The practical checklist for leaving Germany without missing the pension-relevant step.

The pension position almost every leaving checklist skips

Deregistering, ending contracts, closing accounts: the standard leaving-Germany list is long, and the pension position is the item most people never look at. Every month you were employed, 9.3% of your gross salary went into the Deutsche Rentenversicherung (German statutory pension insurance), and your employer added another 9.3% on top. That's 18.6% of your income, month after month.

When you leave, this money stays behind. It doesn't pay out automatically, it doesn't expire, and nobody writes to you about it. A refund returns your own share, the employee half; the employer half stays in the system.

One thing to weigh before you optimize for the payout: a refund ends your insurance relationship with the German system, and the refunded years stop counting toward any future German pension. For most people who leave for good, that's the point. If a return to Germany is realistic for you, think it through first.

If a layoff set this move in motion, as it has for many people in 2026, start with the laid-off-in-Germany guide: it covers the two-week reporting duty, your residence permit options and how unemployment benefit months change the refund math, before you commit to leaving at all.

How much money are we talking about?

Two factors set the amount: how long you worked in Germany and what you earned. The refund is your employee share, 9.3% of each month's gross salary up to the contribution ceiling, summed over every month you paid in.

You don't need to do that arithmetic by hand. A refund calculator turns gross monthly income and months worked into a first estimate in under a minute. For scale: across 3,500+ documented cases, the average refund is EUR 12,926.

Numbers like that are why the pension check belongs on the leaving list next to the deregistration appointment, not in the "maybe someday" pile.

Your passport sets the route: the four groups

The Deutsche Rentenversicherung sorts applicants into four groups. Find yours before you plan anything else, because it decides whether a refund is even on the table.

German citizens can't claim a refund, with or without a second passport. As a German you can always pay in voluntarily until retirement age, and that open option blocks the refund. Two exceptions exist: civil servants and people who reach retirement age without completing the general waiting period.

Citizens of the EEA, Switzerland and the UK are treated like German citizens under coordination law. Voluntary contributions stay open to them, so a refund only becomes possible at retirement age, and only if the five contribution years a regular German pension requires were never reached.

Citizens of treaty countries, meaning states with a social security agreement with Germany such as the US, India or Australia, can claim a refund if they contributed for fewer than 60 months, roughly five years of work. Above that threshold the refund is off the table, wherever they live.

Citizens of non-treaty countries have the clearest path. Voluntary contributions are never open to them, so the length of their German work history doesn't matter. Live outside the EU/EEA, wait out the waiting period, and the claim stands.

Two timing rules decide when you can file

First, the 24-month waiting period: it starts the month after your last mandatory contribution and runs on its own. Second, you must have left Germany before you apply. Even with the 24 months complete, an application filed while you're still registered in Germany goes nowhere.

The waiting time isn't dead time. The application will ask for documents that are far easier to collect while you still have access to German paperwork:

• Your deregistration certificate (Abmeldebestätigung), the official confirmation that you left.
• Your social security card and German pension insurance number.
• Your last income tax return.
• The insurance record from your health insurer, useful for checking that all contribution periods were recorded.

Scan everything before you hand back the apartment keys. Chasing German documents from another continent is the slow version of this process.

Filing from abroad: forms, certifications, addresses

The application form (Antrag auf Beitragserstattung, application for contribution refund) exists only in German. There's no English version, and the correspondence that follows arrives in German too.

Three parts of the package deserve attention:

1. The application form itself, together with proof of life and proof of citizenship.
2. The payment declaration and payment authorization, which must be notarized in parts.
3. Certified copies of your passport and proof of residence, stamped by a local authority or a German embassy. Certified copies often spare you further rounds of evidence later.

The insurer offers no online filing route for this claim, so the package travels by post. Send it by a traceable method. The Deutsche Rentenversicherung consists of 16 separate institutions with different addresses; the letterhead on your last pension letter tells you which one holds your account.

The decision letter: read it closely, respond in time

After filing, the review can take up to six months. The answer arrives as a formal decision letter listing the contribution periods counted and the amount approved for refund.

Check those periods against your own records. Decision letters sometimes cover only part of a contribution history, and the response deadline in the letter is binding: let it pass and you legally accept the content as it stands, gaps included. A payout to a non-German bank account can add up to two more months.

If you'd rather hand off the German forms, the notarizations and the deadline-watching, that's the work Fundsback has done since 2015. We run the pension refund path in English and fully digital, and you don't pay unless the refund lands in your account.