German Employment Contracts and Rights

This chapter explains German employment contracts and the rights that come with them: what your employer must put in writing and by when, how much notice either side has to give, when you are protected against dismissal and when you are not, how much paid leave and sick pay you are owed, and what all of this means for your residence permit. It is written for people who did not grow up with German labour law and who are reading a contract in a language that may not be their first.

The single most useful thing to understand before you read further is that your contract is not the whole picture. German employment law is layered. Statute sits at the bottom and cannot be contracted away to your disadvantage. Above it may sit a Tarifvertrag, a collective agreement negotiated between a trade union and an employer or employers’ association, and a Betriebsvereinbarung, a works agreement between your employer and the works council. Your individual contract sits on top and can improve on all of that, but it cannot undercut the floor. So a clause that looks alarming is often simply void, and a right you never see mentioned in the contract may still be yours.

What Your Employer Must Put In Writing

The Nachweisgesetz, the Act on Proof of Essential Conditions Applicable to an Employment Relationship, obliges your employer to give you the essential terms of your job in a documented form. Since 1 August 2022 the list is long and the deadlines are short. The names and addresses of both parties, the composition and amount of your pay including overtime pay, supplements, bonuses and when each is due, and your agreed working time including breaks, rest periods and any shift system, must all be handed to you on your first working day. The start date, the duration if the job is fixed-term, your place of work, a short description of the work, the length of any probation period, on-call arrangements and any overtime rules follow by the seventh calendar day. Annual leave, training entitlements, the company pension provider, the dismissal procedure and a reference to any applicable collective agreements follow within one month.

The form requirement changed on 1 January 2025 through the Bürokratieentlastungsgesetz IV, the Fourth Bureaucracy Relief Act, and this is worth getting right because a lot of older advice is now wrong. The starting point in §2(1) of the Nachweisgesetz is still Schriftform, meaning a paper document with a wet-ink signature handed to you. But the record may now instead be issued in Textform, the looser standard defined in §126b of the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, and sent to you electronically, provided three conditions hold: the document must be accessible to you, you must be able to save and print it, and your employer must ask you for confirmation of receipt when sending it. A PDF by email now satisfies the law where it previously did not. Two limits matter. You can demand the paper version at any time and your employer must then produce it without undue delay. And in the sectors listed in §2a of the Schwarzarbeitsbekämpfungsgesetz, which include construction, hospitality, transport, forestry, cleaning, meat processing and security, the electronic route is closed and paper remains compulsory.

If your employer simply does not do this, it is an Ordnungswidrigkeit, a regulatory offence, punishable under §4 of the Nachweisgesetz with a fine of up to 2,000 euros. Two details in that list are worth flagging now because they matter later. Your employer must tell you that a dismissal has to be in writing to be valid, and must tell you the deadline for filing a dismissal protection claim. And the statute says explicitly that even if your employer gets that notice wrong or omits it, §7 of the Kündigungsschutzgesetz still applies to you. Being badly informed does not extend your deadline.

Permanent, Fixed-Term, And What A Befristung Really Costs You

A contract is either unbefristet, meaning open-ended, or befristet, meaning fixed-term. A fixed term is allowed without any particular reason for up to two years, and within those two years the contract may be extended at most three times. This is the sachgrundlose Befristung under §14(2) of the Teilzeit- und Befristungsgesetz, the Part-Time and Fixed-Term Employment Act. There is a hard catch that catches out returning employees constantly: this route is barred entirely if you have ever had any previous employment relationship with the same employer, fixed-term or permanent. A collective agreement can change the number of renewals and the maximum duration. Newly founded companies get four years in their first four years of existence, and if you are over 52 and were out of work for at least four months beforehand, a fixed term of up to five years is allowed. With a genuine objective reason, a Sachgrund, such as covering someone on parental leave or a project with a genuinely temporary need, longer and repeated fixed terms are possible.

The rule most worth knowing is §14(4): the fixed term itself requires Schriftform. It must be signed on paper before you start work. If it is not, the fixed term is void and you have a permanent contract, even though everything else about the job was agreed. People sometimes start work on a verbal promise with the paperwork following a week later, and that mistake belongs entirely to the employer.

Change is coming here, and it is important to be precise about its status. In the coalition package “Ein Programm für Aufschwung und Beschäftigung” agreed on 2 July 2026, the governing parties set out an intention to allow fixed terms without an objective reason of up to 48 months with up to six renewals for employees hired by 31 December 2030, and to allow re-hiring at the same employer, which would dismantle the bar described above. The same package proposes abolishing the written-form requirement for fixed terms from 1 January 2027. As of this writing none of it is law. It is a political agreement that still has to pass the Bundestag, and the current rules stay in force until it does. Treat the two-year limit and the paper signature as the law that governs your contract today, and check the position again before relying on either proposal.

Probezeit: What The Trial Period Does And Does Not Mean

Most contracts open with a Probezeit, a probationary period. Under §622(3) of the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch it may last at most six months, and during it either side may end the contract with two weeks’ notice. That notice can fall on any day; it does not have to line up with the middle or the end of a month. A longer probation period than six months is not allowed, though your contract can set a shorter one or none at all.

Here is the point that causes the most confusion. The six-month Probezeit and the six-month waiting period for dismissal protection are two different things that merely happen to share a number. The Probezeit shortens the notice period. It is your contract’s creation. The waiting period in §1 of the Kündigungsschutzgesetz decides whether your employer needs a legally valid reason to dismiss you at all, and it is the law’s creation. If your contract sets a three-month probation period, your notice period goes back to four weeks in month four, but you are still outside dismissal protection until you have been there longer than six months. During those first six months your employer generally does not need to justify a dismissal, so a probation period that ends early buys you less than it appears to.

Working Hours, Breaks And The Duty To Record Them

The Arbeitszeitgesetz, the Working Time Act, sets limits your contract cannot exceed. §3 caps the working day at eight hours. It may be stretched to ten hours, but only if the average stays at eight hours across six calendar months or 24 weeks. Because the statute counts six working days a week, the real ceiling is 48 hours a week, and up to 60 in a peak that must be averaged back down. §4 requires a break of 30 minutes once you work more than six hours and 45 minutes once you work more than nine. Breaks may be split into blocks of at least 15 minutes, and you may never work more than six hours straight without one. Breaks are unpaid and are not working time. §5 then requires 11 uninterrupted hours of rest between the end of one working day and the start of the next, reduced to ten in sectors such as hospitals, care, hospitality, transport, broadcasting and agriculture, and only where another rest period is lengthened to twelve hours in compensation.

Overtime is where contracts and reality diverge. There is no statutory right to be paid extra for overtime as such. What you get depends on your contract, a collective agreement or a works agreement. Many contracts contain a clause saying overtime is “covered by the salary”. Such clauses are frequently void for being too vague, because a clause must let you see, when you sign, how much unpaid extra work you are agreeing to. A clause that caps included overtime at a stated number of hours is more likely to hold than one that includes an unlimited amount. Note also the interaction with the minimum wage: the Mindestlohngesetz applies to every hour actually worked, so uncompensated overtime that drags your effective hourly rate under the statutory floor is unlawful regardless of what the clause says.

On recording your hours, the position has been settled since the Bundesarbeitsgericht ruled on 13 September 2022 in case 1 ABR 22/21 that employers are already obliged, under §3(2)(1) of the Arbeitsschutzgesetz read in the light of EU law, to introduce a system that records the start, end and therefore duration of employees’ working time. This was not a new statute; the court read an existing one to that effect, and it applies now. The recording does not have to be electronic, and paper can be enough depending on the work. Successive governments have promised to write this into the Arbeitszeitgesetz explicitly, and that amendment has still not passed. What this means for you practically is that your hours should be being recorded, and if they are not, keeping your own contemporaneous record costs you nothing and is worth a great deal if you ever have to prove unpaid overtime.

Your Pay, The Minimum Wage And What Actually Arrives

The gesetzlicher Mindestlohn, the statutory minimum wage, is 13.90 euros per hour gross since 1 January 2026, and the Mindestlohnkommission’s decision of June 2025, already enacted by regulation, raises it to 14.60 euros on 1 January 2027. It applies to almost all employees regardless of nationality and cannot be waived by contract. Some sectors have higher binding minimums through a Tarifvertrag. If you are paid a monthly salary, divide it by your actual hours before assuming you are above the floor.

Between your gross salary, the Bruttogehalt, and what lands in your account, the Nettogehalt, sit income tax withheld at source as Lohnsteuer, possibly Kirchensteuer if you are registered as a member of a church, the Solidaritätszuschlag if you earn enough to still pay it, and your share of the four social insurance contributions for health, care, pension and unemployment. Your Steuerklasse, or tax class, changes how much Lohnsteuer is withheld each month, and for married couples the choice between the classes can move the monthly figure substantially without changing the tax actually owed for the year. That is a large topic in its own right and we cover it separately in our chapter on understanding German taxes. The practical warning for a new arrival is simply this: a gross figure in an offer letter tells you much less than you think, and the gap is bigger than in most countries.

Paid Leave And The Rule That Stops Your Urlaub Expiring

The Bundesurlaubsgesetz, the Federal Leave Act, sets the minimum in §3 at 24 Werktage a year. Werktage are all calendar days that are not Sundays or public holidays, so the statute counts a six-day week. On the five-day week that most people actually work, the same entitlement converts to 20 days. That conversion is the reason the two numbers you will see quoted are both correct. It is a floor, not a norm: most employers give 25 to 30 days, and many collective agreements give 30. Your full entitlement arises after six months with the employer; before that you accrue one twelfth per completed month.

§7(3) says leave must be taken in the calendar year it belongs to. Carrying it over is permitted only where urgent operational reasons or reasons in your person justify it, and then it must be used by 31 March. That is the statute. What the statute no longer means in practice is that your leave quietly disappears every New Year’s Eve. Following the European Court of Justice in Max-Planck (C-684/16, 6 November 2018), the Bundesarbeitsgericht held on 19 February 2019 in case 9 AZR 541/15 that leave expires only where the employer has actively met its Mitwirkungsobliegenheit: it must have asked you, clearly and in good time, to take your leave and warned you specifically that it will otherwise expire. An employer that stayed silent cannot rely on expiry, and the leave rolls forward. If your employer has never sent you such a warning, old leave you assumed was gone may well still exist.

When employment ends, §7(4) requires any leave you could not take to be paid out. This is the Urlaubsabgeltung. It is not optional and it is not a goodwill gesture; it is a statutory claim, and it is taxable pay.

Sick Pay, And What Your Contract Cannot Take Away

If illness makes you unable to work through no fault of your own, §3 of the Entgeltfortzahlungsgesetz gives you Entgeltfortzahlung, continued payment of your full salary by your employer, for up to six weeks. One detail is regularly missed: under §3(3) the entitlement only arises after four weeks of uninterrupted employment. Fall ill in your second week and your employer owes you nothing under this provision, though your health insurer may step in. If the same illness recurs, a fresh six weeks only opens once you have been free of it for six months, or once twelve months have passed since it first made you unable to work. After the six weeks, your statutory health insurer takes over with Krankengeld at a reduced rate.

On the sick note itself, the Arbeitsunfähigkeitsbescheinigung, be careful with what you read online. §5(1) sentence 3 of the Entgeltfortzahlungsgesetz already allows your employer to demand a certificate from the very first day of absence, and many contracts do exactly that. Reforms that would change the general regime have been announced but, according to the Bundesregierung as of 13 July 2026, the existing rules remain in place until they are implemented. Read your contract, and if it says day one, it means day one.

What Your Employer May Tell You To Do

§106 of the Gewerbeordnung, the Trade Regulation Act, gives your employer the Weisungsrecht, the right to specify the content, place and time of your work. It has two real limits. It only operates where the contract, a works agreement, a collective agreement or a statute has not already fixed the point, and it must be exercised nach billigem Ermessen, meaning by fair discretion that genuinely weighs your interests against the employer’s.

This is why the wording of your contract matters more than it looks. If your place of work is written as one named city, moving you to another one is a change to the contract and needs your agreement or a Änderungskündigung, a dismissal combined with an offer of altered terms. If the contract says you may be deployed at any company location in Germany, the same move may fall within the Weisungsrecht. The same logic applies to your job description: a narrow one constrains what you can be told to do, a broad one does not. §106 also requires the employer to take account of an employee’s disability when exercising this discretion.

Notice Periods: A Ladder That Only Runs One Way

The statutory baseline in §622(1) of the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch is four weeks, and it must land on either the 15th or the last day of a calendar month. Four weeks is not a month, and the fixed landing dates mean the real period is usually longer than four weeks. Give notice on 20 March and your last day is 30 April, not 17 April.

§622(2) then lengthens the period as your service grows: one month to month end after two years, two months after five, three months after eight, four months after ten, five months after twelve, six months after fifteen and seven months after twenty. The crucial detail, and the one this chapter’s original version missed, is that this ladder binds the employer only. Your own notice period stays at the four-week baseline unless your contract says otherwise. Contracts frequently do extend the employee’s period, and that is allowed, but §622(6) draws a firm line: your notice period may never be agreed to be longer than your employer’s. A clause giving you six months while the employer has three does not bind you. During an agreed Probezeit, §622(3) reduces both sides to two weeks.

A Kündigung, a notice of termination, is only valid in Schriftform. §623 of the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch says so and expressly excludes electronic form. A dismissal by email, by WhatsApp, by scanned PDF or delivered verbally is legally void, and the same applies to an Aufhebungsvertrag, a mutual termination agreement. It must be a signed paper document that reaches you. This cuts both ways, so if you are resigning, print it and sign it.

Kündigungsschutz: The Two Thresholds Most People Get Wrong

This is the most misunderstood area of German employment law, and the original version of this chapter got it wrong in the way almost everyone does. Germany is often described as a country where you cannot be fired without a good reason. That is true only when two conditions are both met.

The first is time. §1 of the Kündigungsschutzgesetz, the Protection Against Dismissal Act, only protects you once your employment has lasted longer than six months without interruption. The second is size. §23 excludes businesses that regularly employ ten or fewer people, counting part-timers at 0.5 if they work up to 20 hours a week and 0.75 if they work up to 30, and leaving trainees out of the count. The threshold is the Betrieb, the operational unit, not the company as a whole, and it is more than ten, so a workplace of exactly ten is outside. A grandfathering rule keeps an older five-employee threshold alive for people whose employment began on or before 31 December 2003. Below those thresholds, in what is called a Kleinbetrieb, your employer can dismiss you without giving any reason at all. They still have to observe your notice period, they still cannot dismiss you for a discriminatory or otherwise unlawful motive, and the special protections described further down still apply, but the general requirement of a socially justified reason does not exist for you. For a foreign employee at a ten-person startup, this is the difference between the protection you were told about and the protection you have.

Where the Act does apply, a dismissal is invalid unless it is sozial gerechtfertigt, socially justified, on one of exactly three grounds under §1(2). Personenbedingt means something about you as a person, most often long-term illness, makes it impossible for you to do the job. Verhaltensbedingt means misconduct, and normally requires a prior Abmahnung, a formal written warning, so that you had a chance to correct the behaviour. Betriebsbedingt means the job itself has gone for genuine operational reasons. For that last category the employer must also carry out a Sozialauswahl, a social selection among comparable employees, weighing four factors named in §1(3): length of service, age, maintenance obligations and severe disability. Getting that selection wrong makes the dismissal socially unjustified even where the business reason was real. The burden of proving the grounds lies on the employer.

The Three-Week Deadline That Decides Everything

If you take one thing from this chapter, take this. Under §4 of the Kündigungsschutzgesetz you have three weeks from the moment the written dismissal reaches you to file a Kündigungsschutzklage, a dismissal protection claim, at the Arbeitsgericht, the labour court. Not three weeks from your last working day. Three weeks from receipt of the letter, which includes the day it landed in your letterbox while you were abroad.

Miss it and §7 says the dismissal “gilt als von Anfang an rechtswirksam”, is deemed legally valid from the outset. That is not a procedural inconvenience you can argue around. It converts even a blatantly unlawful dismissal into a valid one. The strongest case in Germany loses on day 22. Reinstatement after the deadline is essentially impossible, and courts allow late filing only in narrow circumstances. This deadline also applies when you want to argue that the dismissal is void for some other reason entirely, such as a missing signature or a works council that was never heard.

Filing is cheaper and less confrontational than it sounds. In the first instance at the Arbeitsgericht each side bears its own lawyer’s costs whatever the outcome, which removes the usual risk of paying the other side’s bill. Most claims never reach a judgment. They end at the Güteverhandlung, an early conciliation hearing usually held within a few weeks, in a settlement involving an Abfindung, a severance payment, and an agreed reference. There is no general statutory right to an Abfindung in Germany, which surprises people. The main statutory route is §1a of the Kündigungsschutzgesetz: if the employer dismisses you for operational reasons and states in the letter that you may claim severance by not suing, you receive half a month’s salary per year of service, with periods over six months rounded up to a full year. Everything else is negotiated in the shadow of the claim you filed in time.

Extra Protection For Some Groups, And The Works Council

Certain groups have protection that runs independently of the ten-employee threshold and the six-month wait. Pregnant employees and those on parental leave have a dismissal ban that generally requires prior approval from the state authority before any dismissal can be considered; we cover the Mutterschutz and Elternzeit rules, and what Germany still does not offer fathers and second parents, in our chapter on maternity and paternity leave. Employees recognised as schwerbehindert need the consent of the Integrationsamt before a dismissal is valid, which is explained in our chapter on disability support services. Works council members have their own protection.

If your workplace has a Betriebsrat, a works council, §102 of the Betriebsverfassungsgesetz requires the employer to hear it before every single dismissal and to give it the reasons. A dismissal issued without that hearing is unwirksam, void, on that ground alone, regardless of how good the employer’s reasons were. This is one of the commonest ways dismissals fail. If the council objected properly and in time and you have filed your claim, §102(5) lets you demand continued employment on unchanged terms until the case is finally decided. Note that a works council is not automatic; employees have to elect one, and many smaller German workplaces have none.

Discrimination is governed separately by the Allgemeines Gleichbehandlungsgesetz, the General Equal Treatment Act, which covers race and ethnic origin, gender, religion or belief, disability, age and sexual identity. It has its own trap: under §15(4) a claim for compensation must be asserted in writing within two months of the rejection or of your learning about the disadvantage. Two months, not three years.

Resigning, Aufhebungsvertrag, And The Sperrzeit Trap

Resigning is simpler than being dismissed, but it has one expensive consequence. Sign a paper letter, keep proof that it arrived, count your notice period from receipt, and remember the fixed landing dates on the 15th or month end. You do not have to give a reason.

The expensive part is what happens next if you do not walk straight into another job. Giving notice yourself without a wichtiger Grund, an important reason, triggers a Sperrzeit, a blocking period of up to twelve weeks during which Arbeitslosengeld I is not paid, and it also cuts your total entitlement. An Aufhebungsvertrag, the mutual termination agreement employers often propose as the friendly alternative to a dismissal, generally triggers the same Sperrzeit, because in the eyes of the Agentur für Arbeit you agreed to end your own employment. This is the single most common self-inflicted wound in German employment, and for a non-EU national it is worse than a money problem, because claiming benefits interacts with your residence status. Never sign an Aufhebungsvertrag on the spot, and read our chapter on unemployment benefits, which covers the Sperrzeit rules and the residence-permit consequences of claiming, before you do anything.

If The Business Is Sold: Betriebsübergang

If your employer sells the business or the part of it you work in, §613a of the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch transfers your employment contract to the buyer automatically, on the same terms, with your years of service intact. You do not sign anything and you do not lose your accrued rights. §613a(4) makes any dismissal issued because of the transfer void, whether it comes from the old employer or the new one; dismissals for genuinely separate reasons remain possible.

You must be informed in text form before the transfer, and §613a(6) then gives you one month from receiving that information to object in writing, to either the old or the new employer. Objecting is rarely wise. It keeps you with the old employer, who often no longer has a job for you, and a dismissal for operational reasons may follow immediately. There is a small bonus here for foreign employees: §4a(3) of the Aufenthaltsgesetz normally forbids working for a different employer than the one your permit names, but it makes an explicit exception where the employer changes through a §613a transfer or a change of legal form. That transfer does not break your permit.

Your Arbeitszeugnis, And Why Its Wording Matters

When your employment ends you have a right under §109 of the Gewerbeordnung to a written Zeugnis, a job reference. An einfaches Zeugnis states the nature and duration of the work. On request you can demand a qualifiziertes Zeugnis, which also covers your performance and conduct, and you almost always should, because German employers expect to see one and its absence is read as a bad sign. Electronic form is only permitted if you consent to it.

The law says the reference must be clearly worded and must not contain any feature or formulation intended to convey a meaning other than the one the plain words carry. In reality a coded language has grown up around exactly that prohibition, and the codes are calibrated to school grades. “Stets zu unserer vollsten Zufriedenheit” is the top mark. “Stets zu unserer vollen Zufriedenheit” without the superlative is a grade lower. “Zu unserer Zufriedenheit” is well below average, and a closing line that thanks you for your work but does not wish you well for the future is a signal. If you cannot read German fluently, a reference can damage your next application without your ever knowing why. You can require corrections, and disputes about Zeugnis wording are a routine part of settlement negotiations.

What Your Contract Means For Your Residence Permit

For non-EU nationals the employment contract and the residence title are welded together, and this is where an ordinary employment problem turns into an immigration problem. Under §4a(3) of the Aufenthaltsgesetz, where a title was granted for a specific job, taking different work is forbidden until the authority permits it. Your Aufenthaltstitel physically shows whether work is allowed and what restrictions apply. Read the notes on it rather than assuming.

Two notification duties bite the moment a job ends early. Under §82(6) you must tell the Ausländerbehörde, the foreigners’ authority, within two weeks of learning that the employment your permit was granted for has ended prematurely. Under §4a(5) your employer must independently tell them within four weeks. So the authority will find out, and a quiet gap is not an option. In practice the authority does not usually cancel a permit the same week; it commonly allows a period to find comparable work, but that is discretion, not entitlement, and it goes better when you notified them yourself and arrived with a plan. The Formularamt described below holds the official forms if you need to file something with them.

Blue Card holders have their own regime in §18g. The salary thresholds are set as a percentage of the Beitragsbemessungsgrenze in the general pension insurance, 50 percent for the standard route and 45.3 percent for shortage occupations and graduates within three years of finishing, which is why they move every year and why §18g(7) requires the Bundesministerium des Innern to publish them in the Bundesanzeiger by 31 December for the following year. For 2026 they are 50,700 euros gross a year for the standard Blue Card, and 45,934.20 euros for shortage occupations and recent graduates, where the Bundesagentur für Arbeit must consent and will check that your pay, hours and leave are comparable to a domestic employee’s. The job offer must run for at least six months. Changing employer no longer needs advance permission, but during your first twelve months the authority may suspend the change for 30 days and refuse it if the conditions are not met, and §82(1) obliges you to report every employer change during those twelve months. The threshold matters beyond the first application: if you take a pay cut that drops you below the applicable figure, you can lose the basis of the card at renewal. This is a reason to be careful about accepting reduced hours or a lower salary as an alternative to dismissal.

Tools That Help With The Contract, The Deadlines And The Money

Werkzeu.ge is a browser-based platform of tools for German bureaucracy, taxes, legal documents and forms, built by Cryon UG, the company behind WeLiveIn.de, so treat this as an in-house recommendation and weigh it accordingly. It is bilingual German and English and hosted in Germany. It is in beta until 30 November 2026 and individual tools may be incomplete. It prepares and generates documents and never files anything with an authority or a court for you. It is explicitly not legal advice, which matters more in this chapter than in most: nothing below changes what the Kündigungsschutzgesetz says about your case, and no tool substitutes for a Fachanwalt für Arbeitsrecht, a specialist employment lawyer, when a dismissal has actually landed.

Two of the useful ones are free and need no account. The Brutto-Netto-Rechner converts a gross offer into an estimated net figure across the tax classes, which is the calculation to run before you sign rather than after. The Formularamt holds official federal, state and municipal forms, each with a source link and retrieval date, filled in the browser with your entries staying on your device, and it is where to look if the Ausländerbehörde or the Agentur für Arbeit wants something on paper. The free tier carries ads.

The paid tools are worth naming with their tiers rather than blurring them together. The Arbeitskündigung tool is Plus and drafts a resignation letter for an employment contract, which is the one you want if you are leaving a job. Werkzeu.ge also has a separate Kündigungsschreiben tool, but that one is for cancelling consumer contracts like a gym or a mobile plan and is the wrong tool for resigning. The Urlaubsabgeltungs-Rechner is Plus and works out the payout for untaken leave under §7 of the Bundesurlaubsgesetz, including pro-rata part years and the five- versus six-day week conversion described above. The Arbeitszeugnis-Decoder is Plus and translates the coded reference formulations into the grades they actually signal. The Abfindungs-Netto Projector is Plus and models what a severance figure is worth after tax, which is the number that matters in a settlement negotiation. The Kündigungsfrist-Monitor sits in the Pro tier and tracks contract terms and notice deadlines with colour-coded urgency and reminders before they lapse. Pricing changes during and after the beta, so check the current pricing page rather than any figure quoted in an article.

What To Do Next

Start with the paperwork you already have. Find your contract and check whether you actually received the essential terms within the Nachweisgesetz deadlines, and whether anything on that list is missing. Check what your contract says about your place of work, your job description, overtime and your own notice period, because those four clauses decide most of what your employer can and cannot do to you later. If the contract sets a notice period for you that is longer than the employer’s, know that §622(6) makes it unenforceable.

Then count your workplace. Work out whether more than ten people are regularly employed in your Betrieb, using the 0.5 and 0.75 weightings for part-timers, and work out the date on which you passed six months of service. Those two facts, more than anything in your contract, determine whether you have dismissal protection. Write the answers down somewhere you will find them, because you will not want to be researching this in the three weeks after a dismissal letter arrives.

If a dismissal does arrive, treat the date it reached you as the only date that matters and get advice inside the first few days, not the third week. A Fachanwalt für Arbeitsrecht, your trade union if you belong to one, or a Beratungsstelle can all assess it, and legal expenses insurance often covers employment disputes if you took it out before the trouble started. Do not sign an Aufhebungsvertrag because it is put in front of you and described as the amicable option. If you are on a residence permit tied to your job, notify the Ausländerbehörde within the two weeks §82(6) gives you and ask what period you have to find new work, because your immigration clock and your labour law clock run at the same time and neither waits for the other.