Pension and Retirement Plans

This chapter explains the part of German retirement plans that most guides leave out: what happens when the pension is not enough, when illness ends your working life early, or when the person whose contributions supported your household dies. Germany treats retirement as a contributory system first and a welfare system second, and the second layer has its own offices, its own law book and its own rules about foreigners. Our chapter on Pension Plans and Retirement covers the contributory side in depth, including Rentenpunkte, the retirement age, company and private schemes, and what happens to your money if you leave Germany. This chapter starts where that one stops, at the safety net underneath it.

Where Retirement Plans Meet The Welfare System

German retirement plans rest on the gesetzliche Rentenversicherung, the statutory pension insurance, which pays out roughly in proportion to what you paid in. That design is honest about its consequences. A short working life in Germany produces a short pension, and a low-paid one produces a low pension. Nothing in the statutory system guarantees you a liveable amount, only a proportionate one. For foreigners who arrive in their thirties or forties, this arithmetic matters more than it does for someone who started contributing at twenty.

Underneath the pension sits a separate structure built on a different principle. Grundsicherung im Alter und bei Erwerbsminderung, basic security in old age and in reduced earning capacity, does not care what you contributed. It asks only what you have and what you need, and it tops you up to a minimum. Beside both sits a third group of payments for the events that interrupt a working life: Erwerbsminderungsrente when health ends it early, and Hinterbliebenenrenten, survivors’ pensions, when a contributor dies. These are administered by the Deutsche Rentenversicherung, the federal pension insurance body, and they are pensions rather than welfare, but they are so often too small to live on that they end up joined to the means-tested layer in practice.

Understanding which layer you are dealing with tells you which office to write to, which deadlines bind you, and whether your residence permit is affected. The pension layers are administered by the Deutsche Rentenversicherung and claiming from them is a right you bought with contributions. The means-tested layer is administered by your local Sozialamt, the municipal social welfare office, under the Zwölftes Buch Sozialgesetzbuch or SGB XII, the twelfth book of the social code. Claiming from that layer is also a right, but it is a right with conditions attached, and for non-Germans some of those conditions reach into immigration law.

The 60-Month Wartezeit That Decides Everything

Before any of this applies to you, one number has to be met. The allgemeine Wartezeit, the general qualifying period, is five years, expressed in the paperwork as 60 months. Fall short of it and you receive no statutory old-age pension at all, regardless of how much you paid in. There is no partial pension for four years of contributions. The entitlement simply does not open.

The good news is that the 60 months are more generous than they sound, because they are not only months in which you or an employer wrote a cheque. Pflichtbeitragszeiten from employment count. So do freiwillige Beiträge, voluntary contributions you pay yourself. Kindererziehungszeiten, child-raising periods credited to a parent for roughly the first three years of a child’s life, count and are credited automatically once claimed. Periods of caring for a relative, of receiving certain benefits, and of a Versorgungsausgleich, the splitting of pension rights after a divorce, can also count. Months of insurance in another EU or EEA country or in Switzerland count towards the Wartezeit as well, which is the single most important thing for most readers of this chapter, and the section below explains it properly.

The 60-month figure carries a second meaning that catches foreigners entirely by surprise. Section 9 paragraph 2 of the Aufenthaltsgesetz, the Residence Act, makes a Niederlassungserlaubnis, the permanent settlement permit, conditional on having paid “mindestens 60 Monate Pflichtbeiträge oder freiwillige Beiträge zur gesetzlichen Rentenversicherung”, at least 60 months of compulsory or voluntary contributions to the statutory pension insurance. The same five years that open your pension entitlement also open your permanent residence. If you are self-employed and outside the statutory system, or if you have been in and out of German employment, this is worth checking long before you apply for anything, because voluntary contributions can be paid to fill the gap and they count for both purposes.

What Happens To Your Contributions If You Leave Before Five Years

If you leave Germany without reaching 60 months, you may apply for a Beitragserstattung, a refund of contributions. This sounds like getting your money back. It is not, and the gap between what people expect and what arrives is the most common disappointment in this whole area.

Section 210 paragraph 3 of the SGB VI states that contributions are refunded “in der Höhe, in der die Versicherten sie getragen haben”, in the amount the insured person bore. Statutory pension contributions are split down the middle between you and your employer. You bore half. So half is what comes back, and the employer’s half stays in the system permanently. The rule bites in the other direction too: if you paid voluntary contributions, or compulsory contributions on application, where you carried the full amount yourself, section 210 paragraph 3 refunds those at half as well. Either way you should expect roughly fifty cents on the euro, before considering that the refund is not adjusted for the years of inflation since you paid.

Two further conditions apply. You must wait 24 calendar months after leaving compulsory German insurance before the refund can be paid, so this is not something you arrange in your last week in Germany. And you must have no right to voluntary insurance, which in practice excludes EU, EEA and Swiss nationals and those living in a country with which Germany has a social security agreement, since they generally retain that right. Section 210 paragraph 6 then delivers the part that deserves a slow read: “Mit der Erstattung wird das bisherige Versicherungsverhältnis aufgelöst.” The refund dissolves your insurance relationship. Every month you ever contributed is erased. If you return to Germany later, you start from zero, and those months no longer count towards the Wartezeit, towards a Niederlassungserlaubnis, or towards anything else. Taking a refund to recover a few thousand euros can quietly cost you a pension entitlement worth far more, and it is very often the wrong decision for anyone who might come back.

EU Aggregation Versus Bilateral Agreements

The reason so few people should take a refund is that European law usually makes it unnecessary. Within the EU, the EEA and Switzerland, insurance periods are aggregated. Every month you were insured in any member state counts towards the German Wartezeit, and towards the qualifying period of every other member state’s system. Three years in Germany and four in Spain is seven years for the purpose of opening entitlements in both countries. Each country then pays its own pension for its own months, calculated by its own rules and paid at the same time, so you end up with several small pensions rather than one merged one. Nothing is transferred and nothing is lost. You apply once, in the country where you live, and that country’s institution passes the claim on.

Outside that bloc the picture is different and much less automatic. Germany has bilateral Sozialversicherungsabkommen, social security agreements, with a list of countries that includes the United States, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Brazil, India, Turkey, Israel, Morocco and others. Where an agreement covers pensions, it typically does the same aggregation job as the EU rules, but only on the terms written into that particular treaty, and the terms vary. Some agreements are narrower than people assume: the arrangement with China, for instance, is principally about posted workers and avoiding double contributions rather than full pension aggregation, so do not assume that your years at home will lift your German entitlement. India is often described the same way, and that description is out of date: the comprehensive agreement in force since 1 May 2017 does provide for aggregation. Check the specific agreement for your country on the Deutsche Rentenversicherung website rather than reasoning from what a colleague from a different country told you.

If your country has no agreement with Germany at all, the German months stand alone. They must reach 60 on their own, and a refund may genuinely be the better option if there is no realistic prospect of returning. Even then, work the numbers before deciding, because a small German pension paid every month for the rest of your life, in almost any country in the world, usually beats half of your contributions paid once.

Grundsicherung im Alter: The Means-Tested Floor

Grundsicherung im Alter und bei Erwerbsminderung is the benefit that catches people whose retirement plans did not produce enough to live on. It is set out in sections 41 to 46b of the SGB XII, and it is a genuinely different thing from your pension. Nothing about it depends on your contribution record.

Two routes lead into it. The first is age: you qualify once you reach the Altersgrenze. Section 41 sets this at 65 for people born before 1947 and raises it in steps to 67 for everyone born from 1964 onwards, tracking the ordinary Regelaltersgrenze. The second route has no minimum retirement age at all. Anyone aged 18 or over who is dauerhaft voll erwerbsgemindert, permanently and fully unable to work in the sense of section 43 paragraph 2 SGB VI, with no realistic prospect of recovery, can claim it. That second route is why the benefit’s name carries both halves, and it is what connects it to the Erwerbsminderungsrente described further down.

What it pays is not just a cash sum. It covers the notwendiger Lebensunterhalt through the Regelsatz, the standard rate, which for a single adult stands at 563 euros a month in 2026 after the Nullrunde, the zero round, that left the rates unchanged. On top of that it covers your Unterkunft und Heizung, actual rent and heating within local limits, your Kranken- und Pflegeversicherung contributions, Vorsorgebeiträge, and Mehrbedarf, extra allowances for specific situations such as a recognised disability or a medically required diet. The housing element is usually larger than the Regelsatz, which is why the total is far more than the headline number and why people who assume they earn too much to bother are frequently wrong. The Deutsche Rentenversicherung suggests a simple trigger: if your total income is below about 1,148 euros a month, have your entitlement checked.

One exclusion in section 41 deserves flagging because it has no equivalent in most countries’ systems. Paragraph 4 removes the entitlement entirely from anyone who brought about their own neediness vorsätzlich oder grob fahrlässig, intentionally or through gross negligence, within the previous ten years. This is applied narrowly, but giving away assets shortly before claiming is exactly the kind of act it is aimed at.

What Counts As Income And Assets For Grundsicherung im Alter

Because the benefit is means-tested, the office adds up what you have. Your pension counts as income. So do earnings, rent you receive, and most other regular payments. Your partner’s income counts if you live together as a household. Savings count, subject to a Schonvermögen, protected capital, of 10,000 euros per person, which is a meaningfully more generous figure than most people expect and is not reduced by the reform that hit the other Grundsicherung in July 2026. A modest owner-occupied home is usually protected as well, and reasonable provision for old age generally is.

The rule that changes the most lives is section 94 paragraph 1a of the SGB XII, introduced by the Angehörigen-Entlastungsgesetz. Maintenance claims against the claimant’s children and parents “sind nicht zu berücksichtigen, es sei denn, deren jährliches Gesamteinkommen … beträgt jeweils mehr als 100 000 Euro”, are not to be taken into account unless their annual total income each exceeds 100,000 euros. The law then adds a presumption that their income does not exceed it, which means the office may not go fishing through your children’s finances on suspicion. For older readers who have avoided claiming because they did not want their adult children billed, this is the paragraph to read. In the overwhelming majority of cases the children are never approached at all.

There is also a reward built in for people with long working lives. Where a pension rests on at least 33 years of Grundrentenzeiten, qualifying periods for the Grundrente top-up, part of that pension is disregarded when the office calculates your need. The allowance is 100 euros plus 30 percent of the pension above that, capped at half the Regelsatz, which puts the 2026 ceiling at 281.50 euros a month. It applies to statutory, company and private pensions alike, so a modest occupational pension is not simply confiscated by the means test. Be careful with the figures you find online here: the Deutsche Rentenversicherung’s own page on this still quotes a 2022 amount, and secondary sites copy it. Treat the mechanism as the reliable part and confirm the current cap when you apply.

Two practical points about applying. Grundsicherung im Alter starts on the first day of the month in which you apply and is never backdated, so a month of hesitation is a month of money you cannot recover. It is then granted for twelve months at a time and must be reapplied for. The Sozialamt decides, but you do not have to start there: the pension insurance bodies are legally obliged to inform their insured about the conditions, accept the application, and forward it to the competent Sozialamt. If the Rentenversicherung office is the one you already know how to reach, use it.

Grundsicherung im Alter Is Not The New Grundsicherung

On 1 July 2026 the benefit formerly called Bürgergeld was renamed Grundsicherung, with stricter sanctions, an asset check from day one and no Karenzzeit. Since then, one German word has referred to two different benefits, and the confusion is doing real damage to people searching for help.

The new Grundsicherung is the benefit for jobseekers. It lives in the SGB II, it is run by the Jobcenter, it comes with a Kooperationsplan and an expectation that you look for work, and it is the subject of our chapter on Welfare Programs and Eligibility. Grundsicherung im Alter und bei Erwerbsminderung is older, separate and unrelated to that reform. It lives in the SGB XII, it is run by the Sozialamt, and nobody expects a 70-year-old claimant to look for a job. The July 2026 sanctions regime does not apply to it. The age-tiered asset rules that came in with that reform do not apply to it either.

Keep the distinction straight when you read anything written after mid-2026, including news coverage, because journalists conflate the two constantly. If an article describes sanctions, a Kooperationsplan or a Jobcenter, it is about the SGB II benefit and not about you if you are retired. If you are of pension age and a letter arrives from a Jobcenter, something has gone wrong and it is worth asking why.

Erwerbsminderungsrente: When Work Ends Early

Roughly 170,000 people a year in Germany stop working before reaching retirement age because of illness or disability, according to the Bundesregierung. The Erwerbsminderungsrente, the reduced earning capacity pension, is the statutory answer, and it is a pension from the Deutsche Rentenversicherung rather than a welfare payment.

Entitlement turns on hours, not on diagnosis, and not on your own profession. The medical service assesses how many hours a day you could work in any job on the general labour market. If you can manage less than three hours a day, that is volle Erwerbsminderung, full reduction, and the full pension. If you can manage at least three but less than six hours, that is teilweise Erwerbsminderung, partial reduction, and the pension is half of the full amount. Six hours or more and there is no entitlement at all. The fact that you can no longer do the specific job you trained for is, for most people, legally irrelevant, and this is the point at which claims most often fail against expectations. Only people born before 2 January 1961 retain a narrower Berufsunfähigkeit protection tied to their actual occupation.

The insurance conditions are the five-year general Wartezeit plus at least three years of Pflichtbeiträge in the five years before the reduction began. That second condition is the one that catches long-term expatriates and the long-term self-employed, because it looks at recent history rather than lifetime history. A person with fifteen years of German contributions who then spent four years self-employed outside the statutory system can lose the entitlement entirely. Voluntary contributions do not repair it, since it demands compulsory ones. If you are leaving employment for self-employment, this is a risk worth understanding before you do it rather than after.

The amount is calculated as if you had kept working, through the Zurechnungszeit, an added period credited at your existing average earnings. For pensions starting in 2026 the Zurechnungszeit runs to 66 years and 3 months, and it is rising in steps towards 67. An Abschlag, a deduction of 0.3 percentage points per month of early access, applies but is capped at 10.8 percent. The pension is normally granted befristet, time-limited, usually for up to three years at a time and renewable, and becomes unbefristet, open-ended, only after several extensions or where improvement is clearly hopeless. Since 1 July 2024 a Zuschlag has been added to older EM pensions: 7.5 percent for those starting between January 2001 and June 2014, and 4.5 percent for those starting between July 2014 and December 2018. It is granted automatically with no application, and since December 2025 it is paid as part of the regular pension rather than separately. You may also work alongside the pension within limits that rose on 1 January 2026 to 20,763.75 euros a year with a full pension and 41,527.50 euros with a partial one, but only within the hours the assessment says you are capable of.

How Retirement Plans Interact With Means-Tested Support

The Erwerbsminderungsrente is frequently small. A working life cut short at forty produces few Rentenpunkte, the Zurechnungszeit only partly compensates, and the Abschlag takes up to a tenth of what remains. The result is that a large share of recipients end up in the means-tested layer as well, and this is where the two systems have to be read together.

If you receive a volle Erwerbsminderungsrente and the assessment says the reduction is permanent, you can claim Grundsicherung im Alter und bei Erwerbsminderung on top from age 18. The pension counts as income against the calculation, so the Sozialamt tops you up to the minimum rather than paying both in full. That feels unrewarding, and it is worth understanding why it is still worth doing. The top-up covers your actual rent and heating rather than a flat sum, it covers your health and care insurance contributions, and it opens Mehrbedarf allowances. The 33-year Grundrentenzeiten allowance also protects part of your pension from the offsetting, so the contributions were not wasted. A time-limited pension, however, generally routes you to the Jobcenter and the SGB II benefit instead, because the law treats you as temporarily rather than permanently unable to work, which is a distinction with real consequences for which office you deal with.

The same logic applies to the ordinary old-age pension. Claiming Grundsicherung im Alter does not reduce your pension, and your pension does not disqualify you from Grundsicherung im Alter. They coexist, with one counted against the other. Take-up is poor for exactly the reasons that keep people out of every means-tested system, embarrassment and the belief that the answer will be no, and the estimates consistently suggest that a large share of those entitled never apply. The application is free, it costs you nothing but the form, and if you are refused you have a month to lodge a Widerspruch, a formal objection.

Witwenrente And Witwerrente: The Survivors’ Pension

When an insured person dies, their spouse or registered partner may receive a Hinterbliebenenrente. Two versions exist, and which one applies depends mostly on your age and your circumstances rather than on your own contribution record, since this pension is derived from the deceased’s.

The kleine Witwenrente, the small widow’s or widower’s pension, pays 25 percent of the pension the deceased had or would have had for full reduced earning capacity. Under the neues Recht, the new law that applies to deaths from 2002 onwards where the marriage also began after 2001, it is limited to a maximum of two years. The große Witwenrente, the large one, pays 55 percent under the new law and is not time-limited. You qualify for the large version if you have reached a minimum age, or are raising a child under 18, or are yourself erwerbsgemindert. That minimum age is rising: it stood at 46 years and 4 months for deaths in 2025 and climbs to 47 for deaths from 2029 onwards.

The altes Recht, the old law, still governs many live cases and pays more. Where the death occurred before 2002, or where the marriage was concluded before 2002 and at least one spouse was born before 2 January 1962, the large pension is 60 rather than 55 percent and the small pension is not limited to two years. If your marriage predates 2002, check which regime you fall under before assuming the standard figures apply to you.

Two events end a survivor’s pension. Remarriage ends both versions at the end of the calendar month in which you marry, though a Rentenabfindung, a one-off settlement of two annual amounts, is then paid. Choosing Rentensplitting ends it too, and that option is described further down. There is also a Sperre worth knowing about for marriages that lasted less than a year, where the law presumes a Versorgungsehe, a marriage entered into to secure the pension, and refuses the claim unless you can rebut the presumption.

How Your Own Income Reduces A Survivor’s Pension

The survivor’s pension is the one German pension that is reduced by your own income, and the mechanics are worth learning because they are frequently misdescribed as a hard cutoff. They are not. Nothing is lost entirely, and earning more always leaves you better off in total.

The first three calendar months after the month of death are the Sterbevierteljahr, the death quarter. During it you receive the full amount of the deceased’s pension entitlement with no income offsetting whatsoever. This is deliberate breathing room while a household adjusts. After it ends, your own net income above a Freibetrag, an allowance, is counted against the pension at 40 percent. Only the excess is counted, and only at that rate, so 100 euros of income above the allowance costs you 40 euros of pension and leaves you 60 euros ahead.

The Freibetrag is defined as 26.4 times the aktueller Rentenwert, the current pension value, which rose to 42.52 euros on 1 July 2026. That puts the allowance at about 1,122 euros a month of net income, with a further 5.6 times the pension value, roughly 238 euros, added for each child entitled to an orphan’s pension. Because it is tied to the pension value rather than fixed in law, it rises with every pension increase, so verify the current figure at the time you claim rather than relying on a number you read in an article. Note that it is net income that is tested, calculated using statutory flat-rate deductions rather than your actual payslip, which is why the office’s figure will rarely match your own arithmetic.

Waisenrente: Pensions For Children

Children of a deceased insured person receive a Waisenrente, an orphan’s pension, in their own right. A Halbwaisenrente, half-orphan’s pension, paid when one parent has died and one survives, is 10 percent of the deceased’s pension. A Vollwaisenrente, full orphan’s pension, paid when both parents have died, is 20 percent, calculated from the higher of the two entitlements. Both carry a Zuschlag based on the deceased’s insurance periods, so the actual payment exceeds the bare percentage.

The pension runs to the child’s 18th birthday automatically. It continues to 27 where the child is in school, in vocational training or at university, is doing a Freiwilligendienst, a recognised voluntary service year, or has a disability that prevents self-support. Since 2015 a young person’s own earnings no longer reduce a Waisenrente, which removed a long-standing trap for working students. Gaps between school and training of up to four months are bridged, but longer ones are not, so a child taking a year out will usually lose the payment for that period. The pension is not automatic on the parent’s death: someone has to apply for it, and it is not backdated indefinitely, so it belongs on the list of things to do in the weeks after a death rather than the months.

Rentensplitting And The Alternative To A Survivor’s Pension

Married couples and registered partners have an alternative to the survivor’s pension called Rentensplitting, pension splitting. Instead of one partner deriving a pension from the other’s record after death, the entitlements both partners built during the marriage are pooled and divided equally between them, giving each an independent record.

The appeal is that a split entitlement is genuinely yours. It is not reduced by your own income, it does not end if you remarry, and it does not depend on the age or child conditions attached to the large survivor’s pension. The cost is that it replaces the survivor’s pension rather than supplementing it, and it usually only pays off for couples with fairly similar earnings histories or for a surviving partner with substantial income of their own. Both partners must have at least 25 years of Rentenzeiten for it to be available, the choice is generally irrevocable, and the window for making it after a death is limited. This is a calculation rather than a preference, and it is one of the few points in this chapter where paid advice from a Rentenberater, a licensed pension adviser, or a free consultation at a Deutsche Rentenversicherung Auskunfts- und Beratungsstelle is worth the trouble before you sign.

Rules That Apply Only To Foreigners

Two bodies of law reach into these benefits for non-German nationals, and neither is intuitive. The first is section 23 of the SGB XII, which governs Sozialhilfe for foreigners. Foreigners lawfully resident in Germany receive help with subsistence, sickness, pregnancy and care. Paragraph 3 then excludes three groups: those with no right of residence, those whose right of residence arises solely from seeking work, and those who entered Germany in order to obtain Sozialhilfe. Excluded persons receive only Überbrückungsleistungen, bridging benefits, for up to a month, covering food, shelter, acute treatment and the journey home. The exclusion falls away after five years of residence in Germany without substantial interruption, at which point the ordinary benefits apply. In practice this bites hardest on EU citizens, who can enter and stay easily but whose benefit access in the early years is narrower than their residence right suggests.

The second is the Aufenthaltsgesetz. Most residence permits require that your Lebensunterhalt is secured without recourse to public funds, and Grundsicherung im Alter is public funds. For a temporary permit, claiming it can complicate a renewal. For a Niederlassungserlaubnis already held, the position is considerably safer, and for pensioners who have contributed for decades the authorities are not in the business of expelling people who reach the end of a working life with a small pension. But the risk is not zero and it is not uniform across permit types, so if you hold a temporary permit and are approaching pension age with a thin record, get advice specific to your permit before you claim. The same logic reaches citizenship: naturalisation under the Staatsangehörigkeitsgesetz generally requires that you support yourself without SGB II or SGB XII benefits, with exceptions where you are not responsible for the shortfall. Claiming a top-up and applying for a German passport in the same year is a combination that needs planning.

One more asymmetry is worth stating plainly. An ordinary German old-age pension is paid into almost any country in the world if you move away. An Erwerbsminderungsrente is not treated the same way: for recipients outside the EU and outside agreement states, it can be reduced or restricted when you leave Germany. If you are on a reduced earning capacity pension and thinking about returning home, that question needs answering before you book anything.

What Changed In 2026 And What Is Only Proposed

Three things moved in 2026 and they are easy to mix up. The first has already happened: pensions rose by 4.24 percent on 1 July 2026, taking the aktueller Rentenwert from 40.79 to 42.52 euros and adding 77.85 euros a month to a standard pension, for around 21.5 million pensioners. Because so much in this chapter is pegged to that pension value, including the survivor’s pension allowance, the increase moved those thresholds too. The 48 percent Haltelinie, the floor under the pension level, runs to 2031 under the Rentenpaket 2025.

The second has been passed but has not yet taken effect. The Altersvorsorgereformgesetz closes Riester to new contracts from 2027 and introduces the Altersvorsorgedepot in its place. Existing Riester contracts continue and keep their subsidies. This matters here because almost every guide written before 2026, including the earlier version of this page, recommended Riester as the obvious private supplement for people worried about a thin statutory pension. That advice has an expiry date on it now, and anyone about to sign a new Riester contract on the strength of an old article should stop and read our chapter on Pension Plans and Retirement, which covers the replacement in detail.

The third has not happened at all. The Alterssicherungskommission reported on 23 June 2026 with 33 recommendations, and the coalition endorsed them on 2 July, with the Bundestag due to take them up after the summer recess. Coverage of that package has been written in the present tense across the German press, which is misleading. Nothing in it is law. Treat it as the direction of travel, expect the details to change in the parliamentary process, and do not restructure your retirement plans around a commission report.

Tools For The Forms And The Numbers

Werkzeu.ge is a browser-based platform of German bureaucratic and financial tools built by Cryon UG, the company behind WeLiveIn.de, so treat this as a recommendation from an interested party. It is bilingual, hosted in Germany, and uses fixed formulas rather than AI. It is also still in beta until 30 November 2026, its own terms warn that tools may be incomplete, and it prepares documents rather than submitting them: nothing here files anything with the Rentenversicherung or the Sozialamt for you.

For the paperwork, the Formularamt is the piece that earns its place. It is a searchable library of official federal, state and municipal forms, each carrying its source link, retrieval date and checksum, filled in the browser with your entries staying on your device, and it documents the gaps where a form is missing rather than pretending to be complete. The forms this chapter needs are exactly the kind it holds: the Grundsicherung im Alter application, the Erwerbsminderungsrente application, the survivors’ pension forms. It is free with no account needed, in the tier the site labels Gast.

For the numbers, the Renten-Rechner gives you a projection of your statutory pension, which is the figure everything else in this chapter is measured against. It is free but needs a free account, the tier labelled Kostenlos, and the free tier carries ads. Two paid tools in the Plus tier are relevant if you want to go further: the Sozialabgaben-Lebensbilanz totals up what you have paid into the social insurances across your working life, which is a useful reality check against the pension you are projected to receive, and the Krankenkassen-Beitragsrechner works out health insurance contributions, which matter because Kranken- und Pflegeversicherung come out of your pension in retirement and are covered for you if you receive Grundsicherung im Alter. Pricing changes during the beta, so check the current rates at werkzeu.ge/en/pricing rather than trusting a figure quoted in an article.

None of this is financial or legal advice, and neither is this chapter. Werkzeu.ge says the same about itself in its own terms. The rules described here are simplified, they interact with your tax position and your residence status, and the euro figures move every July. For a decision that matters, such as whether to take a contribution refund, whether to choose Rentensplitting, or whether claiming a top-up will affect your permit, use a free Beratungsstelle at the Deutsche Rentenversicherung, a Sozialverband such as the VdK or the SoVD, or a licensed Rentenberater or Rechtsanwalt.

What To Do Next

Start by finding out where you stand, because almost everyone in this chapter’s audience is guessing. Request a Kontenklärung, an account clarification, from the Deutsche Rentenversicherung. It is free, and it forces the office to establish exactly how many months are on your record and which gaps are missing. Do it long before retirement, because proving a period of employment from 2011 is easy now and hard in twenty years. If the Kontenklärung shows you near but under 60 months, ask about voluntary contributions: filling that gap opens your pension entitlement and, separately, the door to a Niederlassungserlaubnis.

If you are leaving Germany, do not apply for a contribution refund reflexively. Check first whether your destination is in the EU or EEA, in Switzerland, or covered by a bilateral agreement, because in all those cases your German months keep working for you and a refund would destroy them for half their value. If your health is failing, apply for the Erwerbsminderungsrente promptly and get the three-years-in-five contribution test checked before you leave any job, since that condition expires quietly. If you have been widowed, the Sterbevierteljahr starts immediately but the pension still has to be applied for, and the Waisenrente for any children is a separate application again.

If your pension is small, apply for Grundsicherung im Alter and let the office do the arithmetic. Use the 1,148 euro figure as a prompt to check rather than a limit, since housing costs push the real threshold higher. It cannot be backdated past the first of the month you apply in, your children will almost certainly never be asked to contribute, and if you are refused you have one month to lodge a Widerspruch. The Deutsche Rentenversicherung must accept the application and pass it to your Sozialamt, so you can start it at whichever office you find easier to deal with. Read Disability Support Services if a health condition is part of your situation, and Care Services for the Elderly if care needs are on the horizon, since Hilfe zur Pflege runs on rules of its own that this chapter does not cover.