Your refund decision arrived. Here is how to read the Bescheid and object if the number is wrong.

What a Bescheid is, and what it is not

When the Deutsche Rentenversicherung (German statutory pension insurance) finishes reviewing your refund claim, it answers with a Bescheid. That word gets rendered as "decision letter," which undersells it. A Bescheid is a Verwaltungsakt, a formal administrative decision, and it carries legal force the moment it reaches you. It is not a receipt, and it is not a summary of your account. It is the insurer's ruling on your case.

In a refund case the Bescheid names the sum the insurer will pay back, and it cites the legal ground for paying it: §210 of the German Social Code (SGB VI), the provision that lets a departing contributor reclaim their pension contributions. Read both first. The amount tells you what the DRV calculated. The paragraph number tells you which decision it reached.

Not every Bescheid grants the refund. If the insurer sees no refund entitlement yet, perhaps because the 24 months since your last mandatory contribution have not passed, the Bescheid says so instead of paying out, and the route to challenge a refusal is the same as the route to challenge a wrong figure. Either way, one block of text decides your next move: the Rechtsbehelfsbelehrung, a short passage that explains how to contest the decision and by when. It reads like boilerplate, so people skim it. It is the most consequential paragraph on the page, because a Bescheid nobody answers becomes the final word on the case, including every error in it.

It comes in German, and the reading is on you

§19 of the Social Code (SGB X) fixes German as the official language of the pension administration, so the Bescheid arrives in German and in no other language. There is no English edition to request, and the DRV is under no duty to translate it for you. If you need the letter in a language you read fluently, arranging that sits on your side of the table.

Before you pay a translator, note that the DRV explains its own decisions at no charge. A call or a visit to the office costs nothing, and someone there will explain a given line of your Bescheid to you. For a clean decision, that exchange is often enough to tell you whether the figure holds up. As you open the envelope, note two dates: the one printed on the letter, and the day it reached you. The second date starts the window you have to respond.

Reading the number: does the sum match what you paid in?

The figure in a refund Bescheid is not a rounded guess. It is the sum of your own contributions: the 9.3% employee share taken from your gross wage in each month you paid in. It never includes the employer's half of the pension bill, so a refund tops out at what you personally put in, not at the total that reached the fund. Confirming the amount is arithmetic against your own history, not an act of faith in the calculation.

Pull two documents. Your old German payslips (Gehaltsabrechnungen) show what left your pay each month. Your Versicherungsverlauf (insurance record) is the DRV's own listing of the periods it has booked under your number, and every refund decision reads from it. Set the months the Bescheid credits beside the months you know you worked and paid. A month you paid in that the record never captured is a month the insurer will not pay you for, and that gap is the most common reason a refund lands lower than expected.

If the two lists diverge, the fix has a name: a Kontenklärung (account clarification), the process of correcting the insurance record until it shows every period you can prove. Straightening the record is what raises the number, since the Bescheid can only pay for what the record holds.

There is a hard edge to how high the figure can go: contributions count only up to the Beitragsbemessungsgrenze, the yearly ceiling on pensionable income, so a high salary in any given year cannot push the refund past that cap for that year. The sum also tracks your contribution months, not the length of your time abroad or the years since you left Germany. Once the month count is complete and the rate reads as 9.3%, the calculation is doing what it should.

If the number is wrong: the Widerspruch

When your records and the Bescheid disagree, or the legal ground looks misapplied, you contest the decision with a Widerspruch (objection). §84 of the Social Court Act (SGG) sets the deadline: one month from Bekanntgabe, the point at which the decision is made known to you. When the Bescheid is served abroad, that window opens to three months, and that is the version most refund applicants meet, because the letter reaches them outside Germany.

You lodge the Widerspruch in writing, or in person and on the record (zur Niederschrift), with the same office that issued the Bescheid. The address stands on the letterhead, and the Rechtsbehelfsbelehrung sets out these steps for your specific case. Lodge it inside the window and the decision is no longer settled; let the window close and the Bescheid holds as issued, whatever it left out.

One deadline gets mistaken for another here, so hold them apart. The objection window runs from the Bescheid. The 24-month waiting period, the rule that governed when you could file at all, runs from your last mandatory contribution in Germany, never from your departure, your deregistration, or the day this letter arrived. Two separate dates, measured from two separate events, and mixing them up is how people miscount both.

Handing off the German paperwork

You can read your own Bescheid, reconcile the figure against your payslips, and send a Widerspruch without help, and for a clean decision plenty of people do exactly that. The weight sits in doing all of it in German, against a fixed deadline, from another country, in a procedure with no English form and no page to file through.

That German paperwork is what Fundsback has handled since 2015. The Deutsche Rentenversicherung writes to us; we write to you in English. We read the Bescheid, check the figure, and watch the deadlines it sets. The eligibility check costs nothing, and you owe nothing until the pension refund is paid. If it never pays out, there is no fee to settle.