cityparity

Kita cost in Germany: what parents pay in eight cities

By Skyler Bissell · August 2, 2026 · 8 min read

Two children aged 2 and 4 in full-time Kita cost a Berlin family €1,440 a year in our engine and a Cologne family €5,280. Both cities sit in the same country, under the same federal child-benefit law, staffed to broadly similar ratios. The difference is which Land the city sits in, and for this question that is close to the only variable that matters.

Anyone searching for the cost of a Kita place is looking for a single German number. There is not one. There are sixteen, one per federal state, and a household moving to Frankfurt is answering a different question from one moving to Stuttgart even though both are answering it in euros.

There is a second thing worth saying up front, because the internet gets it wrong constantly. "Free Kita" in Germany almost always means free tuition. It rarely means a €0 invoice. Berlin scrapped tuition in 2018 and Berlin parents still pay every month, because the food contribution survived the reform. That gap between the policy headline and the direct debit is where most of the confusion lives.

TL;DR

What eight German cities charge

Every figure below is the same household: two earners on €162,430 between them, children aged 2 and 4 in full-time care, renting three bedrooms. One note on how the model bills them. Both children draw the Kindergarten rate, because our engine applies the Krippe rate only below age 1, where German under-threes are mostly still on parental leave. Where the two rates differ, the under-one figure is worth knowing anyway, so it is named in each entry.

So two of the eight reach zero, and the other six charge something between €120 and €440 a month. That is a narrower and less romantic picture than the one German childcare usually gets abroad, and it is still remarkable by international standards. Amsterdam charges €29,400 for the same two children after its refund. London charges £34,000 after its funded hours. New York charges $55,600. The most expensive German city on this list costs less than a fifth of the cheapest of those three.

Why the Land decides, and what that means for a move

Early-years education in Germany is a state responsibility. The federal government legislates the entitlement and pays Kindergeld. The Länder decide whether a Kita place carries a fee, how it scales with income, and how many hours are covered. Berlin and Hamburg dropped tuition to zero. Hesse dropped it from age 3. Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg, Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia kept fees, usually on a municipal income scale.

Three practical consequences for someone weighing a German offer.

The city matters more than the salary. Between Cologne and Düsseldorf the German tax system takes exactly the same amount from the same income, and the Kita bill differs by €5,280 a year. There is no offer negotiation that produces a cleaner gain than picking the right side of a municipal boundary.

A headline rate can mislead in both directions, because the scale is usually income-tested. A municipal scale that charges €220 a month at the top band charges far less in the middle of it. Our rates sit at the professional end, which is the conservative read for our readers and the wrong read for anyone on a median salary. If you are moving on a teacher's or a nurse's salary, expect to pay less than every number on this page.

Free does not mean available. Every child in Germany has a legal claim to a place from their first birthday under section 24 of the social code. The claim is real and enforceable. Capacity in the big cities is not keeping up with it. Families in Berlin, Munich, Hamburg and Frankfurt register during pregnancy and apply to a dozen Kitas. The scarce thing in Germany is the place. The fee is close to a rounding error next to what a US family pays for the same hours.

Kindergeld pays more than the Kita costs

On top of the fee picture sits a transfer running in the opposite direction. Kindergeld is paid for every child living in Germany, is not means-tested, and does not taper at professional incomes. Our engine carries it at €3,108 per child a year, about €259 a month, so €6,216 for two children. Who qualifies as a newcomer, and the application deadline that costs arriving families money, are in Kindergeld for expats.

Set that against the fee column and every city in the list still ends up net positive. Frankfurt and Düsseldorf take in the full €6,216 and pay out nothing. Berlin finishes €4,776 ahead, Hamburg €3,816, Leipzig €2,616, Stuttgart €1,752, Munich €1,416, and even Cologne, the priciest of the eight, finishes €936 in front. A German household with two small children receives more from the state for having them than it spends on the care that lets both parents work.

Notice how much the ranking moves once the transfer is in. On the fee column alone, Munich sits second worst. On the net column it sits sixth of eight, barely ahead of Cologne, because Kindergeld is flat and the fee is not. The cities that charge nothing keep their whole transfer. The cities that charge a lot hand a chunk of it straight back.

That is the sentence worth carrying into an offer conversation, because it inverts an assumption most American candidates arrive with. The comparison is not a smaller childcare bill. It is a childcare line that has changed sign. You can see how far that goes across countries on our childcare costs by country table, and how the transfers stack on child benefit by country.

What it does to the offer you should accept

The reason this is worth thousands of words rather than a bullet is that the €5,280 spread inside Germany is small next to what the whole childcare line does to a relocation. A New York household moving to Berlin drops a $55,600 recurring cost to €1,440 and picks up €6,216 of Kindergeld. Even at the wrong end of any sensible exchange rate that is roughly $60,000 a year of change, on a line item that never appears in a compensation comparison.

German tax is the counterweight and it is heavy. On €162,430 split between two earners, this household hands over about 36.5% in income tax and social contributions and keeps €103,215. Whether the trade works depends on the salary, the rent, and how many years the children stay small. Six years of Berlin Kita saves a New York family something in the region of a house deposit. Six years of Cologne Kita saves them nearly as much, which is the honest point of this whole exercise: the German cities differ from each other by thousands and from the US by tens of thousands.

Put your own numbers in and run the comparison, or read the worked New York vs Berlin family version with rent and taxes attached. The full family ledger is in our cost of raising kids breakdown. One salary read across seven German cities with the Kita line inside it is in is €100k a good salary in Germany.

FAQ

Is Kita free in Germany?

Tuition is free in some federal states, but a free place is rarely a free bill. Berlin and Hamburg abolished Kita tuition for every family and still invoice a food contribution, €60 a month per child in our Berlin data and €100 in Hamburg. Of the eight cities we price, only Frankfurt and Düsseldorf come out at €0 for two children. Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg, Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia all charge tuition on top, usually on an income-tested municipal scale, so there is no national answer.

How much does a Kita place cost in Munich?

Our Munich data carries €200 a month for a Kindergarten place and €250 for an under-one Krippe place. For a household with a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old, both billed at the Kindergarten rate, that is €4,800 a year, the second highest of the eight German cities we price. Bavaria's Beitragszuschuss is already deducted from the monthly rate, so the €4,800 is what lands on the invoice rather than a headline before support.

Do foreigners get Kindergeld in Germany?

Generally yes, if you live in Germany and hold a residence title that permits work, which covers EU citizens and most skilled-worker and Blue Card holders. Kindergeld is universal rather than means-tested, so it does not phase out at a professional income. Our engine carries €3,108 per child a year, about €259 a month, so €6,216 for two children whatever the household earns.

Is it hard to get a Kita place in Germany?

Harder than paying for it. Every child has a legal entitlement to a place from their first birthday under section 24 of the German social code, but the entitlement does not conjure capacity, and in Berlin, Munich, Hamburg and Frankfurt demand runs ahead of supply. Families routinely register during pregnancy and apply to a long list of Kitas. Budget for the search rather than the fee.

More in this series

Sources. Berlin's fee-free Kita and the meal contribution come from the Berlin Senate's Kita pages. Kindergeld amounts and eligibility come from the Familienkasse at the Bundesagentur für Arbeit. Per-city fee scales come from each Land's and municipality's published Kitabeiträge; field-level provenance and dates are in data/_meta.json, and the method is on the methodology page.

Correction, August 2, 2026. An earlier version of this post said five of the eight cities bill €0. That came from a fault in our own data: the value of Germany's free Kita hours was stored in a field the engine treats as a cash subsidy, so the same relief was subtracted twice and Berlin, Hamburg and Munich were wrongly rounded to zero. The fix is live and every figure above has been recomputed. Only Frankfurt and Düsseldorf bill nothing.

Figures here come from cityparity's per-city engine and were current at publication; municipal fee scales and benefit rates move, so treat any single number as a strong estimate and run your own inputs. See the methodology.