Kündigungsfristen: Notice Periods for Renting in Germany

Germany's notice-period rules (§573c BGB) are deliberately asymmetric, and understanding which side of the asymmetry you're on matters whether you're the one leaving or being asked to.

As a tenant, your notice period is a flat three months, no matter how long you've lived in the flat — one year or twenty, it doesn't change. Notice has to reach your landlord by the third working day of a month to take effect at the end of the second following month; miss that cutoff by even a day or two and your notice effectively slides an extra month.

Your landlord's notice period, by contrast, scales with how long you've lived there: three months if you've been in the flat under five years, six months once you pass the five-year mark, and nine months once you pass eight years. The logic behind this "social rootedness" principle is that the longer you've lived somewhere, the more disruptive an eviction becomes, so the law gives you more runway the longer you stay.

This asymmetry is also why landlords in Germany can't simply terminate a lease without cause the way they might elsewhere — an ordinary termination (ordentliche Kündigung) generally requires a legally recognized reason, most commonly Eigenbedarf (the landlord or a close family member needs the flat for themselves). A landlord terminating purely because they'd prefer a different tenant, with no such reason, is on shaky legal ground.

None of this applies to Kündigung aus wichtigem Grund (termination for serious cause — unpaid rent, for instance), which works on a different, faster timeline for both sides. The scaled notice periods above are specifically for ordinary, no-fault termination of an open-ended lease.

If you're on a fixed-term contract (Zeitmietvertrag) rather than an open-ended one, none of this applies either — those end automatically on the agreed date without notice from either side, unless the contract itself says otherwise. Check which type of contract you actually signed before assuming standard notice-period rules apply to you.