Which Kita Doors Are Actually Within a Pram Walk
Berlin funds the Kita place and then leaves the searching to you, so the only question that matters is which doors you can realistically reach. Type your postcode, or tap your own street on the map, and this draws the Senate’s full register at real addresses: every Kita inside a 5, 10, 15 or 20 minute pram walk, how many children each one is licensed to hold, and its phone number, so a morning of calls goes down the list in the order that gives you the best odds.
The data is the Kita list the Senate Department for Education, Youth and Family publishes as open data, the November 2025 edition, released under Datenlizenz Deutschland Namensnennung 2.0. It holds 2,917 Kitas, of which 2,913 carry a usable coordinate, and 200,869 licensed places between them. Licensed places are what a facility is permitted to hold rather than what is free today, and the walking rings are straight-line distances at 75 metres a minute, so a real route is always a little longer. Checked on 16 September 2026.
The number of Kitas near you and the number of places near you are two very different figures. Berlin’s median Kita is licensed for 48 children, one in three holds fewer than 30 and that whole third accounts for only a tenth of the city’s capacity, while the 744 houses licensed for 100 or more hold 56 per cent of it. So six pins on a street corner can mean six hundred places or sixty. This board counts the places instead of the pins, sorts the list biggest first, and keeps the phone numbers next to them, because in Berlin the voucher is the easy half and the ringing round is the half that takes the year.
Licensed places, not free places
Every figure on the board is the number of children a Kita is permitted to hold, which is the only capacity number published for the whole city. It is not a live vacancy count and no such feed exists. Read it as a measure of how much turnover a house has: a Kita licensed for 250 loses a whole cohort to school each August and has to refill it, while a Kita licensed for 25 might release four places in a year and give two of them to siblings. That is why the list sorts biggest first.
Why the ring is a pram walk and not a legal radius
The rings are 5, 10, 15 and 20 minutes at 75 metres a minute, which is an honest pace with a pushchair. The legal yardstick is much wider: when a district Jugendamt runs a Platznachweis it may list free places in a neighbouring district, and a journey of up to 30 minutes on public transport counts as reasonable. Use the wide radius when options run out, and build the first call list inside the walk you will still do twice a day in February.
The postcode only frames the view
Typing a postcode centres the map on the middle of the Kitas registered in it, which is a rough starting point rather than your door, and in a large outer postcode it can land some way from where you live. Tapping your own street on the map is the accurate way to use the board, and every distance is then measured from that point.
One operator, many separate lists
A lot of Berlin Kitas belong to a handful of large providers. The register alone tags 51 houses to Kindergaerten City and 50 to Kindergaerten NordOst, roughly 13,800 places between them. Each house still keeps its own waiting list and its own phone number, so a call to one is not an application to the others. Count houses rather than brands.
What the board cannot tell you
It cannot tell you whether a Kita is any good, what its pedagogy is, or whether it has room this September. For the first two the official Kita-Navigator is the right place, because it carries each facility’s focus and approach and lets you send an enquiry. For the third there is no substitute for the phone. The register is also a snapshot, so a small number of entries will have changed since November 2025.
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Kita Place in Berlin: Nobody Finds It for You
Berlin funds the Kita place and then leaves the searching to the family, so the year turns on two dates on the voucher and on how much licensed capacity really sits within a pram walk of your street. Half of the city’s 2,917 Kitas hold fewer than fifty children.