The „Beitragsbemessungsgrenzen“ are increasing in 2025 – what does it mean for you?

There are a few very important guideline numbers that many people are not even aware of called “Beitragsbemessungsgrenzen”, directly translated to contribution assessment limits.

These limits are set by the German government and influence almost every person in Germany in one way or the other.

Here are the most important changes

• Contribution assessment ceiling for compulsory insurance limit for health and long-term care insurance: these regulate from which income onwards you can join private health insurance as an employee.
• Contribution assessment ceiling for health and long-term care insurance: these limit how much of your income is used to calculate the maximum premium in public insurance.
• Contribution assessment ceiling for general pension insurance and unemployment insurance: these give the limit for how much of your income is maximum used to calculate how much you pay into the pension and unemployment insurance.
• Reference value for pension insurance: this number is used to calculate various things such as the amounts for self-employed persons subject to compulsory insurance in the statutory pension insurance or the minimum contribution for public health insurance.

Let’s take a look at the numbers first before we show you what it means to you:

But what does that actually mean to you?

Private health insurance

• If you are an employee, you can join private health insurance, given that your income is high enough.
  
• By increasing this limit, it is more difficult to join private health insurance because you need to earn more, namely 73.800 € instead of 69.300 € per year.

Public health insurance

• If you are a high earner (and not in private health insurance), you will end up paying more for your public health insurance.
• Whereas in 2024 maximum 5.175 € / month were used as the basis for your costs, not it will be 5.512,50 € / month, leading to roughly 65 € – 70 € more total costs / month.
• If you pay the minimum contributions  to public health insurance, it will also increase by roughly 30€ – 40 € / month in total.

Pension insurance

• Same as above, more of your income will be used to calculate how much you contribute to public pension insurance.
• The roughly 500 € increase results in roughly 90 € / month more contributions to the pension insurance.
• For self-employed this only is relevant in case you have to be in the public pension insurance, then the same applies to you.

What can you do?

Unfortunately, nothing… You can try and see whether private health insurance might make sense to you, given your income is higher than 73.800 €, to lower costs and get better health care but apart from that, this is something that happens almost every year and you simply have to live with it 😊