Germany income tax rates, 2025

What is actually taken, at three incomes

The OECD models a single person with no children and no other income at three multiples of the German average wage, and publishes what that person actually pays. These are outcomes rather than statutory rates: everything taken, divided by everything earned.

The same three incomes, in money

The rates above are what the OECD publishes. The amounts below are those rates applied to the gross earnings it publishes alongside them, which is arithmetic rather than a further source, and it is separated from the table above so that nothing computed here can be mistaken for something published. Rounding means the parts may miss the total by a unit.

Read the middle row across: someone on the German average wage of €66,700 keeps €40,902 of it, and €25,798 is taken. At 67% of the average wage the amount taken is €15,255 and at 167% it is €47,134, so an income two and a half times larger carries a tax bill 3.1 times larger.

The two numbers that decide different things

On the German average wage the average rate is 38.7% and the marginal rate is 43.5%. Those answer different questions and confusing them is the commonest mistake made with a table like this one. The average rate tells you what your year costs. The marginal rate, 4.8 percentage points higher here, tells you what the next unit of income costs, which is the number that decides whether a rise, a bonus or extra hours are worth taking.

Across the range the OECD publishes, the combined rate moves from 34.1% at 67% of the average wage to 42.3% at 167%, a spread of 8.2 percentage points over an income range of two and a half times. That is a moderate profile, and it means a rate quoted at the average wage is a poor guide to what happens well above or below it.

Nothing above includes what your employer pays. In Germany employer social security contributions run at 20.9% of gross earnings, against 21.5% taken from you. The two sides are close to equal, which is unusual and means the payslip shows roughly half of what the contribution system actually costs.

The statutory schedule, as published

No schedule is shown for Germany, and the reason is worth stating rather than leaving as an absence. The rates and thresholds the feed publishes for it do not pair into a ladder that can be read: either the counts disagree, so pairing them by position would invent a schedule, or the rates do not rise with income, which a progressive ladder does not do and which means one of them is wrong where it was published. Repairing somebody else's schedule and presenting the result as a published fact is not something this site will do. The outcome rates above are unaffected: they come from a different series that the OECD computes itself.

Why Germany has no calculator here

The published series for Germany could not be read into a schedule at all: 3 rates but 4 thresholds; a ladder needs exactly one fewer threshold than rates

Where Germany sits

Of the 38 jurisdictions the OECD publishes this series for, Germany ranks 3 by the combined rate taken from a single person on the average wage, at 38.7%. Immediately above it: Belgium at 39.5%, Lithuania at 38.7%. Immediately below: Slovenia at 36.2%, Denmark at 35.3%, Hungary at 33.5%.

What this page does not tell you

Everything above describes a single person with no children on €66,700, €40,902 of which they keep. It does not describe a couple, a parent, anybody with income other than a salary, or anybody at a German salary between the three published points. The full list of what this kind of page cannot answer, including how regional taxes are handled and what none of it says about being foreign, is on how these figures are published.

Every figure on this page, and where it came from

21 rules for Germany, each carrying the dataset, the row, the date it was read and an archived copy of that row. Ruleset sha256:7c8a1de9fc6d87cc.

• de.ref_average_combined_rate.aw100.ty2025: Average income tax and employee social security combined at the average wage. DSD_TAX_WAGES@DF_TW_COMP / DEU AV_RITEESSC PT_WG_EARN_G / S_C0 AW100 / 2025. Read 2026-09-06 from OECD Taxing Wages, tax burden on a single person with no children.
• de.ref_average_combined_rate.aw167.ty2025: Average income tax and employee social security combined at 167% of the average wage. DSD_TAX_WAGES@DF_TW_COMP / DEU AV_RITEESSC PT_WG_EARN_G / S_C0 AW167 / 2025. Read 2026-09-06 from OECD Taxing Wages, tax burden on a single person with no children.
• de.ref_average_combined_rate.aw67.ty2025: Average income tax and employee social security combined at 67% of the average wage. DSD_TAX_WAGES@DF_TW_COMP / DEU AV_RITEESSC PT_WG_EARN_G / S_C0 AW67 / 2025. Read 2026-09-06 from OECD Taxing Wages, tax burden on a single person with no children.
• de.ref_average_employee_ssc_rate.aw100.ty2025: Average employee social security rate at the average wage. DSD_TAX_WAGES@DF_TW_COMP / DEU AV_R_EMPEE_SSC PT_WG_EARN_G / S_C0 AW100 / 2025. Read 2026-09-06 from OECD Taxing Wages, tax burden on a single person with no children.
• de.ref_average_employee_ssc_rate.aw167.ty2025: Average employee social security rate at 167% of the average wage. DSD_TAX_WAGES@DF_TW_COMP / DEU AV_R_EMPEE_SSC PT_WG_EARN_G / S_C0 AW167 / 2025. Read 2026-09-06 from OECD Taxing Wages, tax burden on a single person with no children.
• de.ref_average_employee_ssc_rate.aw67.ty2025: Average employee social security rate at 67% of the average wage. DSD_TAX_WAGES@DF_TW_COMP / DEU AV_R_EMPEE_SSC PT_WG_EARN_G / S_C0 AW67 / 2025. Read 2026-09-06 from OECD Taxing Wages, tax burden on a single person with no children.
• de.ref_average_income_tax_rate.aw100.ty2025: Average income tax rate at the average wage. DSD_TAX_WAGES@DF_TW_COMP / DEU AV_ITR PT_WG_EARN_G / S_C0 AW100 / 2025. Read 2026-09-06 from OECD Taxing Wages, tax burden on a single person with no children.
• de.ref_average_income_tax_rate.aw167.ty2025: Average income tax rate at 167% of the average wage. DSD_TAX_WAGES@DF_TW_COMP / DEU AV_ITR PT_WG_EARN_G / S_C0 AW167 / 2025. Read 2026-09-06 from OECD Taxing Wages, tax burden on a single person with no children.

The remaining 13 are in the published ruleset, with the same quote and hash on each.