Whose Pavement Is It When It Snows in Berlin
BSR clears the carriageway in a Berlin winter and leaves the pavement in front of your building to you, and how wide a path you owe depends on the cleaning class of your own street: 1.5 metres on a main or shopping street, 1 metre on everything else. That class is not something you can read off the street, and nearly a quarter of Berlin streets change it partway along. Search your street, tap the stretch your building stands on, and keep both pavements if you live on a corner.
The map draws the whole Berlin street cleaning register, all 89,141 registered street sides, from the open data BSR publishes under CC BY and refreshes every Sunday morning; the file behind this build is dated 12 September 2026. District boundaries come from the Berlin geoportal ALKIS Bezirksgrenzen service, which is what lets a Hauptstrasse in Pankow and a Hauptstrasse in Spandau stay two different streets. The duty behind the class is the Strassenreinigungsgesetz and the Gehwegwinterdienstverordnung, read off Berlin’s own service portal on 16 September 2026.
The first real snow in Berlin usually falls on a weeknight, and the people who wake up with a problem are the ones who assumed the city handles the pavement. It does not. BSR takes the carriageway, the cycle paths, the crossings and the bus stops, and on most streets it also sweeps your pavement up to ten times a week in ordinary weather, which is exactly why the split surprises people. In snow that same pavement is the Anlieger’s, and the minimum width depends on which of the register’s classes your block side sits in. This board draws all of them at their real coordinates so you can find yours in about ten seconds.
What a cleaning class actually decides
Berlin sorts every public street, square and path into directories A, B and C and then into classes by sweeping frequency, from ten times a week in class 1a down to once a week in class 4. That single letter and number decides two separate bills. It sets the quarterly street cleaning fee the owner pays and passes on, and it sets the minimum width of the path you have to clear when it snows: 1.5 metres on the main and shopping streets of categories A1 and A2, 1 metre everywhere else.
Why the map is worth more than a lookup
A class is not guessable from the width of the road or the look of the buildings. Of the 11,377 street entries in the register, 2,564 carry more than one class along their length, which is a little under a quarter. Karl-Marx-Allee runs at one class in Friedrichshain and another further out, and a long Hauptstrasse can pass through four. Your neighbour three doors down can owe a different width from you, and if you moved along the same street last year your old answer may not be your new one.
The streets where the road is yours too
Category C covers the streets the law calls insufficiently built up. There the Anlieger cleans the carriageway to the middle of the road all year, and in winter carries an extended duty where the pavement continues across the junction. That is 1,684 kilometres, about 15 percent of Berlin, and it is not evenly spread: 32 percent of Marzahn-Hellersdorf and 27 percent of Treptow-Koepenick against effectively none in Mitte or Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg. The map shows those pockets as soon as it loads.
Clear by 07:00, grit and never salt
Snow goes as soon as the snowfall stops. If it is still falling after 20:00 or starts later, the path has to be clear by 07:00 the next morning, or 09:00 on a Sunday or public holiday, and the route to your bins needs one bin’s width by 06:00. Spread sand, grit or granulate: every de-icing agent is banned for residents in Berlin, not only salt. In a hard frost, break the ice up and lift it off before you grit, because grit on top of ice does not hold.
What this map cannot tell you
It cannot tell you whether the duty is yours or your landlord’s, because that sits in your lease rather than in the register. An owner can pass the work to a tenant in the tenancy agreement, or hire a winter service and pass the cost on through the service charges, and both are normal in Berlin. It also shows the register as BSR published it on 12 September 2026, and the classes are revised by regulation every couple of years, so treat an old screenshot with suspicion.
Read next
Berlin Snow Clearing Rules: Which Pavement Is Yours and How Wide
BSR clears the carriageway and sweeps your pavement up to ten times a week in ordinary weather, then leaves it entirely to you the moment it snows. The width you owe is 1.5 metres on a main street and 1 metre elsewhere, the deadline is 07:00 or 09:00 on a Sunday, and every de-icing agent is banned.