Germany take-home pay calculator

Work out your own Germany salary

Enter a gross salary and the bands open up underneath it. Everything runs in your browser: no salary you type here is sent anywhere.

How Germany income tax is built

The order the pieces are applied in decides the answer, so it is stated rather than implied. Social security is assessed first, on gross, with thresholds of its own. Contributions do not reduce the income tax base here, so the two schedules are independent. The allowance comes off next. The ladder runs on what is left.

The bands, one at a time

The allowance

€1,266 of income is outside the ladder for the 2026 calendar year. The published figure is a single number with no income dependence, so it is applied at every income. Where a jurisdiction withdraws its allowance as income rises, that withdrawal is a separate rule and this page would say so: the United Kingdom is the example, and its withdrawal creates an effective 62% band that the published rates never mention.

Employee social security

Contributions are charged on gross earnings, not on income after the allowance, and they have their own thresholds. Treating them as a second rate on the income tax base is the most common way a take-home calculator goes wrong, and it produces a number that looks reasonable at every income. The highest published employee rate here is 21.75%.

What each band takes on the average wage

Germany compared with everywhere else we compute

Each jurisdiction is shown at its own average wage, which is the only way to compare tax systems without an exchange rate deciding the answer. The rate is what a single person on that country's average salary actually pays.

Rows marked income tax only exclude employee social security, so they are not comparable with the rest as take-home. They are shown rather than hidden, and labelled rather than footnoted. The EUR columns use the European Central Bank reference rate for 2026-09-04, which is a rate for information rather than a rate any bank will give you. Every other figure on this page is in its own currency, because a comparison made at each country's own average wage does not need an exchange rate to be meaningful and does not inherit the error in one.

What this does not model

• Employee social security is included, assessed on gross earnings with its own thresholds.
• A surtax on the tax due is included.
• A single person on employment income, with no dependants, no other income and no reliefs beyond those above.
• Employer contributions are excluded throughout, because they never appear in your gross pay.

Moving to or from Germany

Residence decides which system taxes you, not where your employer sits. This page assumes residence in Germany for the whole of the 2026 calendar year and employment income taxed there. A move part way through that period is usually taxed in both places and is a different calculation.

Double taxation agreements, foreign tax credits and the treatment of income arising outside Germany are not modelled anywhere on this site. What this page gives you is the domestic calculation done in full, which is the input any treaty question needs first.

Where every figure came from

Each rule below carries the document it was read from, the date it was read, and an archived copy of the exact text. Citations on this page are derived from the calculation rather than written beside it, so the page cannot cite a source the arithmetic did not use, nor use one it does not show.

• de.income_tax.pauschbetraege.ty2026: Arbeitnehmer- und Sonderausgaben-Pauschbetrag, 2026. Read 2026-09-08 from Einkommensteuergesetz § 9a Pauschbeträge für Werbungskosten. Locator: EStG § 9a Satz 1 Nummer 1 Buchstabe a.
• de.social_security.employee.ty2026: Employee social security contributions, 2026. Read 2026-09-08 from Werte der Rentenversicherung: aktuelle Zahlen aus dem Bereich der Sozialversicherung. Locator: Werte der Rentenversicherung, Beiträge zur Sozialversicherung.
• de.solidaritaetszuschlag.ty2026: Solidaritätszuschlag, 2026. Read 2026-09-08 from Solidaritätszuschlaggesetz 1995 § 4 Zuschlagsatz. Locator: SolzG 1995 § 4 Zuschlagsatz.

Ruleset sha256:fe993d9d072cbcac. Method on methodology, full provenance on sources, every change on the changelog, and anything we got wrong on corrections.

How a figure gets from a government document to this page, and what every term here means, is written once on methodology rather than repeated on every jurisdiction.

Keep going

Compare Germany with another country

The same position in each country’s own wage distribution, side by side. 37 comparisons, each built from the same published series as the pages behind them.

• 🇦🇺Germany vs Australia
• 🇦🇹Germany vs Austria
• 🇧🇪Germany vs Belgium
• 🇨🇦Germany vs Canada
• 🇨🇱Germany vs Chile
• 🇨🇴Germany vs Colombia
• 🇨🇷Germany vs Costa Rica
• 🇨🇿Germany vs Czechia
• 🇩🇰Germany vs Denmark
• 🇪🇪Germany vs Estonia
• 🇫🇮Germany vs Finland
• 🇫🇷Germany vs France
• 🇬🇷Germany vs Greece
• 🇭🇺Germany vs Hungary
• 🇮🇸Germany vs Iceland
• 🇮🇪Germany vs Ireland
• 🇮🇱Germany vs Israel
• 🇮🇹Germany vs Italy
• 🇯🇵Germany vs Japan
• 🇱🇻Germany vs Latvia
• 🇱🇹Germany vs Lithuania
• 🇱🇺Germany vs Luxembourg
• 🇲🇽Germany vs Mexico
• 🇳🇱Germany vs Netherlands
• 🇳🇿Germany vs New Zealand
• 🇳🇴Germany vs Norway
• 🇵🇱Germany vs Poland
• 🇵🇹Germany vs Portugal
• 🇸🇰Germany vs Slovakia
• 🇸🇮Germany vs Slovenia
• 🇰🇷Germany vs South Korea
• 🇪🇸Germany vs Spain
• 🇸🇪Germany vs Sweden
• 🇨🇭Germany vs Switzerland
• 🇹🇷Germany vs Türkiye
• 🇬🇧Germany vs United Kingdom
• 🇺🇸Germany vs United States