Foreigners Pay Higher Rent in Germany, Statistics Reveal
According to the German Federal Statistical Office (Destatis), the average net rent per square meter of living space for non-German citizens is 9.5 percent higher than for Germans. The data, released on Wednesday, is based on the 2022 census results.
The average net rent for non-German citizens was 7.75 euros per square meter, compared to 7.08 euros for Germans. A possible explanation for the higher average rent is the size of the living space. A quarter of non-German citizens lived in apartments with less than 60 square meters of living space, compared to just one in eight Germans.
The average net rent for households in apartments under 60 square meters was 8.01 euros, which is 15.6 percent higher than for households in apartments with 60 or more square meters, at 6.93 euros.
On average, non-German citizens lived in apartments of 85.7 square meters, while Germans lived in apartments of 109.6 square meters. The majority of non-German citizens rented their homes, with 54 percent of them doing so, compared to 22 percent of Germans who rented.
The statistical office ruled out the possibility that Germans tend to have longer tenancy agreements with lower rents as an explanation for the differences. Although 22 percent of non-German citizens had lived at their current address for less than a year, compared to seven percent of Germans and more than half of Germans (51 percent) had lived at their address for 10 years or more, while only 20 percent of non-German citizens had done so, the data still showed that non-German citizens paid higher average rent per square meter.
There were also differences in rent when the tenancy duration was broken down: non-German citizens who had lived at their address for 20 years or more had a 9.1 percent higher average rent per square meter than Germans with the same tenancy duration. The difference was 5.9 percent for a tenancy duration of 15 to under 20 years, 7.0 percent for a tenancy duration of 10 to under 15 years and 3.5 percent for tenancy agreements that had been in place for less than a year.
The type of location also did not fully explain the difference in rent, as non-German citizens paid higher average rent in both large cities and smaller towns. The difference was 7.3 percent in large cities with over 100,000 inhabitants, 6.6 percent in medium-sized cities (50,000 to under 100,000), 9.3 percent in smaller towns (10,000 to under 50,000) and 10.6 percent in towns with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants.