Moving from the United Kingdom to Germany

You may arrive first and apply afterwards

This is the practical difference and it is rarely stated next to the word Brexit. German residence law lists a small set of nationalities whose citizens may enter without a visa and then apply for their residence permit from inside Germany. The United Kingdom is on that list, written out in full alongside Australia, Canada, Israel, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand and the United States.

The condition is a deadline: the permit must be applied for within 90 days of entry. So the sequence available to a British citizen is arrive, then apply — where a national of most other non-EU countries must obtain the visa before travelling and cannot start the process on the ground.

That is a real advantage and it is worth not overstating: it changes the order of the steps, not the requirements. You still have to qualify for something.

You can move without a job, for a year, on six points

Germany has a route that needs no employer at all — the opportunity card. It grants up to a year to look for qualified work, and it is the only route on this site that starts with you rather than with a contract.

Qualifying means either being a recognised skilled worker or reaching six points on a published scale, where German at B2 is worth 3, five years of recent relevant experience 3, being 35 or under 2, and so on down to one-point items. Six is a low bar for someone with a degree and some language, and a real one for someone with neither.

The two conditions that decide whether this is actually usable are less advertised. Your livelihood must be secured — the search year is self-funded. And you may work an average of no more than 20 hours a week while you search. A year in Germany at half-time earnings, paying German rent, is a plan that needs arithmetic before it needs optimism.

If you do have an offer, the salary bar is the thing to compare

Coming from the UK you are leaving a system where the threshold is a ladder — £41,700 with the full going rate for your occupation code, or lower floors paired with a reduced share of it — and arriving in one where the Blue Card threshold is a single annual figure that moves each January with the pension calculation.

The two are not comparable by size alone, and the reason is what each excludes. The British rules count guaranteed basic gross pay and almost nothing else: no bonuses even when guaranteed, no allowances, no benefits in kind. A package that clears £41,700 on paper can fail on the figure that actually counts. Check the German page on this site for the current threshold and the German page for what it is derived from.

What changes about tax

Nothing carries over. You leave the UK system and enter the German one, where the rate rises continuously rather than in steps and where the first band starts after a tax-free allowance. Our German income tax page derives the bands from the statute rather than repeating a summary, including the point where the marginal rate reaches 42%.

The practical consequence for someone comparing two offers: the gross figures tell you less than you think, and the gap between them is not the gap between the take-home amounts.