In much of the world an employment contract is mainly a document about how the job can end.
Here it’s mostly a document about what happens while it lasts.
Six weeks of full pay when you’re ill. Twenty vacation days as a legal floor, and thirty in most contracts. Notice periods counted in months. And after the first half year, a dismissal that needs a documented reason behind it.
Wherever you’re arriving from, the contract you sign here probably does more for you than your last one did. The statutory part of that list arrives with the job rather than through negotiation. It’s the floor, and whatever you bargain for sits on top of it.
Nobody Here Works at Will
Most jobs open with a Probezeit, a probation period of up to six months. During it either side can leave on two weeks’ notice without explaining anything. That’s the least protected you’ll ever be in a German job.
Then it changes sharply. In companies with more than ten employees, a dismissal after those six months needs a reason the employer can document. Something about the business, your conduct, or your ability to do the work. A slow quarter isn’t enough by itself.
Notice periods stretch with your service. Four weeks at the beginning, a month once you pass two years, and upward in steps from there. Someone twenty years in has seven months.
That’s the part worth sitting with for a second. Losing a job here rarely means clearing your desk the same afternoon. It means a letter, a date several months out, and your salary running the whole way to it.
Your own notice stays at four weeks whatever happens, so the arrangement is lopsided in your favor.
Being Sick Costs You Nothing
Call in sick and your employer keeps paying your full salary for six weeks. Not a reduced rate, and not out of a pool of days you built up over the year. The whole salary, and the six weeks reset for each new illness.
If something keeps you out longer than that, your health insurer takes over. It pays around seventy percent of your gross, for as long as a year and a half.
Fall ill during your vacation and those days go back into the account, as long as you have a doctor’s note. The holiday was meant for resting, and the law takes that literally.
When a child is sick, there are paid days for that as well, counted separately from your own. Each parent has an allowance of them.
The Vacation Is Real and the Clock Stops
Twenty days is the statutory minimum on a five-day week. Almost no employer offers the minimum. Thirty is what most contracts say, and nobody calls that generous here. It’s simply the going rate.
The working day is capped at eight hours. Ten is permitted when the average across six months comes back down to eight. That’s how a busy season gets covered without anyone breaking the law.
Between the end of one shift and the start of the next you’re entitled to eleven uninterrupted hours. That rule is why the late email asking for something by eight the next morning is rarer here than you might expect.
Sunday work is prohibited unless the job actually requires it. Hospitals, restaurants, transport, and a defined list of others have exemptions. Everybody else finds the country closed, which takes a few weeks to get used to and then becomes the best part of the week. ;-)
Parents Get Three Years and Their Job Back
Maternity protection begins six weeks before the due date and runs for eight weeks after the birth. Pay continues throughout, and dismissal during that window is off the table entirely.
What follows is Elternzeit, parental leave, and it’s the part that catches newcomers off guard.
Either parent can take up to three years per child. The position is held for you. The employer cannot end the contract for the whole duration, and working part-time during it is both allowed and common.
The money comes from the state rather than from your employer, which is where the old rumor about unpaid leave started. Elterngeld replaces roughly two thirds of your previous net pay, for up to fourteen months when both parents take a share of the time.
Only a handful of countries match three years away with the job still waiting, and most of them are neighbors of ours.
Some of this you’ll never have to negotiate, because somebody negotiated it long before you arrived. A large share of the workforce is covered by collective agreements between unions and employer associations. Those routinely improve on the legal floor for pay, hours, and holiday.
Any workplace with five or more employees can elect a Betriebsrat, a works council with genuine say over shift patterns, working hours, and hiring. Where one exists, it costs you nothing to use it. Underneath everything sits a statutory minimum wage, which an independent commission reviews and raises regularly.
Getting to the point where you sign one of these contracts is the subject of work in Germany. What the deductions on that first payslip actually buy is spelled out on health care in Germany and, more broadly, on living in Germany.