German pension refund for Brazilians: eligibility, bilateral agreement, and claim process.

The contributions you built in Germany stayed there

Maybe you spent a few years on a German payroll before moving back to Brazil, or you left for a job somewhere else. The years count on your record; the pension you paid into across those years didn't move with you. It sits in Germany under your Versicherungsnummer (German pension insurance number), and it stays there until you either draw a German pension one day or ask for the contributions back.

What a refund can return is capped from the start. Of the pension money your German job generated, only the part deducted from your own payslip is refundable, 9.3% of gross under the Deutsche Rentenversicherung (German statutory pension insurance) rules; the matching amount your employer paid in is locked away by paragraph 210 of the German Social Code (SGB VI). The account itself is patient. It doesn't shrink with the years, it doesn't expire, and it announces itself to nobody: if anyone raises the question of this money, it will be you.

What the 2013 agreement does for a split career

Brazil and Germany have run a bilateral social security agreement since it took effect on 1 May 2013. Its job is to keep a working life spread across both countries from being treated as two throwaway fragments. The mechanism at its centre is totalization: for the question of whether you've met a German qualifying period, the agreement treats your Brazilian insurance time and your German insurance time as one continuous record rather than two short ones.

For a refund, that mechanism runs in a direction people rarely expect. Count your German months on their own and you might look well short of the qualifying period. Let the agreement weigh your Brazilian insurance periods on the same question, and the same career can already meet it. So before you treat a brief German stretch as money waiting to be claimed, check what the agreement makes of your Brazilian record too, not the German side in isolation.

Where 60 months takes your claim

The figure that governs the outcome is the German minimum insurance period: 60 contribution months, around five years of work. Below it, no German pension entitlement forms, and a refund is how your contributions find their way back to you. At 60 and above, you hold a claim to a German pension instead, and for a Brazilian citizen that claim ends the refund rather than standing beside it. This is the part the agreement drives. Because it can carry you to 60 by counting your Brazilian periods, it can also be the reason a refund you assumed was open turns out to be closed. Crossing the line isn't a loss: a pension paid for the rest of your life can outweigh a single payout, and that is what those months buy you once you pass it.

Between you and the payout stands one more date: two years have to separate your last mandatory contribution from the application, measured from the month of your final German payslip rather than from the day Brazil became home again. The claim also fails outright for anyone the system still counts as its own: because a German pension has been awarded or is in payment, because a German job was never given up and compulsory insurance follows it, or because the right to voluntary insurance, freiwillige Versicherung, is still alive, which for a resident of Brazil is true only at an EU or UK address. Free of those ties, under 60 months, past the two years and settled outside the EU, your case is the ordinary one the agreement leaves fully intact. If a layoff started this clock for you, know that months on unemployment benefit count as mandatory contributions too, toward the 60 and the two years alike; the laid-off-in-Germany guide covers those overlaps alongside the permit and benefit deadlines.

Filing from Brazil, and where to get help first

The application itself is a German-language exercise. German is the official language of the pension administration under paragraph 19 of the German Social Code (SGB X), so the forms are in German, the questions come back in German, and there's no English edition and no upload portal to route around it. The file travels to the Deutsche Rentenversicherung by post. How many questions your file raises sets the pace of the review. Nothing to query, and the money often lands within a few months; each period the insurer first has to reconcile with your work history means another letter, and letters are what push a case over the six-month mark. From your side it wants evidence that you now live outside the EU and a Brazilian account it can reach by international transfer, the SWIFT or BIC details the form asks for. The document list on this page is the full version.

You don't have to pay anyone to learn where you stand. The Deutsche Rentenversicherung runs a free advice service, by phone and at its offices, and it will go through your insurance record with you at no charge. A fair number of people file this way, usually with someone on hand who reads German.

For most people, running German bureaucracy from Brazil is a half-year better handed to someone else. That's the part we take on. Fundsback has filed the German pension refund since 2015: you handle it with us in English and online, we handle the Deutsche Rentenversicherung in German, and you owe us nothing unless the refund is paid. Checking whether you qualify is free.