How much is the Rundfunkbeitrag in Berlin?

18.36 euro a month, which is 220.32 euro a year, and it is charged once per flat. It has been at that level since August 2021, when the Bundesverfassungsgericht ordered the figure into force after the federal states failed to agree on it. Berlin has no local rate and no local discount: the contribution is identical in every Bundesland. The number of people in the flat makes no difference, and neither does whether anyone there owns a television or a radio.

Does every person in a shared flat have to pay?

No. One adult per flat is registered and pays, and the flat decides between themselves who that is. Everyone else deregisters, quoting the nine digit Beitragsnummer of the account that stays. This is where most of the money is lost in Berlin: somebody moves into a shared flat or in with a partner and keeps the contribution account from their old address, so the same flat door is billed twice. A duplicate left running for a year is 220.32 euro nobody had to spend.

I moved flats. Does my old account close by itself?

It does not. Re-registering your address at the Buergeramt does not close a contribution account, and nothing closes automatically. If you left a flat where other people stayed, one of the people staying has to register it in their own name. If you gave the flat up completely, you deregister it yourself with evidence. Until one of those two things happens, the old address keeps producing a bill in your name.

Do I pay twice if I have a second home?

Not if you apply. Since 1 June 2020 anyone who can show they already pay for their main home can be released from the contribution on a Nebenwohnung, and spouses or registered partners can apply on the same basis. The rule followed a 2018 Bundesverfassungsgericht ruling that nobody should be charged twice for the same person. It is never granted automatically, and it starts from the month the application arrives, or up to three months earlier if the conditions were already met. Holiday flats, Gartenlauben and Datschen outside an allotment colony count as second homes if you are registered at them.

Who can be exempted from the Rundfunkbeitrag?

Exemption depends on the benefit you receive, not on how much you earn, and you have to apply with evidence. It covers Grundsicherungsgeld, which used to be called Buergergeld, Hilfe zum Lebensunterhalt, Grundsicherung im Alter und bei Erwerbsminderung, benefits under the Asylbewerberleistungsgesetz, and BAfoeG or Berufsausbildungsbeihilfe when you are not living with your parents. It does not cover Arbeitslosengeld I, Wohngeld or Uebergangsgeld. If your income is above the benefit threshold by less than the contribution itself, you can apply as a besonderer Haertefall. People granted the RF mark on their disability pass pay a reduced 6.12 euro a month.

What happens if I never answer the letters?

The registration offices pass data to the Beitragsservice when something changes, such as a move, and there is a nationwide comparison of records on top of that under section 11 paragraph 5 of the state treaty. Anyone who cannot be matched to an account gets written to, and silence does not make the flat disappear from the data. The next step is a Festsetzungsbescheid, which is an enforceable title without any court behind it, and from there the case goes to the enforcement authority or a bailiff. If you believe the demand is wrong, object in writing with your Beitragsnummer and keep a copy.

Is the Rundfunkbeitrag going up in 2027?

It may. On 20 February 2026 the independent commission that works out what the broadcasters need, the KEF, handed its 25th report to the federal states in Berlin and recommended 18.64 euro a month from 1 January 2027, an increase of 28 cents. That is a recommendation and not law: the sixteen states still have to confirm it, and a new procedure from 2027 lets a minority of them object. For a single household the change would be 3.36 euro a year, which is worth far less than checking whether your own address is being billed once or twice.

Rundfunkbeitrag in Berlin: One Flat, One Fee, and Four Ways to Pay Twice

Yusuf Ucuz

Sep 14

7 min read

A letter arrives with no logo worth noticing, a nine digit number, and a sentence saying your flat has been registered. Most people in Berlin either pay it without reading it or put it under a pile and hope. Both are expensive habits.

The Rundfunkbeitrag is 18.36 euro a month, 220.32 euro a year, and it has stood at that figure since August 2021. It is not a television tax, it is not charged per person, and it has nothing to do with what you own or watch. It is charged on the flat.

That one word is where the money is. Get it right and a four person flat in Neukoelln costs each of you less than five euro a month. Get it wrong and two people in the same kitchen are paying the state twice for the same address.

What the Rundfunkbeitrag in Berlin actually charges you for

One flat, one contribution. The official wording is blunt about it: 18.36 euro a month per Wohnung, and how many people live in that flat makes no difference.

Devices make no difference either. No television, no radio, no aerial, no interest in any of it, same 18.36 euro. The old device licence died in 2013 and the flat replaced it, which is exactly why arguing about your habits gets nobody anywhere.

The figure itself is not set by the broadcasters. An independent commission, the KEF, works out what they need, and the sixteen federal states then decide. In 2020 the states failed to agree, the broadcasters went to the Bundesverfassungsgericht, and on 20 July 2021 the court ordered 18.36 euro into force from that August. That is the number you are still paying.

The main entrance of the Haus des Rundfunks on Masurenallee in Berlin-Charlottenburg, with gold lettering above the brick and glass doorway and people walking in

Haus des Rundfunks on Masurenallee, opened in 1931 and still a working broadcasting house. Your 18.36 euro a month keeps buildings like this one running, which is a fair thing to have an opinion about and a useless thing to argue with the Beitragsservice about.

Why the flat rule lands harder in Berlin than almost anywhere

Here is the part nobody explains when they tell you the fee is cheap.

The Amt fuer Statistik Berlin-Brandenburg counted about 1.95 million households in Berlin in the 2025 Mikrozensus, and 977,000 of them contain one person. Half the city lives alone. In Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg the share reaches 59.2 per cent; even in Marzahn-Hellersdorf, the lowest in the city, it is 43.9 per cent.

A fee charged per flat is therefore, for half of Berlin, a fee charged per person.

Living alone: 220.32 euro a year, all of it yours.
A couple: 110.16 euro each.
A four person flat: 55.08 euro each.

Same broadcasting, same programmes, four times the cost per head at one end compared with the other. And if every Berlin household paid it, the city would send roughly 430 million euro a year into the system.

A Berlin doorbell panel with six buttons and handwritten and printed name labels, mounted on a rough concrete wall

Six buttons, six flats, six contributions. The panel by the front door is the closest thing to an official map of what the Beitragsservice thinks your building owes.

Four places Berliners pay more than they owe

Every one of these I have watched happen to somebody, usually to someone who had been here for years and assumed the admin was settled.

Two accounts behind one flat door. This is the common one. You move in with a partner, or a room opens up in a shared flat, and the new arrival keeps the contribution account from their old address. Now the flat pays 36.72 euro a month. Only one adult per flat needs to be registered, and the flat itself decides who that is. Everyone else deregisters using the first person's nine digit Beitragsnummer. The money is real: a second account left running for a year is 220.32 euro for nothing.

The flat you moved out of. Nothing closes your account automatically. Berlin moves quickly, and people re registering at the Buergeramt assume the rest follows. It does not. If you leave a flat and someone stays behind, one of the people staying has to register it; if you gave the flat up entirely, you deregister with proof.

The second address. Since 1 June 2020 anyone who already pays for their main home can apply to be released from the fee on a Nebenwohnung, which the state treaty introduced after the Bundesverfassungsgericht ruled in 2018 that nobody should pay twice. Spouses and registered partners can apply on the same basis. It is not automatic, it needs an application, and it starts from the month you apply, or up to three months earlier if the conditions were already met. Note what else counts here: holiday flats, Gartenlauben and Datschen outside an allotment colony are treated as second homes if you are registered there. A plot inside one of Berlin's 70,000 Kleingarten is a different matter, because you are not supposed to be registered there at all.

The student room. This one surprises people every autumn. A room in a hall of residence that opens straight onto a shared corridor counts as a flat in its own right, so it owes its own 18.36 euro, bathroom or no bathroom. But if several rooms sit behind one flat door and are used as a shared flat, the ordinary rule applies and the whole unit pays once. The door decides, not the kitchen.

Two 1950s student residence buildings at the Studentendorf Schlachtensee in Berlin-Zehlendorf, low white concrete blocks with a gravel path in front

Studentendorf Schlachtensee in Zehlendorf. Whether a room here owes its own contribution comes down to one thing: does it open onto a shared corridor, or is it behind a flat door with the others.

Work out what your address actually owes

The Rundfunkbeitrag check above does one narrow job. Give it the month your current living situation started and tell it what is registered, and it draws every month since then as what the flat owed against what is actually being paid, so a duplicate shows up as a widening band you can see, not a number you have to trust.

If the band is empty, you are fine and you can stop reading. If it is not, the gap is money you have already spent.

When you pay nothing, and when you pay a third

Exemption exists, it is decided on the benefit you receive, not on how much you earn, and it is never granted automatically. You apply, with evidence.

It covers, among others:

Grundsicherungsgeld, what used to be called Buergergeld.
Hilfe zum Lebensunterhalt and Grundsicherung im Alter und bei Erwerbsminderung.
Benefits under the Asylbewerberleistungsgesetz.
BAfoeG or Berufsausbildungsbeihilfe, when you are not living with your parents. That last one matters in a student city and gets missed constantly.

It does not cover Arbeitslosengeld I, Wohngeld or Uebergangsgeld. Those three feel like they should and they do not.

There is one door left open for people just above the line. If your income exceeds the social benefit threshold by less than the contribution itself, you can apply as a besonderer Haertefall.

And there is a reduced rate short of full exemption: people granted the RF mark on their disability pass pay 6.12 euro a month, a third of the full figure.

A Plattenbau housing block in Berlin-Marzahn, pale concrete panels with rows of balconies and many identical flat windows

Marzahn. Every window in this frame is a separate contribution, which is the whole logic of the system in one photograph.

What happens if you just ignore the letters

Nothing, and then quite a lot.

The registration offices pass on data when something changes, a move or a death, and on top of that there is a nationwide comparison of records under section 11 paragraph 5 of the state treaty. Anyone the Beitragsservice cannot match to an account gets written to. Not answering does not make the flat disappear from the data.

What follows is a Festsetzungsbescheid, and this is the part people underestimate. That document is an enforceable title. It does not need a court behind it. From there it goes to the enforcement authority or the bailiff, and by then you are arguing about a debt, not about a registration.

If you think the letter is wrong, say so in writing, in German, with your Beitragsnummer, and keep the copy. Silence is the only answer that is guaranteed to cost you.

A Berlin Altbau tenement facade in Friedrichshain with a painted archway entrance, graffiti along the ground floor and cars parked in front

Friedrichshain, where 59.2 per cent of households are one person. In a building like this the difference between a tidy set of contribution accounts and a messy one runs into thousands of euro a year across the stairwell.

What changes in 2027

On 20 February 2026 the KEF handed its 25th report to the states in Berlin and recommended 18.64 euro a month from 1 January 2027, an increase of 28 cents. That is a recommendation, not law; the states still have to decide, and from 2027 a new procedure lets a minority of them object.

The rbb Fernsehzentrum on Masurenallee in Berlin-Charlottenburg, a tall 1960s office slab with a projecting studio block, seen past a metal sculpture and trees

The rbb television centre on Masurenallee. Berlin and Brandenburg's share of the money is spent from here, which is the only part of the system that is genuinely local.

For your own budget it is 3.36 euro more a year. It is worth knowing about and it is not worth planning around. The four situations above are each worth sixty times more than the increase, which is a useful sense of proportion to carry into the next letter you get.

My move

Do one thing this week. Find the Beitragsnummer on the last letter or the last bank statement, put your move in date and your living situation into the tool above, and see whether your address is paying once or twice.

If it is paying twice, the fix is a deregistration form with the other account's number on it and it takes ten minutes. If you have a second address, or you are on BAfoeG and living away from your parents, that is an application rather than a form, and it starts from the month you send it, so sending it today is worth three months of waiting.

Berlin does not send you a reminder when you are overpaying. It only sends one when you are not paying. That asymmetry is worth a quarter of an hour, in the same way that reading the second page of a Nebenkostenabrechnung is, or checking which Krankenkasse you actually landed in.

Image credits

Source and licence details for the 5 photographs used in this article.

The entrance of the Haus des Rundfunks on Masurenallee in Berlin-Charlottenburg: Steffen Zahn, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The rbb Fernsehzentrum on Masurenallee in Berlin-Charlottenburg: Fred Romero, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

A doorbell panel with six buttons and handwritten name labels: Angela Monika Arnold, Berlin, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Residence buildings at the Studentendorf Schlachtensee in Berlin-Zehlendorf: Fridolin freudenfett (Peter Kuley), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

A tenement facade on Colbestrasse in Berlin-Friedrichshain: Dreizung, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.