no earlier than four months before the fixed period expires, you may ask the landlord to state within one month whether the reason still applies. If the answer comes late, you may demand an extension of the tenancy by the length of the delay.

There is a related trap in the opposite direction. Under § 550 BGB, a lease made for longer than one year without written form counts as concluded for an indefinite period, but it cannot be terminated before the end of one year after the accommodation was handed over. An agreement settled entirely by email or messages is not automatically an escape route.

How much deposit can the landlord ask for, and when is it due?

At most three times the monthly rent excluding the operating costs shown as a flat rate or as an advance payment, which is what § 551 (1) BGB says in those words — the base rent, not the warm rent. § 551 (4) BGB makes any agreement departing from that to your disadvantage ineffective, so a higher figure in a signed contract does not become valid by having been signed.

You are entitled to pay it in three equal monthly instalments under § 551 (2) BGB, with the first due at the start of the tenancy and the other two together with the following rent payments. Landlords frequently ask for the full sum before handover; the entitlement is yours whether or not the contract mentions it.

§ 551 (3) BGB requires the money to be invested at a credit institution at the usual rate for savings deposits with three months' notice, kept separate from the landlord's own assets, with the returns belonging to you and increasing the security. The same paragraph contains an exception worth knowing if your first address is a hall: for accommodation in a student or youth hall of residence there is no obligation on the landlord to pay interest at all.

How the deposit interacts with a SCHUFA file and what else belongs in an application folder is a separate question, covered in the guide on apartment hunting linked at the foot of this page.

What is actually included in the rent, and what can land in the Nebenkosten bill?

Only the cost types listed in the Betriebskostenverordnung, and only if the contract says you bear them at all. § 556 (1) BGB makes passing operating costs to the tenant a matter of agreement and refers to that ordinance for what counts; § 2 BetrKV then sets out a closed list of seventeen numbered items, from property tax through water, drainage, heating, lift, street cleaning and refuse, building cleaning, garden care, lighting, chimney sweeping, insurance, the caretaker, the aerial or broadband installation and the laundry facilities, ending at number 17 with other operating costs.

Two things are expressly not operating costs. § 1 (2) BetrKV excludes administration costs — staff, supervision, the value of the landlord's own administrative work, the audit of the annual accounts, management — and it excludes maintenance and repair costs. A line called Verwaltungskostenpauschale in a residential service-charge schedule is asking you to pay for something the ordinance says is not passable.

The billing deadline is the part worth putting in your calendar. § 556 (3) BGB requires the statement to reach you no later than the end of the twelfth month after the end of the accounting period, and after that deadline the landlord is barred from claiming a shortfall unless the delay was not their responsibility. The same paragraph gives you twelve months from receipt of the statement to raise objections, after which they are barred in the same way.

§ 556 (3) BGB also requires the advance payments to be reasonable in amount. A visibly low monthly advance makes the quoted warm rent look competitive and moves the difference into a single bill more than a year later, which is a budgeting problem rather than a legal one — but it is the reason two flats with the same warm rent can cost differently over a year.

§ 556 (4) BGB entitles you to inspect the underlying receipts on request; the landlord may provide them electronically.

Can the rent go up during the tenancy, and by how much?

That depends on which of three mechanisms the contract uses, and the contract has to choose one. Under § 558 (1) BGB an ordinary increase up to the local reference rent requires the rent to have been unchanged for fifteen months, and the demand may be made no earlier than one year after the last increase.

The ceiling on those increases is in § 558 (3) BGB: within three years the rent may not rise by more than 20 percent, or 15 percent in areas designated by state ordinance where the supply of housing at reasonable terms is particularly endangered. The reference rent itself is defined in § 558 (2) BGB as the usual rents agreed or changed for comparable housing in the municipality over the last six years.

A Staffelmiete is the second mechanism. § 557a BGB requires each step or each increase to be stated in writing as a euro amount, keeps every step unchanged for at least a year, and excludes ordinary increases under §§ 558 to 559b while it runs. Its third paragraph allows your right to terminate to be excluded for at most four years.

An Indexmiete is the third. § 557b BGB ties the rent to the consumer price index of the Federal Statistical Office, keeps it unchanged for at least a year at a time, excludes increases under § 558, and requires each change to be declared in text form stating both the index movement and the amount in euros — with the new rent payable from the beginning of the month after next following receipt.

Where the local reference rent comes from is set out in § 558d BGB: a qualified Mietspiegel must be adjusted to market developments every two years and redrawn after four, and only then does the presumption apply that its figures represent the local reference rent. If your city's table is older than that, the number in a rent-increase letter is arguable.

Is the starting rent capped in the city you are moving to?

Only if the state government has designated the area by ordinance, which is why the answer differs from one municipality to the next. § 556d (1) BGB caps the rent at the beginning of the tenancy at 10 percent above the local reference rent, but only for housing situated in an area with a strained housing market determined by such an ordinance under § 556d (2) BGB.

Every one of those ordinances has an end date. § 556d (2) sentence 4 BGB provides that an ordinance must expire at the latest on 31 December 2029, which is the federal outer limit rather than a promise that any particular city is covered until then. Hamburg is a documented example at the long end: the city's development and housing authority announced on 25 November 2025 that the rent-limitation ordinance covers the entire city area from 1 January 2026 to 31 December 2029 and that on a new letting rents are as a rule limited to ten percent above the local reference rent.

Three exceptions swallow a large part of the cap in practice. Under § 556e BGB a higher previous rent may be charged again, and modernisation carried out in the three years before the tenancy begins allows a supplement. Under § 556f BGB the cap does not apply at all to a dwelling first used and let after 1 October 2014, nor to the first letting after comprehensive modernisation.

What makes those exceptions checkable is § 556g (1a) BGB: a landlord relying on one of them must tell you so in text form, unprompted, before you make your contractual declaration — how high the previous rent was, that modernisation took place, that the flat is a post-October-2014 new build, or that this is the first letting after comprehensive modernisation. Without that information the landlord cannot invoke the exception, and if it is supplied late they can rely on it only two years afterwards.

The deadline attached to all of this is easy to miss while you are settling in. § 556g (2) BGB lets you reclaim rent above the permitted level only after you have complained of the breach, and if the complaint reaches the landlord more than 30 months after the tenancy began, or after it has ended, you can only reclaim rent that fell due after the complaint arrived.

Which repair and decoration clauses are worth reading twice?

The clause that transfers decorating to you, because whether it works at all depends on the state of the flat on the day you moved in. In its press release of 18 March 2015 on the judgments VIII ZR 185/14, VIII ZR 242/13 and VIII ZR 21/13, the Federal Court of Justice held that a standard-form clause imposing decorative repairs on the tenant of a flat handed over unrenovated is ineffective, because it obliges the tenant to remove all traces of use left by the previous tenant, unless the landlord grants an appropriate compensation. The same press release declared standard-form pro-rata cost-sharing clauses ineffective because the tenant's share cannot be reliably determined.

The follow-up decision matters for long tenancies. In its press release of 8 July 2020 on VIII ZR 163/18 and VIII ZR 270/18, the court held that where such a clause is ineffective, the duty to maintain falls back on the landlord once the initial decorative state has significantly deteriorated — but the tenant must contribute a fair share of the cost, as a rule half.

What counts as decorating is defined by law, and more narrowly than most contracts imply. § 28 (4) sentence 3 of the Zweite Berechnungsverordnung provides that decorative repairs comprise only papering, painting or liming walls and ceilings, painting floors, radiators including heating pipes, interior doors, and windows and exterior doors from the inside. Sanding a parquet floor and painting the outside of the front door are not on that list.

The small-repairs clause is defined just as narrowly. § 28 (3) sentence 2 of the same ordinance provides that small maintenance comprises only the repair of minor damage to the installation items for electricity, water and gas, to the heating and cooking equipment, to the window and door fastenings and to the closing devices of shutters. A clause reaching beyond those items is reaching beyond the legal definition of the thing it names.

No statute names a euro figure for such a clause, and no publicly available decision of the Federal Court of Justice that this guide could read sets one. What is settled is the structure: a small-repairs clause needs both a ceiling per individual repair and a ceiling per year, and secondary sources differ on the amounts. If your contract names one ceiling and not the other, that is the point to raise before signing rather than after.

What if the flat turns out to be smaller than the contract says?

A shortfall of more than 10 percent is a defect in the rented property, and you do not have to argue that it inconveniences you. The Federal Court of Justice held in its judgment of 24 March 2004, VIII ZR 295/03, that where a rented flat has a floor area more than 10 percent below the area stated in the lease, this constitutes in principle a defect within the meaning of § 536 (1) sentence 1 BGB entitling the tenant to reduce the rent, and that no additional showing by the tenant that the shortfall reduces the flat's fitness for contractual use is required.

§ 536 (1) BGB is the provision behind that: a defect that removes the flat's fitness for its contractual use releases you from the rent for that period, and a defect that merely reduces it entitles you to an appropriately reduced rent, while an insignificant reduction is disregarded. § 536 (4) BGB makes any agreement to your disadvantage ineffective for residential tenancies.

The square-metre figure in the contract is therefore not decoration. If a flat is advertised at 62 square metres and the contract repeats it, that number has become part of what you were promised.

The one document that decides most later arguments is the handover record. Photograph every room on the day you get the keys, note the meter readings, and get the record dated and signed by both sides — including, in plain words, whether the flat was freshly decorated or not. That single sheet is what the decoration clause above will turn on years later, and it is the cheapest thing on this page to get right.

How quickly can you get out again?

Three months, by giving notice no later than the third working day of a calendar month with effect from the end of the month after next — that is § 573c (1) BGB, and the extension of the notice period after five and after eight years in the same sentence applies to the landlord, not to you. § 573c (4) BGB makes any agreement departing from that to your disadvantage ineffective, so a clause demanding six months' notice from the tenant does not create a six-month obligation.

Two situations shorten it. For a furnished room within the landlord's own flat under § 549 (2) no. 2 BGB, § 573c (3) BGB allows notice up to the 15th of a month with effect from the end of that same month. For accommodation let only for temporary use, § 573c (2) BGB allows a shorter period to be agreed.

If you need to leave before three months are up and no shorter period applies, subletting is the route the law actually provides. § 553 (1) BGB gives you a claim to the landlord's permission to let part of the accommodation to a third party where a legitimate interest arises after the contract was concluded, unless there is an important reason in the person of the third party, the flat would be overcrowded, or permission cannot be expected of the landlord for other reasons. § 553 (2) BGB lets the landlord make permission conditional on a reasonable rent increase, and § 553 (3) BGB makes a clause to your disadvantage ineffective. Note the wording: part of the accommodation, not all of it.

In the other direction, the threshold for the landlord to end the tenancy without notice is defined in § 543 (2) no. 3 BGB: arrears over two consecutive dates covering the rent or a not insignificant part of it, or arrears reaching two months' rent over a period spanning more than two dates. The same provision excludes the termination if the landlord is satisfied beforehand.

Will this contract get you registered at the Bürgeramt?

Only if the landlord confirms your move-in, and they are legally obliged to. § 19 (1) BMG provides that the provider of the dwelling must cooperate with the registration and confirm the move-in in writing, or electronically to the registration authority, within the period set by § 17 (1) BMG — the two weeks you have to register after moving in. § 19 (3) BMG lists what the confirmation contains: the provider's name and address, the owner's name if they are a different person, the move-in date, the address of the dwelling and the names of the people required to register.

If the confirmation does not come, the law tells you what to do rather than leaving you stuck. § 19 (2) BMG requires you to notify the registration authority without delay that the confirmation was refused or did not arrive in time. Refusing or delaying it is an administrative offence for the landlord under § 54 (2) no. 3 BMG, punishable by a fine of up to 1,000 euros — the same ceiling that applies to you under § 54 (2) no. 1 BMG for registering late.

There is one offer to walk away from without discussion. § 19 (6) BMG prohibits offering or providing an address for a registration where nobody actually moves in or intends to, and § 54 (1) together with § 54 (3) BMG puts a fine of up to 50,000 euros on it. An address sold to you for the Anmeldung alone is not a shortcut; it is the one offence in this area that carries a five-figure fine.

The order in which the arrival paperwork has to happen — lease, handover, Anmeldung, bank account, health insurance, broadcasting contribution — is one of the things we work through with candidates, which is free for you because the employer pays.

This guide is general information, not legal advice. For a clause that is already in dispute, the two places that can act on your behalf are a lawyer specialising in Mietrecht and the local tenants' association, the Mieterverein, which reviews contracts for its members.