Germany income tax brackets: 2024, 2025 and 2026 compared

Germany's income tax rates have not changed for three years. Not in 2024, not in 2025, not in 2026. The entry rate is 14%, the third zone still ends at 42%, the top rate is still 45%.

What moves every year are the thresholds. That is the whole story, and almost every page about it gets the emphasis backwards.

Three years side by side

One boundary never moves: the top rate has started at €277,826 in all three years. That is deliberate. The annual shift exists to offset bracket creep — kalte Progression — and the legislature has chosen not to offset it at the top.

The 2024 figure you will find is probably wrong, and it is not your fault

Search for the 2024 allowance and you will mostly find €11,604. That number was correct for most of 2024 and is now superseded.

The Act on the Tax Exemption of the Subsistence Minimum 2024, published in the Federal Law Gazette on 5 December 2024, rewrote §32a paragraph 1 and raised the allowance to €11,784 — retroactively, for the whole of 2024. The zone coefficients were rewritten with it.

Here is the part worth knowing. The Finance Ministry's own official wage tax manual for 2024 still shows €11,604, because that edition was published before the December amendment. It is an official source, it is the right year, and it is out of date. We checked it, found €11,604, and only caught the problem because the number disagreed with the amendment history.

This is why the wrong figure is everywhere: it was not invented by anyone. It was the official number, taken from an official page, for eleven months.

Why the rates are identical while the formulas differ

German income tax is not a table of flat bands. Within the first two zones the rate rises continuously, because the tax is defined by a formula with coefficients rather than a percentage per bracket.

Those coefficients change every year. The second zone's leading coefficient was 954.80 in 2024, 932.30 in 2025 and 914.51 in 2026. Read on their own, they look like changing rates. They are not — they are the arithmetic that holds the rate curve in the same shape while the zone beneath it gets wider.

We checked rather than assumed. Differentiating each published formula at its zone boundaries gives 14.00% and 23.97% at the ends of the second zone, and 23.97% and 42.00% at the ends of the third — in all three years, to the second decimal. Same curve, moved three times.

What to do with this

Filing for a past year? Use that year's column. The gap between the 2024 and 2026 allowance is €564 of income that is tax-free in one year and taxed in the other.

Wondering whether you are better off? Slightly, each year, and only because of the thresholds. On the same nominal salary more of it now falls below each boundary. Nobody's rate was cut.

Reading a page that says German rates changed? It has misread changed formula coefficients as changed rates. It is the single most common error in this topic.

Where these numbers come from

The 2025 and 2026 figures are taken from the Finance Ministry's official wage tax manual, the edition for each year. The 2024 figures are taken from the amending act itself as published in the Federal Law Gazette, because — as above — the manual for that year predates the amendment.

Social contributions are not in this table. Health, long-term care, pension and unemployment insurance are charged separately on their own ceilings, and folding them into a table of income tax brackets is one of the more common ways these numbers get misquoted.