How Much Notice Do You Actually Need to Give in Germany? Understanding Your Kündigungsfrist Before You Job-Hunt

The default rule under German law is four weeks' notice for an employee resigning, effective either on the 15th or the last day of a calendar month. That's the floor almost every employee starts from, unless your contract or a collective agreement says otherwise.

When your employer gives notice instead, the picture changes: the period rises with tenure. It's one month after two years, two months after five years, three months after eight years, four months after ten years, five months after twelve years, six months after fifteen years, and seven months after twenty years with the same employer, always ending at the close of a calendar month. One structural detail matters here: your own notice period as an employee can never be contractually set longer than your employer's notice period for that same relationship.

Collective bargaining agreements, or Tarifverträge, are explicitly allowed to set different periods than this statutory table. If your employer is bound by one, check it before assuming the default applies to you.

During an agreed probation period, capped at six months by law, either side can end the contract with just two weeks' notice and no fixed calendar date, none of the month-end timing rules apply. That's the fastest exit or entry point the law allows on either side.

Fixed-term contracts work differently again: they generally cannot be ended by ordinary notice at all, unless that right is explicitly written into your individual contract or an applicable collective agreement. If your Befristung doesn't mention early termination, you and your employer are both locked in until the agreed end date, which surprises a lot of people used to the flexibility of an open-ended contract.

German law requires resignations and terminations in handwritten paper form, called Schriftform. Electronic form is explicitly excluded, which means resigning by email, WhatsApp, SMS, or fax has no legal effect whatsoever, no matter how clearly you stated your intent.

This trips up people used to a more digital-first work culture more often than you'd expect. If you're planning to resign, print the letter, sign it by hand, and make sure it's physically handed over or received, a scanned PDF sent by email does not count as valid notice under German law. One helpful counterbalance: once notice has actually been given, you're entitled to request reasonable paid time off to search for and interview for your next job.

If you're a leitende Angestellte, a senior executive with independent hiring and firing authority, you're generally still subject to the same statutory §622 notice periods as regular employees. There's no separate, shorter statutory minimum reserved for executives specifically. What is different is your protection against dismissal: your employer can remove you through an Auflösungsantrag that requires no justification at all, even after a court has found the underlying dismissal invalid.

GmbH managing directors and AG board members sit outside this framework entirely. As corporate officers rather than employees in the labor-law sense, the statutory §622 BGB notice periods essentially don't apply to them. Their notice terms come from their individual service contract (Dienstvertrag), not from employment law, so read that document carefully before assuming any statutory floor protects you.

In practice, plenty of German employment contracts specify notice periods well beyond the four-week statutory minimum. A three-month notice period is described as "normal" for many jobs, and some contracts run six months or a full year, especially for senior and specialized roles, which typically carry individually negotiated periods of two to three months rather than the bare legal floor.

Collective agreements add another layer. The IG Metall Manteltarifvertrag for the Berlin-Brandenburg metal and electrical industry, for example, reproduces the same statutory tenure ladder as §622 BGB, but separately fixes two weeks' notice for anyone under six months' tenure, a detail the base law doesn't specify on its own. Three things ultimately determine your real notice period, and you should check all three before assuming the four-week default applies to you.

Two details cause more miscalculated resignation dates than anything else. First: "4 weeks" is not the same as "1 month." The statutory notice period is exactly 28 fixed days, while a one-month contractual notice period follows the calendar month, which runs anywhere from 28 to 31 days. Get the two confused and you can hand in notice a few days too early or too late without realizing it.

Second, "Kündigung zum 15." means the employment ends on the 15th calendar day of the month, not the 15th working day, an easy point of confusion if the 15th falls mid-week. And regardless of what date is written or handwritten on the letter itself, a resignation only becomes legally effective on the date it is actually received by the other party, the Zugang. If you mail a letter, the date it lands matters, not the date you wrote or signed it.

If you resign voluntarily without an important reason, German unemployment insurance treats that as your own doing: a 12-week Sperrzeit follows, during which you receive zero unemployment benefit, plus a permanent 25 percent cut to your total entitlement duration. If there's any chance of a gap between jobs, that penalty alone should factor into your timing decision, not just your notice period.

If you're on a visa, the notice-period question overlaps with a second timeline. Since a 2024 reform, EU Blue Card holders only need to notify the Ausländerbehörde of an employer change within the first 12 months of Blue Card employment, down from the previous 24 months; the authority then has 30 days to object before the change is automatically approved. If you're on a standard skilled-worker permit rather than a Blue Card, you generally need the Ausländerbehörde's approval before changing employer at all, a restriction typically lifted only after two to three years in Germany. Build both timelines into your job search before you hand in your notice.