If the German tax system feels deliberately confusing, you are not imagining it. Letters from the tax office (Finanzamt) arrive in dense legal German, half the rules change depending on the city you live in, and nobody hands you a manual when you arrive. So we are writing the manual. Every term explained in plain English, free to read, and kept current as the rules change.
Four topics cover almost every question expats send us. Pick the one that matches your situation and jump straight to the part you need — every link below goes to a specific section of a guide, not a sales page.
Turning a project into a company changes your tax picture completely: corporate income tax (Körperschaftsteuer) and trade tax (Gewerbesteuer) replace personal income tax, and the bookkeeping rules get stricter. Start with the groundwork below: the decisions that come before you pick a legal form.
The recurring work once you are running: what to charge, what to file, and how much to put aside so a tax assessment never catches you short.
Long-form, step-by-step tutorials you can follow start to finish. Our founder series runs across three parts, in the order you actually deal with each office — read it straight through, or use the topic links above to skip ahead.
Enter a gross salary and see what actually lands in your account: income tax, health insurance, pension and church tax, for every tax class and federal state.
Visa requirements, fake self-employment, the Freiberufler vs. Gewerbe split, and how German VAT works.
Navigate the Anmeldung, trade licences, and the Finanzamt questionnaire with ease.
Tax prepayments, the insurance that actually matters, pension planning, and your website's Impressum.
Most English-language tax advice online is written for another country and loosely adapted. Ours starts from the German system: the actual offices you deal with, the actual forms they send, and the points where the answer depends on which city you registered in.
Every guide follows the real process — the citizens' office (Bürgeramt), the trade office (Gewerbeamt), the tax office (Finanzamt) and the ELSTER online tax portal — in the order you meet them.
Trade tax (Gewerbesteuer) is set by each municipality, so the same profit is taxed differently in Berlin and Munich. Registration works differently too: some cities take the whole Gewerbeanmeldung online, others still want you at a counter.
Thresholds, filing deadlines and small business (Kleinunternehmer) limits change from year to year. We revise the guides when the rules move, and each article shows the date it was last reviewed.
We use the German word next to its English meaning every time, so a term like Umsatzsteuervoranmeldung is recognisable when it turns up on a form instead of being quietly translated away.
taxzeit is a free knowledge base about taxes and self-employment in Germany, written in English for the people the German system is hardest on: expat freelancers, solo founders and small startup teams who are excellent at their own work and were never taught how the Finanzamt thinks.