Almost everywhere else, the first question about a degree is how to pay for it.
Here the first question is how to pay for lunch.
Fifteen of our sixteen states charge no tuition at all at public universities. That holds for foreign students exactly as it does for German ones. Bachelor, master, doctorate: the teaching is free. Nobody graduates from a German public university carrying debt for the education itself.
What’s left is the cost of living, the paperwork to get admitted, and a visa that wants proof you can cover the first year. That’s what this page is about.
Tuition Is the Part You Don’t Pay
The exception is Baden-Württemberg, which charges non-EU students 1,500 euros per semester. That figure hasn’t moved since 2017. Every other state waives tuition for everybody, and there’s no separate international rate hiding in the small print.
What every student does pay is the Semesterbeitrag, a semester fee that runs from around a hundred and fifty euros to a few hundred. It covers student services, the cafeterias, and administration.
Most of the time it also covers a transit pass. At a growing number of universities that pass now works nationwide, not just locally. Which means the fee frequently buys more travel than it costs. :-)
Add it up across a three-year bachelor. The entire administrative cost of the degree lands near what one semester costs elsewhere.
Getting In Runs Through One Office
More than 170 German universities route foreign applications through a single clearing house called uni-assist. You submit your school and university records there once. It checks them, converts your grades into the German scale, and issues a document the universities then accept.
That document stays valid for a year, so one round of paperwork can carry several applications.
The standard deadlines are 15 July for the winter semester, which begins in October, and 15 January for the summer semester. Individual programs set earlier ones, master’s programs especially. Submit at least eight weeks ahead, because the clearing house needs time and a missing certificate can cost you a semester.
If your school leaving certificate doesn’t qualify you for university at home, it won’t qualify you here either. The route in that case is a Studienkolleg, a one-year preparatory course ending in an assessment exam. Pass it and you apply like everybody else.
Then there’s the language. Well over two thousand degree programs are taught entirely in English, concentrated at master’s level. For those you need no German at all on paper. Undergraduate teaching is still mostly German, and those programs want a formal certificate, either TestDaF or the DSH exam.
Learn some anyway. The seminar may run in English, but the housing office, the landlord, and the doctor will not. ;-)
The Money You Do Need
Non-EU students applying for a visa have to show they can support themselves for a year. The usual instrument is a Sperrkonto, a blocked account you open before you travel.
You deposit the full year in advance, currently a little under twelve thousand euros. After you arrive, the provider releases roughly a thousand a month into your ordinary account. The rest stays out of reach, which is the entire point of the arrangement.
One practical trap: the account unblocks against your registered address. Register in your first week and the money follows quickly.
Health insurance is compulsory and comes at a reduced student rate, which is a fraction of what an adult pays.
Now the part that changed in your favor. Since March 2024, students from outside the EU may work 140 full days a year, or 280 half days. A job of up to twenty hours a week works just as well. Student assistant positions at the university itself sit outside that limit entirely, and so do internships your program requires.
Twenty hours a week at minimum wage comes to roughly what the blocked account releases each month. The job doesn’t have to fund everything, in other words. It only has to close the gap.
What the Degree Is Worth Afterward
This is the part most people discover late, and it changes the arithmetic completely.
Finish here and you get eighteen months to look for work, staying in the country the whole time. Find something in your field and the student permit converts into a work permit without you leaving.
Then the shortcut arrives. A skilled worker with a German degree can apply for permanent residence after two years of employment, where the standard route asks for five. The years you spent studying paid for themselves twice over.
Which universities do what, and how our system splits between research universities and universities of applied sciences, is the subject of German universities. The permit ladder afterward is on immigration to Germany, and the job hunt itself on work in Germany.