What recognition costs and how long it really takes

What the procedure itself costs

For non-regulated commercial and industrial training professions, one office decides for the whole country: IHK FOSA in Nuremberg. Trades go to a chamber of skilled crafts instead, which sets its own fees. The published IHK FOSA schedule puts the decision on equivalence at 100 to 600 euros, graded by the effort the case is expected to take. Clean paperwork sits at the bottom end, a case that needs expert opinions at the top.

One exception is worth knowing before you choose your route. If the case runs through the accelerated skilled worker procedure under § 81a AufenthG, IHK FOSA charges a separate rate for the same decision: 500 to 1,200 euros, on top of the 411 euro state fee for the procedure itself. Speed is bought, not given — and the employer who starts that procedure is usually the one who pays for it.

The fee buys a decision, not a result. You pay it whether the notice says full equivalence, partial equivalence or none. Two rejection scenarios have their own rates, and even pulling out costs money:

• Rejection because the application was filed twice or because you did not cooperate (§ 6 (5), § 14a (6), § 15 (2) BQFG): 100 to 200 euros.
• Rejection because the qualification is not a state qualification, cannot be clarified, or its authenticity is in doubt (§ 3 (3), § 5 (4) and (5) BQFG): 50 to 500 euros.
• Withdrawing the application before the decision: 0 to 300 euros.
• Applying again for the same profession within five years of the first decision: 100 to 300 euros.
• Certified copies 5 to 15 euros per document, a duplicate of the notice 20 euros.
• The route for people without papers is the qualification analysis under § 14 BQFG, and the actual cost of that assessment is billed on top.

University degrees: the ZAB fee, and the order things happen in

A foreign university degree is not put through an equivalence procedure. What you get is a Statement of Comparability from the ZAB, and it costs 208 euros; a re-issue of a statement you already hold is 104 euros. Those rates are set by the state of Berlin and were last adjusted in June 2024 — older pages still quote 200 and 100 euros.

The sequence catches people out more often than the price. The ZAB sends a fee notice, you normally have three weeks to pay, and assessment begins only once the documents are complete and the money has fully arrived. The three-month processing time is counted from that point, not from the day you posted the envelope. Applications tied to an EU Blue Card or to the accelerated skilled worker procedure are handled faster. If you cancel, or if the ZAB cannot issue the statement, up to half the fee is kept.

Regulated professions: every state sets its own price

Nursing, medicine, teaching and the other regulated professions are decided by the individual federal state, and each one has its own fee ordinance. Two checked examples show the spread rather than a rule:

• Bavaria (Landesamt für Pflege): 40 to 70 euros for the procedure, 40 euros for the certificate.
• Hesse (Landesamt für Gesundheit und Pflege): 110 euros for examining the application and determining equivalence, another 110 euros for issuing the licence to practise — 165 euros for harmonised qualifications from the EU, EEA and Switzerland.

The costs nobody quotes you: translations and official fees

Sworn translations are usually the largest single line in the budget, and there is no fixed price for them. The only published benchmark is § 11 JVEG, the rate courts pay their translators: 1.95 euros per 55 characters started when the text comes in editable electronic form, 2.15 euros otherwise, rising to 2.15 or 2.30 euros for technical vocabulary, poor legibility, urgency or rare languages, with a minimum of 20 euros per job. A private translator is not bound by any of it, so ask for a fixed quote per document and count the characters, not the pages.

Two state fees are fixed by ordinance and worth planning for: the accelerated skilled worker procedure under § 81a AufenthG costs 411 euros (§ 47 no. 15 AufenthV) and is normally started and paid for by the employer, and a national visa costs 75 euros (§ 46 (2) no. 1 AufenthV).

How long it actually takes

The official statistics for 2025, published by the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB) in August 2026, report the two routes separately rather than as one number. Around 15,600 procedures were decided for the first time under the BQFG, almost all of them non-regulated professions. Measured from the day the file was complete to the first appealable notice, the average was 57 days and the median 29 days; three quarters were decided within 75 days, and in 81 per cent of cases the authority stayed inside the statutory period. A further 43,850 decisions were taken under professional law, which in practice means the federal health professions: average 66 days, median 22, three quarters within 78.

Read those numbers carefully, because they describe a narrower thing than the question you are asking. They begin at completeness. Advice, gathering documents, translations, the postal round trip and every week spent waiting for a missing certificate happen before the clock starts — § 6 (2) BQFG only obliges the authority to confirm receipt within a month and to tell you what is missing. The accelerated procedure under § 14a BQFG shortens the formal steps to two weeks and two months, but it too counts from completeness, it runs through your employer, and the two-month period is a target the authority *should* meet, where the three-month period in § 6 (3) is one it *must*.

The second half of the picture is where months turn into years. Of the roughly 16,600 procedures finalised in 2025 after a compensation measure (an adaptation course or a knowledge exam), the median gap between the notice ordering the measure and the final decision was 482 days, with three quarters done within 653 days. That span is not the length of the course itself: waiting for a place, preparing for the exam, learning the language and any private interruption all fall inside it. The reward for the patience is real, though: 98 per cent of those procedures ended in full equivalence.

Getting some of it back: the Anerkennungszuschuss

The federal Anerkennungszuschuss reimburses up to 600 euros of procedure costs, including translations, certifications and expert opinions, up to 1,200 euros for a qualification analysis and up to 3,000 euros per person for qualification measures. The income limit is 32,000 euros for a single applicant and 50,000 euros for jointly assessed couples.

Two conditions decide whether it is available to you at all. You need your habitual residence or main address in Germany — nationality and residence status do not matter, but living abroad rules it out, which is precisely the situation most readers of this guide are in. And the funding has to be applied for before you file the recognition application; nothing is reimbursed retroactively. If you are still abroad, budget the full amount yourself, and if you move first and apply later, the grant can still cover the steps that are ahead of you. Our own placement work is free for you because the employer pays, but the authority's fee stays yours either way.

The one thing worth doing differently from most people: start the recognition procedure before the visa process rather than after it, and get the required document list confirmed in writing by the competent office before you pay a single translator. The fee is a few hundred euros; the months lost because a certificate arrived in the wrong form are what the move actually costs.