Minimum Wage for Students in Germany: EUR 13.90 in 2026

Twenty hours a week, about 80 hours a month, at EUR 13.90 an hour comes to around EUR 1,100 before tax. That is the number worth carrying around, because it tells you whether a job offer is worth the commute and whether your budget closes. The legal floor behind it applies to almost every student job in Germany, whatever your nationality, and it sits alongside the rules in what your student visa lets you do for money.

The floor, and who it covers

The statutory minimum is EUR 13.90 per hour. It covers most employees including most students, and it does not care which passport you hold. Collective agreements in some sectors set higher rates, so the statutory figure is the bottom of the range rather than the going rate.

It also moves. The Fifth Minimum Wage Adjustment Ordinance of 5 November 2025 set two steps at once: the current rate from 1 January 2026, and EUR 14.60 from 1 January 2027. The same 80-hour month will pay about EUR 1,168 gross once that lands, so a contract signed in 2026 at the bare minimum has a built-in raise in it. If your employer writes "minimum wage" into the contract rather than a fixed euro figure, that raise happens automatically. If the contract names a number, check in December that it is being lifted.

What the minimum wage does not do is tell you how much you may work. That limit is counted in days, and it comes from immigration law rather than employment law.

What student jobs actually pay

The gap between the legal floor and a decent Werkstudent contract is where your budget is won or lost.

Werkstudent roles in IT, engineering and finance sit near the top of that range and carry low social insurance costs. Twenty hours a week in one of them turns your blocked account's 992 euros a month from a survival budget into a normal one. Details on landing one are in how Werkstudent contracts work and who hires for them.

Your hourly rate is a lever on the day limit

This is the part most students miss. Section 16b of the Residence Act limits you to 140 working days a year. A day where you work up to four hours counts as half a day, so the same allowance stretches to 280 half-days if you keep your shifts short. Anything over four hours burns a whole day, whether you worked five hours or ten.

Work the consequence through. Two students both want EUR 1,100 a month. One earns the minimum and needs 80 hours; spread over four-hour shifts that is 20 half-days, so 10 days off the allowance each month, or 120 days a year. The other earns EUR 18 an hour and needs about 61 hours for the same money, roughly 15 half-days a month and 90 days a year. The second student ends the year with 50 days of headroom for a full-time stretch in the semester break; the first has almost none.

One important carve-out sits in the same section: studentische Nebentaetigkeiten, academic side jobs at the university such as research or teaching assistant work, are not counted against the 140 days at all. A HiWi contract at your own institute is the single most efficient job on the market for a visa holder, and it is the one students overlook because the hourly rate looks unremarkable. How the 140 and 280 day allowance is counted sets out exactly which days are charged against you.

Minijobs sit under a separate cap

A minijob caps monthly earnings at EUR 603 gross, which is EUR 7,236 across a year. At the current minimum wage that buys you 43.38 hours a month, so roughly ten hours a week. That is light work by design, and it eats less of your day allowance than a full Werkstudent schedule. It suits a first semester when your German is still coming along and the coursework is heavier than you expected.

The cap is not a fixed number somebody chose. Section 8 of SGB IV defines it as the minimum wage multiplied by 130, divided by three, rounded up to whole euros, which is deliberately equivalent to ten hours a week. That means the ceiling rises automatically every time the minimum wage does, and it also means the ceiling is on euros, not hours. If you are paid EUR 18 an hour in a minijob, you may work about 33 hours a month, not 43.

The semester break has its own rule

Alongside the minijob there is a second category most students never hear about. Kurzfristige Beschaeftigung, short-term employment, is free of social insurance contributions no matter what it pays, as long as it is limited from the outset to three months or 70 working days in a calendar year. That is the legal shape of the classic full-time semester-break job: high hours, high gross pay, no health or pension deductions.

Two cautions. Income tax still applies to it, which is exactly the situation that produces the refunds described in our guide to student tax, the allowance and getting withheld tax back. And the social insurance rule does not override your visa: those 70 days still count against your 140, and at full-time hours they count as whole days.

If you are offered less than the floor

An employer paying under the statutory rate is breaking the law, and the law is unusually firm about it. Section 3 of the Minimum Wage Act says an employee can give up an accrued minimum wage claim only through a court settlement. Any other waiver is void, and forfeiture of the claim is excluded outright, so a contract clause saying you lose unclaimed pay after three months does not touch the minimum wage portion. If you were underpaid two years ago, the claim is still alive.

Section 22 sets out the genuine exceptions, and they are narrower than employers sometimes suggest:

• Mandatory internships required by your study or examination regulations, at any length.
• Orientation internships before training or study, and internships alongside a degree, but only up to three months, and only if you have not already interned with that employer.
• People under 18 without a completed vocational qualification.
• The long-term unemployed, during the first six months of a job.

A voluntary internship that runs past three months has to be paid the minimum wage from the first day, not from month four. Treat a below-minimum offer outside those categories as a signal about everything else that employer will do to you, and walk. Knowing the number is your best protection in a first job search, and the application mistakes that cost students offers covers the rest of that process.

Your payslip will not show a clean EUR 1,100 either. Tax and social contributions depend on your hours and your status, so budget on the net figure once your first payslip arrives rather than on the gross. Treat the minimum wage as the floor, not the target.

What happens after you graduate

The same floor applies to your first full-time contract, though a graduate role in a shortage field will pay far above it. A full-time year at the 2027 rate of EUR 14.60 comes to roughly EUR 30,368 gross on a 40-hour week, which is a useful sanity check on any offer you are shown. Worth factoring into the post-study job-seeker visa and what it lets you do when you plan the year after your thesis.

Sources

• BMAS, minimum wage steps and dates
• Section 22 MiLoG, exceptions
• Section 3 MiLoG, no waiver, no forfeiture
• Section 16b AufenthG, the 140-day rule
• Section 8 SGB IV, minijob and short-term employment
• Minijob-Zentrale, earnings limit

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