Opening a Bank Account in Germany

Almost nothing in German daily life works until you have a bank account in Germany. Your salary arrives by transfer, your rent leaves by direct debit, your health insurance, your phone contract, your electricity supplier and the broadcasting fee all expect to collect from an account rather than take your cash. This chapter explains what kind of account you need, the legal right to one that most newcomers never hear about, the documents a bank will genuinely ask for, how the identity check works when you cannot walk into a branch, and what to do when a bank tells you no. It also covers the parts people get wrong: the address problem, the credit record you do not have yet, and the widespread but unlawful demand for a German account number.

The single most useful thing in this chapter is at the top, because it changes how you should approach every conversation with a bank: in Germany, access to a basic payment account is a statutory right, not a commercial favour. If you read nothing else, read the sections on the Basiskonto and on what happens when a bank refuses.

What a Girokonto Actually Is

The everyday German account is the Girokonto, the current or checking account used for incoming and outgoing payments. It is not a savings product and it is not designed to hold wealth. It exists to receive your salary and to pay things out again, and the German payment system is built around the assumption that everybody has one. When a German form asks for your Bankverbindung, your banking details, it is asking for the Girokonto.

Money moves in and out of it in three main ways, and the vocabulary matters because the forms use it. An Überweisung is a credit transfer: you instruct your bank to push money to someone else. A Dauerauftrag is a standing order: a fixed amount you tell your bank to send on a fixed date each month, which is how many people pay rent. A Lastschrift is a direct debit: you give a company a mandate, and the company pulls the money from your account itself. The Lastschrift is the German default for recurring bills, and it is worth understanding that with a SEPA-Basislastschrift you can demand your money back within eight weeks of the debit, without giving any reason, which makes it far safer than it feels the first time you authorise a stranger to take money out of your account.

Your account is identified by an IBAN, the International Bank Account Number. A German IBAN is 22 characters long, starts with DE, and contains your old-style account number and bank code inside it. You will type it constantly, so it is worth putting it somewhere you can copy from. The IBAN is not secret in the way a card number is: you give it to your employer so they can pay you and to anyone who owes you money. It lets people send you money and, where you have signed a mandate, collect it – it does not let a stranger help themselves.

Every Legal Resident Has a Right to a Bank Account in Germany

This is the part the guides usually skip. Since the Zahlungskontengesetz, the Payment Accounts Act, came into force, a bank in Germany cannot simply decide it would rather not have you as a customer. Section 31 of that Act obliges every institution that offers payment accounts to consumers to conclude a Basiskonto contract – a basic payment account – with anyone entitled to it. The law then defines who is entitled in remarkably wide terms: every consumer lawfully resident in the European Union, expressly including people with no fixed abode, asylum seekers, and people who have no residence permit but cannot be deported for legal or practical reasons.

Read that again, because it disposes of most of the anxiety newcomers carry into a bank. You do not need to be German. You do not need a permanent contract, a minimum salary or a German credit history. You do not need to have been here for any length of time. If you are lawfully in the EU and you are a consumer, a bank that sells current accounts to the public owes you a basic one. The Bundesanstalt für Finanzdienstleistungsaufsicht, BaFin, the financial regulator, states the same entitlement in its own consumer guidance in the same words.

The mechanics are equally concrete. Once your complete application arrives, the bank must offer you the contract without undue delay and at the latest within ten Geschäftstage, ten business days. It must confirm that it received your application and attach a copy. If you tell a bank you want a Basiskonto, it must give you the statutory application form free of charge, and if it has a website it must make that form available there too. There is a detail in the law worth knowing: if you fill that form in completely, the bank cannot then turn round and claim your application was incomplete. That kills the most common stalling tactic outright.

None of this means the Basiskonto is the account you necessarily want. It is a floor, not a ceiling. Most people who arrive with a job offer and a passport will simply open an ordinary Girokonto and never think about the Zahlungskontengesetz again. The right matters precisely when the ordinary route fails – and knowing it exists changes the conversation from pleading to citing.

What a Basiskonto Must Be Able to Do

A Basiskonto is a real account, not a token. The law says it is held in euro and must allow cash deposits and withdrawals, direct debits including one-off ones, transfers including standing orders, and payments by card. Cash withdrawals must work at counters and, independently of opening hours, at the bank’s own machines or those of a network it belongs to, anywhere in the European Economic Area. Payments to and from providers elsewhere in the EEA must work too.

Two further guarantees are easy to miss and worth quoting at a reluctant clerk. The number of payment transactions may not be limited: a bank cannot give you a Basiskonto and then cap you at five transfers a month. And the services must be made available to the same extent as the bank generally offers them to ordinary account holders, through every channel the bank normally provides for the purpose. In practice this means that if the bank offers online banking to its customers at large, it must offer online banking on the Basiskonto as well. BaFin says so explicitly.

There is one real limitation, and it is deliberate. The law describes these services as payment business “without credit business”. A Basiskonto carries no right to an overdraft. You can spend what is in it and no more. A bank and a customer may separately agree extras that go beyond the statutory minimum, and the law expressly says that can include an arranged overdraft facility – but that is a negotiation, never an entitlement, and a bank that declines is within its rights. If you are working with a debt counsellor, note also that you can demand at the moment of application that the Basiskonto be operated as a Pfändungsschutzkonto, a P-Konto, which shields a monthly allowance from creditors.

What a Basiskonto Is Allowed to Cost

A Basiskonto is not required to be free, and in Germany it usually is not. What the law requires is that the fee be angemessen – reasonable – and it tells you how reasonableness is judged: by the fees usual in the market and by the customer’s actual usage pattern. Contractual penalties tied to a Basiskonto contract are simply prohibited. Where a fee is unreasonable, the fee clause falls but the account contract itself survives.

That standard sounds soft, and in practice it has been fought over. The Verbraucherzentrale, the consumer advice organisation, has repeatedly found German basic accounts to be among the most expensive in Europe, with monthly charges at the top of the range far above what several other EU states charge for the same statutory product, some of which provide it cheaply or free. Courts have struck down individual banks’ pricing. Because those figures move and because judgments keep landing, do not trust a number you read on a guide page – including this one. Compare the current published price lists of two or three institutions near you before you apply, and remember that under the Act every bank offering consumer accounts must explain its Basiskonto’s features, charges and terms to you free of charge, at any time. Asking is an entitlement, not an imposition.

It is also worth being realistic about the ordinary Girokonto by comparison. The free German current account has not disappeared, but it has narrowed: many banks now waive the monthly fee only above a minimum monthly incoming amount, or for customers under a certain age, or for students, and charge for everything else. Direct banks and app-based providers tend to be cheaper on the monthly fee and to recover it elsewhere, most often on cash withdrawals outside their own network and on currency conversion. Read the Preis- und Leistungsverzeichnis, the price and services list, which every bank must publish, and look specifically at what a withdrawal costs and what happens when you spend in another currency.

When a Bank Can Say No, and When It Cannot

Because the entitlement is statutory, the grounds for refusing it are a closed list. A bank may only refuse a Basiskonto application on the grounds set out in the Act, and there are essentially four. It may refuse if you already hold a usable payment account at another institution in Germany. It may refuse if you were convicted, within the last three years, of an intentional criminal offence against that bank, its staff or its customers in their capacity as such. It may refuse if you previously held a Basiskonto at that same bank and it rightfully terminated the contract within the last year because you deliberately used the account for unlawful purposes. And it may refuse if it cannot meet its due-diligence duties under money-laundering law or banking law with respect to you – most commonly, if it cannot verify who you are.

Look at what is not on that list. Creditworthiness is not there. A negative Schufa entry is not there. Unemployment is not there. Having no job, no German history, no assets and no credit file is not a lawful reason to refuse you a Basiskonto, and the Verbraucherzentrale states plainly that neither a registered address nor a credit check is a precondition: an application and proof of identity are all the law requires. If a clerk refuses you because of your Schufa, the clerk is wrong, and the refusal is unlawful.

The money-laundering ground is the one that does real work, and it is worth understanding rather than resenting. It is not a judgement about you. It is a statement that the bank cannot complete a legally mandated identification step. That is why the documents you bring matter so much, and why the next sections deal with identity in detail: in the overwhelming majority of genuine problem cases, the obstacle is not that the bank dislikes the applicant, but that the applicant has arrived with a document the bank’s process cannot accept.

The Ten-Day Rule and the Free BaFin Route

A refusal is not a conversation. The Act requires the bank to declare a refusal without undue delay and in any case within ten business days of your application arriving. It must tell you free of charge, in text form, and in German unless you have agreed otherwise, why it refused. It may withhold the reasons only where giving them would endanger public security or breach the money-laundering rules on tipping off, which is a narrow exception, not a general excuse. Critically, the refusal itself must inform you about the BaFin procedure described below and about your right to go to the consumer arbitration body, and it must give you that body’s contact details. A bare “no” with no reasons and no signposting is not a lawful refusal.

If the bank refuses, or does not decide within ten business days, or agrees the contract and then does not actually open the account within ten business days, you can ask BaFin to open an administrative procedure against it. This is the part that surprises people: it is free for you. BaFin charges you nothing; you carry only your postage and, if you choose to use one, your own lawyer. There is a form for it on BaFin’s website, and you send it to Bonn. You cannot run this route in parallel with a court case or an arbitration procedure on the same facts – pick one.

What BaFin then does has teeth. If the bank refused you unlawfully, BaFin orders it to conclude the contract and open the account in your favour. The bank escapes only if it can make one of the statutory refusal grounds credible to the regulator. And the regulator may charge the bank a fee for the order – so the cost of being wrong lands on the institution, not on you. One practical wrinkle: after BaFin orders the opening, you still have to go back and actively conclude the contract. The order does not create the account by itself.

For a sense of scale, BaFin published a survey of how the Act is working in September 2025. Roughly 1,100 institutions in Germany offer basic accounts. Refusal rates fell over the surveyed period to well under a tenth of what the anxious newcomer imagines. In 2023 fewer than 200 people asked BaFin to intervene, and in something under half of those cases the account was opened as a result, while in a comparable number of cases the bank turned out to have had a lawful ground. BaFin’s own summary is that banks largely comply. Two things follow. The route works. And it is used by very few people, which means most of those who are wrongly refused simply give up. Do not be one of them.

The Documents You Need to Open a Bank Account in Germany

For an ordinary Girokonto, expect to be asked for four things. First, identity: a valid Personalausweis, the national identity card, if you have an EU one, or your passport. Second, proof of address, usually the Meldebescheinigung, the certificate of registration you receive when you complete your Anmeldung at the Bürgeramt. Third, your Steueridentifikationsnummer, the eleven-digit tax identification number. Fourth, if you are not an EU, EEA or Swiss national, your residence title – the elektronischer Aufenthaltstitel or the visa in your passport.

Beyond that, banks vary and are entitled to. Many will ask for your employment contract or recent payslips, particularly if you want an overdraft or a credit card, which are credit products and therefore subject to a genuine assessment of whether you can repay. Some ask for a residence permit that has more than a few months left to run. Some ask students for their enrolment certificate. None of this is unreasonable for a commercial product. What you should notice is that all of it goes beyond what the Basiskonto entitlement requires – which is exactly why the Basiskonto matters as a fallback when the paperwork for the ordinary account is not yet in place.

You will also be asked about tax residency, and possibly asked to sign a self-certification naming every country where you are tax resident. This is not the bank being nosy. Germany participates in the international automatic exchange of financial account information, and if you are tax resident elsewhere your account details may be reported to that country’s authorities. Answer accurately. Guessing here creates problems later that are far more tedious than the form.

Your Steuer-ID and Why a Missing One Is Not a Blocker

German tax law requires banks to record your Steueridentifikationsnummer for every account holder. This is not optional for the bank and it is not a discretionary request, so there is no point arguing about it. The Abgabenordnung obliges credit institutions to collect and record that number, and obliges you to supply it and to report changes without delay.

But here is the part that is almost never explained, and it solves a real newcomer problem. Your Steuer-ID is issued automatically after your Anmeldung and arrives by post, and it can take weeks. Plenty of people are told to wait for it before opening an account. The law does not say that. If you do not supply the number by the time the business relationship begins, and the bank has not lawfully obtained it some other way, the bank must query it from the Bundeszentralamt für Steuern by automated procedure, and it has until the end of the third month after the relationship starts to do so. In other words, the statute expressly contemplates an account being opened before the Steuer-ID is known, and puts the work of finding it on the bank.

So if a bank tells you it cannot open your account because your Steuer-ID has not arrived, it is describing its own internal preference, not a legal requirement. Say that you do not have it yet, that it has been requested, and ask them to query it from the BZSt as the Abgabenordnung provides. Some banks will do exactly that. Others will still refuse, because they are allowed to set their own conditions for an ordinary commercial Girokonto – which brings you back, once again, to the Basiskonto, where the list of lawful refusal grounds does not include a missing tax number. Our chapter on Registration (Anmeldung) and Legal Documentation explains how the Steuer-ID is assigned and how to chase it if it never turns up.

How Banks Check Your Identity: PostIdent, VideoIdent and the eID

Money-laundering law, not the bank, decides how your identity gets checked. The rule is that verification happens either by an appropriate examination of a document presented in person, or by another procedure that is suitable for the purpose and offers an equivalent level of security. Everything you will meet in practice is one of those two things wearing a brand name.

PostIdent is the in-person route, outsourced. You take your passport or identity card and a coupon from the bank to a branch of Deutsche Post, or in some variants to a partner shop, and a member of staff checks your document and confirms your identity to the bank. It is slow, it is reliable, and it accepts the widest range of documents, because a human being is looking at the physical thing. If you have an unusual document or a name that transliterates awkwardly, this is the route that fails least often.

VideoIdent is the other-procedure route. You sit in a video call with an agent, hold your document to the camera, tilt it so the security features catch the light, and read out a code. It takes minutes rather than days, and it is why an app-based account can be open the same afternoon. Its weaknesses are practical: it needs a decent connection and good lighting, agents are often not available at three in the morning despite the marketing, and providers restrict which nationalities’ documents they will accept over video. A document rejected on VideoIdent is very often accepted on PostIdent, so a refusal from the video agent is not the end of the road.

The third route is the electronic identity function. A German Personalausweis, an EU eID card, and the elektronischer Aufenthaltstitel all carry a chip that can prove your identity online, and money-laundering law recognises this explicitly. Where a bank supports it, it is the fastest and least fragile method of the three, because no human is squinting at a hologram. It requires the online function to have been activated and a PIN you have actually kept.

Opening a Bank Account in Germany Without a Registered Address

Newcomers hit a circle. To rent a flat you want to show a German account. To open the account the bank wants a Meldebescheinigung. To get the Meldebescheinigung you must complete the Anmeldung. To complete the Anmeldung you need a landlord’s confirmation, which means you need the flat. Our chapter on Registration (Anmeldung) and Legal Documentation sets out that chain in full, and it is worth reading alongside this one, because the two problems are the same problem seen from different ends.

The Basiskonto breaks the circle. A registered address is not a lawful precondition for it. The Act extends the entitlement expressly to people with no fixed abode; the Verbraucherzentrale states directly that only an application and proof of identity are required; and a moment’s thought shows why it must be so, since a right that excluded the homeless would be a right that excluded precisely the people it was written for. The bank still needs an address to send you post, and will ask for one – a c/o address, a friend’s address, or in genuine homelessness a care-of address at a support organisation can serve. What it cannot do is convert “you are not yet registered” into a refusal.

This does not make it painless. A branch clerk who has never processed a Basiskonto for an unregistered applicant may simply say no, and be sincerely convinced. Your practical options are to ask for the statutory application form in writing, to fill it in completely, to ask for the refusal in writing with reasons – all of which the bank owes you – and, if it comes to that, to send the form to BaFin. In the meantime, several app-based providers will open an account against a passport and a foreign address, which is often the fastest way to have somewhere for a first salary to land while the registration works itself out.

Schufa and the Thin File

The Schufa is Germany’s main credit bureau. It holds a record of your German financial behaviour – accounts, contracts, loans, whether you pay – and reduces it to a score that businesses buy. When you open an ordinary Girokonto, the bank will normally query it and will normally report the new account back to it. This is routine and not sinister.

Your problem as a newcomer is not a bad file. It is no file. The Schufa knows nothing about you, because you have done nothing in Germany yet, and a score computed from nothing is not a good score – it is an absent one. Some systems treat absence as risk. This is the real reason a perfectly solvent professional gets declined for a credit card in their first month, and it is worth understanding that it is a data problem, not a judgement.

Two things follow. The first is that a thin or negative Schufa file is legally irrelevant to the Basiskonto, as set out above: it is not on the list of lawful refusal grounds. The second is that a thin file resolves itself, and faster than you expect, because opening the account is itself one of the entries that starts building it. Do not respond to a declined credit card by applying to five more banks in a week; each application can leave a trace, and clustered applications read badly. Our chapter on Credit and Loans in Germany deals with the Schufa properly – how the score works, how to obtain your free annual self-disclosure, and how to get errors corrected – and there is no sense repeating it here.

Choosing Where to Open a Bank Account in Germany

The German market divides into three groups, and the right answer depends less on which is best than on which failure mode you can tolerate.

The Sparkassen and the Volksbanken and Raiffeisenbanken are the local institutions. A Sparkasse is a public-law savings bank tied to a city or district; a Volksbank is a cooperative owned by its members. Between them they blanket the country with branches, which matters more than it sounds: they are the ones you can walk into, they handle cash without fuss, and they are the institution a German landlord or a small employer recognises without thinking. Their monthly fees are typically higher, their apps are typically less polished, and English-language service is genuinely hit and miss outside the big cities. They are also strictly regional, so the Sparkasse in one city cannot simply serve you as a customer in another. The commercial branch banks – Deutsche Bank, Commerzbank, and the branch networks around them – occupy a similar space with a national footprint and, generally, better English. On the landscape itself, one point of 2026 context: UniCredit’s takeover bid for Commerzbank failed. Commerzbank announced on 8 July 2026 that 17.6 per cent of shares had been tendered by the deadline, and stated that the tendered shares came predominantly from banks and parties affiliated with UniCredit, with independent institutional and private investors accounting for under two per cent. For a customer choosing an account, the practical consequence is simply that Commerzbank continues as an independent German bank.

The Direktbanken – ING, DKB, Comdirect and their peers – are full German banks with German banking licences, German deposit protection and German IBANs, but no branches. They are the traditional sweet spot for people who want a serious, unremarkable German bank at a low price and are happy to do everything online. Their weakness is precisely the missing branch: when something goes wrong, you are in a queue.

The app-based providers – N26, Revolut, Trade Republic and others – are the fastest to open and the best at foreign exchange, and for many newcomers the first account that actually works. Their structures differ in ways worth checking before you commit rather than after. Some hold a German banking licence, which means a German IBAN and German deposit protection. Others operate under a licence issued in another EU state and passport it into Germany; Revolut, for instance, works on a Lithuanian banking licence and historically issued Lithuanian IBANs, though it has established a German branch and now issues German IBANs, migrating existing customers over. That matters for two reasons: which country’s deposit guarantee stands behind your money, and whether you will meet the IBAN problem described next. Before you open one, check which entity actually holds your deposits and which IBAN you will be given.

Your IBAN Is Not Allowed to Be a Problem

Here is a thing that happens. You open an account with a non-German IBAN, you give it to your employer’s payroll department or your landlord or your gym, and you are told the system only takes German account numbers. This is called IBAN discrimination, and it is illegal.

The rule is Article 9 of Regulation (EU) No 260/2012, the SEPA Regulation, headed “Payment accessibility”. Its second paragraph provides that a payee accepting a credit transfer or using a direct debit to collect funds from a payer holding a payment account located within the Union shall not specify the Member State in which that payment account is to be located, provided the account is reachable. The first paragraph binds payers the same way. In plain terms: within the euro payments area, if your account can be reached, nobody may insist on which EU country it sits in. Your employer may not require a German IBAN to pay your salary. Your landlord may not require one to collect rent by direct debit. Your insurer, your gym and your phone company may not either. The European Commission describes the practice in exactly these terms and tells consumers to complain to the competent national authority where it happened.

Enforcement is the weak point, and it is honest to say so. The rule is clear, and compliance is patchy, because a payroll clerk with an old input mask is not thinking about EU regulations. Start there: most cases are ignorance, not policy, and a polite message noting that Article 9 of the SEPA Regulation prohibits requiring an account in a particular Member State resolves a surprising number of them, especially if it reaches someone above the clerk. If it does not, Germany has a dedicated complaints office for SEPA discrimination run by the Wettbewerbszentrale, the centre for combating unfair competition, set up in 2017 in coordination with BaFin and the Bundesbank, and complaint volumes there have been climbing. Refusing a valid EU IBAN is not only a breach of the Regulation, it is treated as an unfair competitive practice, which gives it real bite against a business.

And then there is the pragmatic reading, which you are entitled to weigh. Being right does not make your rent leave your account. If you are three days into a new job and payroll will not take your Lithuanian IBAN, you may reasonably decide that fighting the good fight is a project for next month and that opening a German-IBAN account today is the cheaper path. That is a legitimate choice, not a surrender. Just make it knowing that the demand was unlawful, and that if you have the appetite, the complaint route exists.

Girocard, Credit Cards and the Cash Question

The card that comes with a German account is a Girocard, the German domestic debit card. Older Germans and a great many websites still call it the EC-Karte, a name that has been obsolete for years but refuses to die – if someone says EC-Karte, they mean the Girocard. It draws directly on your balance and it is accepted essentially everywhere in Germany that accepts any card at all. Its limitation is that it is a domestic scheme: outside Germany, a plain Girocard may not work, and the international co-badging that used to paper over this has been withdrawn for new cards, so do not assume the card in your German wallet will function on holiday. Check what your specific card carries before you travel.

A credit card is a separate product and is not handed out with the account. It is a credit product, so the bank assesses you, which is where the thin Schufa file bites hardest in your first months. If you need one immediately – and you may, because some airlines, hotels and car hire firms will not deal without one – the workarounds are a prepaid card, a debit Mastercard or Visa from one of the app-based providers, or a secured card against a deposit. What most people actually discover is that a debit Visa or Mastercard covers nearly every case where they thought they needed credit.

Now the cash question, where most guides are a decade out of date. The Bundesbank’s payment behaviour study for 2025, published in June 2026, found that for the first time cash was no longer the majority of transactions: 45 per cent of payments were made in cash against 55 per cent cashless. Debit cards accounted for 26 per cent, mobile methods for 10 per cent. Measured by turnover rather than by number of payments, cash accounts for less still. Germany is not the cash-only country your friends warned you about, and it has been changing quickly.

But the study contains the fact that actually governs your behaviour, and it points the other way. At in-person purchases, customers could pay in cash 94 per cent of the time – and could pay cashless only 86 per cent of the time. About a quarter of respondents had been unable to pay cashless when they wanted to at least once in the previous month. Cash is no longer what most people use; it is still what is most widely accepted. That is the practical point: the bakery, the Kneipe, the market stall, the doctor’s parking machine and the small restaurant that has a card reader in theory and a broken one in practice have not gone away. Carry some cash. Not because Germany is stuck in the past, but because acceptance still lags usage, and the eight per cent gap will find you at the worst moment.

The Dispokredit: Convenient and Expensive

A Dispokredit, usually just called the Dispo, is the arranged overdraft on a Girokonto. The bank sets a limit, commonly some multiple of your monthly incoming salary, and lets you go below zero up to it without asking. It is granted at the bank’s discretion, it usually requires a few months of regular salary arriving first, and as covered above it is never part of the Basiskonto entitlement.

It is also one of the most expensive forms of borrowing available to an ordinary consumer in Germany. Dispo rates run far above ordinary consumer loan rates, and there is a second tier above it: if you exceed even your agreed Dispo limit, that is a geduldete Überziehung, a tolerated overdraft, priced higher still. The interest is charged only on what you actually use and only for as long as you use it, which is what makes it feel harmless. For a few days at the end of a month it genuinely is. As a permanent state of being a thousand euros below zero, it is a slow, quiet, expensive leak, and the bank has no reason at all to point that out to you.

If you find yourself living in your Dispo month after month, the standard advice is right: replace it with an ordinary instalment loan at a fraction of the rate, or with a Rahmenkredit, and then leave the Dispo alone for emergencies. Rates move, so compare current ones rather than trusting a figure from a guide; the chapter on Credit and Loans in Germany goes into the alternatives, and Managing Personal Finances covers the budgeting side.

Switching Banks: the Kontenwechselhilfe

If your first account turns out to be the wrong one, you are not stuck with it, and you do not have to do the migration by hand. The Zahlungskontengesetz obliges both banks – the one you are leaving and the one you are joining – to give you Kontenwechselhilfe, account switching assistance, if you ask for it. You sign an authorisation, and the receiving bank then has two business days to demand the necessary information from the old one.

What it must hand over is genuinely useful: the list of your standing orders, the information it holds on your direct debit mandates, and the details of incoming transfers and direct debits over the previous thirteen months. Thirteen months is deliberate – it catches the annual charges that would otherwise ambush you eleven months later. The old bank must then stop the standing orders from the date you specify and transfer your remaining balance across.

There is a limitation that matters given the previous sections, and it is easy to miss. The switching duty does not apply where either provider is not established in Germany, or where the two accounts are held in different currencies. So if you are moving from a German bank to an app-based provider operating out of another Member State, you may find the statutory help simply is not owed to you, and you are back to updating your employer, your landlord and every direct debit by hand. That is not a reason to avoid the move – just a reason to know which kind of move you are making. And do not close the old account the day the new one opens. Leave it open, with a small balance, for a month or two until you are sure everything has actually followed you.

Deposit Protection

Your money in a German bank is protected by statutory deposit insurance up to the equivalent of 100,000 euros per depositor per institution. This is EU-harmonised, so the figure is the same across the Union, and it covers the balance in your Girokonto as well as savings. Above that ceiling, the law provides for temporary cover of up to 500,000 euros in defined situations where a large sum has just landed for a life reason – the sale of a private home, or statutory payments connected with marriage, divorce, retirement, dismissal, birth, illness, disability or death.

Two practical implications. First, the ceiling is per institution, so if you are ever holding more than the limit, splitting it across two banks costs you nothing and removes the question. Second, and more relevant to newcomers, the protection follows the licence, not the marketing. If your app-based account is run by a bank licensed in another EU country, it is that country’s guarantee scheme standing behind it, not the German one. The cover level is the same across the EU, but the scheme, the language and the process are not. Some German institutions additionally belong to voluntary schemes that protect balances well beyond the statutory ceiling. None of this should keep you awake – but it is worth knowing which entity holds your salary.

Tools That Help You Prepare

Preparing a bank appointment is mostly a document problem, and a couple of free browser tools can take the friction out of it. Werkzeu.ge, which is built by Cryon UG, the company behind WeLiveIn.de, has a Bank-Konto-Checkliste at werkzeu.ge/de/tools/einwanderung/bank-konto-checkliste that walks through which documents your particular situation calls for before you go. It is in the Gast tier, meaning it is free and needs no account.

Once you have an IBAN, the IBAN-Rechner at werkzeu.ge/de/tools/finanzen/iban-calculator checks that one you have been given is structurally valid and shows which bank it belongs to – useful when a landlord sends you their details by hand and you would rather not send your deposit into a typo. It is also free with no account. If you are working out what will actually land in the account, the Brutto-Netto-Rechner at werkzeu.ge/de/tools/steuern/brutto-netto-rechner converts a gross salary to net using the official formulas, and the Formularamt holds official German forms with their source, retrieval date and status recorded, which is the place to look for the paperwork that surrounds the account rather than the account itself. Both are free without an account.

Two of the things this chapter touches sit behind the paid tier, and it would be misleading to imply otherwise: the Schufa-Selbstauskunft tool, which helps prepare the request for your own credit record, is a Plus tool and is not free. Some honest caveats apply across the board. The platform is in beta until 30 November 2026 and its own terms say tools may be incomplete. The free tier carries advertising. The tools prepare and generate documents; nothing is ever submitted to a bank, a Bürgeramt or the Schufa on your behalf, and you remain the one who sends things. And none of it is financial, tax or legal advice – a calculator is not a Steuerberater and a checklist is not a lawyer. For what each tier includes, see the current pricing at werkzeu.ge/en/pricing rather than any figure quoted on a guide page, because prices change and pages like this one go stale.

What To Do Next

Start by deciding which problem you actually have. If you have a passport, a job and a registered address, you do not need any of the law in this chapter: pick an institution that matches how you live – a branch nearby if you handle cash or want to talk to a person, a Direktbank if you want a cheap serious German account, an app if you want it open this afternoon – compare the current price lists on withdrawals and foreign currency, and open an ordinary Girokonto. Bring your identity document, your Meldebescheinigung, your Steuer-ID and your residence title if you need one.

If you do not have all of that, work the other route deliberately. Ask the bank for the Basiskonto application form, which it must give you free of charge and publish on its website. Fill it in completely, which removes the “incomplete application” objection. Count ten business days. If the answer is no, insist on it in writing with reasons, which the bank owes you, and check the reason against the closed list: an existing usable account, a conviction against that bank in the last three years, a Basiskonto at that bank rightfully terminated within the last year for deliberate unlawful use, or an inability to meet money-laundering duties. If the reason given is your Schufa, your income, your lack of a job or your lack of a registered address, it is not a lawful reason. Send the BaFin form. It costs you nothing, and BaFin can order the bank to open the account.

Then get the basics in place in the first weeks. Set up a Dauerauftrag for your rent so you never think about it again. Give your IBAN to your employer, and if payroll objects to a non-German one, point at Article 9 of the SEPA Regulation. Expect to be declined for a credit card at first and do not carousel through applications; the file thickens on its own. Keep cash in your wallet – not much, but some, because acceptance still lags usage. Read Registration (Anmeldung) and Legal Documentation for the document chain the bank is standing at the end of, Credit and Loans in Germany for the Schufa and borrowing, and An Expat’s First Steps in Germany for how the account fits into everything else waiting for you.

And keep the one fact that most newcomers never learn. A bank in Germany that sells current accounts to the public cannot simply decide it would rather not have you. If you are lawfully in the EU, you are entitled to a basic payment account – with no job, no credit history, no assets and no registered address. The right is real, the deadline is ten business days, and the regulator that enforces it does so for free.