Two clocks start running long before you book the truck, and neither one can be restarted. Your dog’s microchip has to go in before the rabies shot, or the shot doesn’t count. Your furniture has to have been yours and in use for six months before you leave, or it stops being duty-free.
So the sensible way to plan this is backward, from the landing date.
How much of it applies to you depends on where you’re coming from. Inside the EU there’s no customs procedure at all. You hire a van, you drive, you unload, and the hardest part is the staircase. From anywhere else, the whole apparatus below switches on.
British readers, a word. Since Brexit the United Kingdom sits on the far side of that line. A move that meant a van and a ferry in 2019 now runs through full customs paperwork. Same as one from Ohio or Osaka.
The entry rules live on German visa requirements, and what happens to your status afterward is over on immigration to Germany. This page is about the boxes, the dog, and the car.
What Travels and What You Sell
Customs calls your belongings Übersiedlungsgut or household removal goods. Bringing them in duty-free is the normal outcome, but it hangs on conditions that run on separate clocks:
- You lived outside the EU for twelve straight months.
- The things belong to you and you used them for at least six months before leaving. Receipts settle arguments.
- The declaration reaches customs within twelve months of your move. Form 0350 is the one you want, and a shipping agent can file it for you.
- You keep everything for another twelve months after clearance. Sell it, lend it, or give it away inside that year and the duty comes back.
Alcohol and tobacco sit outside the exemption, and so does anything you used commercially. A carpenter’s workshop travels as a business import, not as household goods.
Number the boxes and write the inventory while you pack. Customs may ask for the list, and you’ll want it anyway on the day box fourteen fails to arrive.
Now the part that decides half your packing. German sockets run at 230 volts and 50 hertz, and the plug is the round two-pin Schuko type. North America runs 120 volts at 60 hertz.
Laptops and phone chargers cope with both, and the small print on the power brick tells you so. Anything with a motor, a heating element, or a clock in it does not. A transformer fixes the voltage and leaves the frequency alone. That’s why an imported mixer runs slow and an imported oven runs hot. ;-)
Sell the large appliances before you go. German apartments frequently come without a fitted kitchen. You’ll be buying a fridge and a washing machine here anyway, and what’s on the shelves is good. The full customs rules sit on the German customs pages in English.
The Car Is Usually the Wrong Idea
What settles this is a document rather than a distance. If your car holds an EU type approval and the manufacturer can supply the certificate of conformity, registering it here is routine. Roadworthiness test, paperwork, plates, done.
Without that certificate you’re looking at a full individual inspection under § 21 of the road traffic regulations. The car has to be converted before it can pass. Lighting is the bulk of it: amber turn signals, a rear fog light, and headlights carrying an E mark. The speedometer has to read in km/h.
Conversion and inspection together land in the four-figure range, and that’s before anyone counts the shipping.
Right-hand drive is perfectly legal here, so a British car can be registered. The headlights still have to come out, because they aim their beam at the wrong side of the road. Those stick-on blackout wedges are a holiday fix and not a registration fix.
There’s a customs condition on top of all that: the vehicle has to have been registered in your name in the country you’re leaving. A car bought three weeks before departure is not removal goods.
My honest read: sell it and buy here, unless it’s a car you’d hate to part with. If it is, ship it and pay the bill cheerfully. Everybody else comes out ahead at a German dealership. :-)
The Dog Needs a Longer Run-Up Than You Do
Sequence matters more than anything else here. The microchip goes in first, and it has to be the fifteen-digit ISO type that scanners here can read. The rabies vaccination comes after. Done in the wrong order, the vaccination counts for nothing and you start the whole sequence again.
Then you wait. A first rabies shot takes twenty-one days to become valid, and a puppy can’t be vaccinated before twelve weeks of age. That puts the earliest possible travel date at fifteen weeks.
Countries fall into two groups. The listed ones include the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom among others, and from there the medical side ends with the vaccination. From everywhere else you add a rabies antibody test and a three-month wait after the blood draw. That pushes a young dog past seven months old before it can fly.
A pet passport issued outside the EU carries no weight at the border and gets taken off you. What travels instead is an official health certificate from a government-authorized vet, issued shortly before departure. The EU has reworked the certificate template recently, so ask your vet what the current version looks like rather than printing one you found online. The EU rules for traveling with pets are the reference to check against.
One more thing that catches people out. You have to arrive through a designated point of entry and present the animal to the authorities there. Landing at a small regional airport with a dog and no appointment is how quarantine stories start.
Papers You Can’t Get Once You’re Here
Some documents take a week at home and half a year from four thousand miles away. Collect them before you fly.
Birth certificates, marriage and divorce records, and diplomas, all as originals or certified copies. Anything an authority here will rely on generally needs an apostille on top. That’s a stamp from your own government confirming the document is real.
Translation is a separate step, and it happens on this end. German offices want a translator sworn in by a German court, so a translation done at home often gets refused. Bring the originals and have the translation made after you arrive.
The small ones are the ones people forget. Vaccination records for the humans as well as the pets, and a claims history from your car insurer. Prescriptions too, written with the generic drug name instead of the brand. Brand names change at the border.
Once you land, one appointment outranks the rest of the list. The Anmeldung, your address registration, has to happen within two weeks of moving in. The bank, the employer, and the tax office all wait for that one slip of paper. Everything else can be arranged around it.
What all this leads to is the subject of living in Germany. If the job comes first and the move follows, start instead with work in Germany.