🫣 Sometimes I’ll overshare and/or rant a bit.
Last Friday, I visited my local Bürgeramt to transfer my permanent residency permit from my old Canadian passport to my new one. The appointment was surprisingly fast, the staff were kind, and I walked out with an eID instead of a sticker in my passport. It was, by any measure, a genuinely good experience with German bureaucracy, which is not something I say often.
It also got me thinking about this week’s main topic. New Gallup data shows that only 11% of workers in Germany are actually engaged at work, meaning the vast majority are either going through the motions or actively checked out. Those Bürgeramt staff clearly were not in that 89%.
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📊 Results of our weekly polls.
⁉️ Our last poll asked: Where does your salary rank in Germany?
This week’s salary data sparked quite the discussion in our community. Many readers were shocked to learn that €24,608/month places someone in Germany’s top 1%, with one person commenting: “Wait, one person out of 100 takes home 25k a month? Are you sure? That’s... a lot.”
At the same time, others pointed out that salary numbers alone rarely tell the full story. As one reader noted, “A single with €3,000 net income is not the same like a family of four.”
Our poll reflected that complexity too, with many readers feeling financially “comfortable,” while others still felt their earnings were lower than expected for life in Germany.
👉 Geek out on the full report from the Ministry of Finance.
🫂 Take part in this week’s poll. New Gallup data shows only 11% of employees in Germany are engaged at work, and a companion analysis argues this is not a cultural quirk but a management failure costing the economy an estimated $164 billion a year in lost productivity.
🧑🏼🤝🧑🏽 Connect with others: Join our chat on Substack. Or sign-up for LinkUsUp, a new way to connect with other professionals in Germany.
🤝 News from our community.
ICYMI: The last newsletter covered income distribution across Germany, our guide to the best immigration lawyers in Berlin, five sustainable food companies hiring right now, and debated whether or not Germany “is over.
Most read: Popular links last week included our list of companies hiring in Berlin, the episode of Brooklyn Coffee Shop featuring a Berliner, and The Berliner’s Mogg sandwich review.
🧺 Our event theme for this week is simply getting out and meeting new people with similar interests, be it playing chess, connecting with other internationals, or eating foods with friends while watching a movie.
May 27: Amateur Chess 2.0 at Schnelle Quelle is an evening of drinks and chess with strangers, no skill required and no pressure to be good. Show up, sit across from someone you've never met, and see what happens. €5 for players, free for spectators.
May 30: Potluck Picnic: Flavours of Home at Mauerpark is a bring-a-dish afternoon where everyone turns up with something that means home to them, whether that's a family recipe, a childhood staple, or just something you love to make. Food, stories, music, and a blanket on the grass. Free with one dish to share.
Jun 7: Films for Foodies: Spotlight on Malaysia at Kino & Bar in der Königstadt is a film screening followed by traditional Malaysian snacks from Seri Melayu. The film is a 2014 story about a father confronting his daughter's engagement to a Westerner. Stick around for Teh Tarik and appetisers. Suggested donation €14.
📅 Subscribe to our calendar to receive event alerts from The Berlin Life as they happen.
If your job search in Germany feels like shouting into a void, some of it might be fixable. This podcast episode covers seven tips for finding work in Germany, from why laser-focusing your applications beats applying to everything, to the smaller cities where companies offer free meals, on-site doctors, and on-site daycare just to attract talent.
Germany can feel expensive until you know the system. This guide to saving money in Germany covers 20 practical ways to keep more of your cash, from supermarkets worth switching to and loyalty programs most internationals never bother joining, to the prepaid SIM trap, the Pfand system, and why filing your tax return is one of the smartest things you can do.
ℹ️ More where that came from: 60+ guides on living and working in Germany.
🥨 Things to make life in Deutschland (a little bit) better.
Hot tip: Do you find it difficult to make friends in Berlin as an international? Ones that are here to stay longterm. People who you can bond with and rely on during the good times and bad. If having a close-knit circle of friends is something you want, apply to join Inner Circle and get connected now.
Recommended newsletters: 20% Berlin & Smart Living in Germany.
Weekly deals: We partnered with Spotahome to make your Berlin apartment search a little less painful. Use code TBL15 for 15% off your first booking.
🇩🇪 5 German companies hiring right now.
This week, we're featuring five German fintech companies:
Moss (Automated corporate spend management)
Munich & Berlin | 30+ jobs
Account manager, senior brand designer, techops engineer.
🇬🇧 &/or 🇩🇪 | Mainly hybrid.
N26 (Mobile bank reimagining money’s relationship)
Berlin | 26 jobs
Director of marketing, head of data science/generative AI, IT audit manager.
🇬🇧 &/or 🇩🇪 | Hybrid.Raisin (Marketplace unlocking barrier-free savings)
Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, Hamburg | 35 jobs
Enterprise IT services engineer, head of relationship mgmt, AI engineer.
🇬🇧 &/or 🇩🇪 | Hybrid.
Scalable Capital (Robo-advisor making investing accessible)
Munich & Berlin | 98 jobs
Compliance expert, AI platform engineer, incident manager.🇬🇧 &/or 🇩🇪 | Hybrid.
Trade Republic (Mobile bank democratizing wealth creation)
Berlin | 45+ jobs
Senior technical product manager, market operations associate, senior IT security engineer.
🇬🇧 &/or 🇩🇪 | Hybrid.
👋🏼 This is anything but a scraped job board. It’s a curated, weekly updated database of 395+ Berlin companies hiring right now, designed to help internationals cut through the noise and focus on employers actually worth applying to.
🤑 German startups that recently raised new funding.
Over the past week, 13 German startups took home around €203 M in funding, across seven locations.
Job seekers, get your applications on. Nine of them are currently hiring for a combined 112 roles.
allseven (Curated health supplement bundles) - €170 K
Caputh | 1 job
Working student - social media.
🇩🇪 | Remote with some office days in Berlin or Hamburg.bunch (All-in-one fund operations platform) - €30.1 M
Berlin | 11 jobs
Senior fund operations manager, post merger integration lead, Manager of IT support.
🇬🇧, 🇩🇪 a plus | Hybrid.
ClearOps (AI supply chain connectivity) - €8.6 M
Munich | 6 jobs
Account executive, solutions engineer, working student - events & recruiting.
🇬🇧 &/ 🇩🇪 | Hybrid.
Eterno (Modern medical office buildings) - $100 M
Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Munich + | 61 jobs
Head of customer activation /onboarding, workplace experience manager, project manager - cloud.
🇬🇧 working language & 🇩🇪 required for some roles | Hybrid, with remote options.
Feldwerke (Agricultural solar panel systems) - €12 M
Munich | 10 jobs
Entrepreneur in residence, project manager, business development rep.
🇬🇧 &/or 🇩🇪 | Hybrid.
Getquin (Investment portfolio tracking app) - €12 M
Berlin | 10 jobs
Ad manager, content creator, senior/lead product manager.
🇬🇧 &/or 🇩🇪 | Onsite mainly.
LawX (AI legal practice management) - €7.5 M
Berlin | 3 jobs
Legal engineer, data engineer, working student.
🇩🇪 | Hybrid, with remote options.
Qurie (Refrigerant-free electrocaloric cooling) - €2.2 M
Freiburg | 1 job
System developer.
🇩🇪 | Hyrbid.
Unframe (Managed AI delivery platform) - $50 M
Berlin | 9 jobs
Senior GTM recruiter, VP of marketing, channel manager - EMEA.
🇬🇧 &/or 🇩🇪 + other languages like French, Spanish, & Dutch | Mostly remote.
What this week’s funding rounds tell us:
Health is having a moment. Allseven, Eterno, Femi-ON, and Getquin all raised this week, spanning supplements, medical real estate, femtech hardware, and investment wellness. Whether you work in clinical, ops, or product, this sector is putting money to work right now.
Finance and compliance is hot too. Bunch, Getquin, and ComplyDo all raised in the same week, covering fund ops, portfolio tracking, and regulatory compliance. If your background touches any of these areas, three companies just got fresh capital at the same time.
Eterno is the week’s dominant employer with 61 of the 112 available roles. More than half the jobs this week come from a single company building out medical office infrastructure across Germany, so if healthcare operations, project management, or tech are your thing, start there.
💸 Other funded startup lists tell you a company name and a number, while we tell you who's actually hiring, how many roles are open, what languages you need, whether it's remote or onsite, and what the trends actually mean for your job search.
231 startups tracked this year, 234 funding rounds, zero paywalls, one single page. Bookmark it and check back weekly.
🙌 Weekly career tips to keep you sane in Germany.
Applying for jobs is stressful, tedious, and honestly not fun, so yes, use AI to speed up the process, make it more efficient, and free up your headspace for the things that actually matter.
Alas, there is a problem. If you let AI do all the work, the person that shows up in your job application is not really you. AI has a way of making everyone sound the same, using the same words and phrases, and somewhere in that process you lose yourself. Being authentic is one of the most important things you can do in a job application, because the version of you that appears on paper needs to be the same one that walks into that first interview.
I spoke to a recruiter a few months back who told me something that stuck with me. He said AI makes candidates look so impressive on paper that he gets genuinely excited to bring them in, and then the interview happens and reality does not match what was written. That’s a huge waste of everyone’s time and it can really damage your chances.
So use AI to help you, but make sure the application still sounds like you and stays truthful about your experience. Do not just say what you can do, back it up with data and real examples from your work history, because that’s what will set you apart.
If you want help improving your CV or job applications for the German market, I’ve got you. 👉🏼 Learn more or book a session here.
🗞️ The inside scoop on what’s happening in Germany.
June brings changes for people in Germany, including the end of fuel tax relief, new EU pay transparency rules requiring employers to publish salary ranges in job ads, and stricter food labelling rules.
New Destatis data shows smoking rates in Germany have barely moved since 2021, with around 19% of people still lighting up.
Amazon is funding IoT leak detection across 500 buildings and wetland restoration in Bavaria’s Spessart Forest, together aiming to replenish nearly 370 million litres of water annually.
FlixTrain is doubling its services by 2027 and Eurowings is stepping in to cover routes Ryanair is abandoning in Berlin. Meanwhile, Berlin's new S-Bahn CEO is promising cleaner trains and progress on the long-delayed S15 line.
E-bike commuting is booming but Berlin is on track to build just 8.1 kilometres of new cycle paths this year. Germany is simultaneously offering up to €6,000 in EV subsidies for households looking to go electric by car instead.
A new proposal would build 21,400 apartments around Tempelhofer Feld, shrinking the beloved open space by a third. For the first time a majority of Berliners appear to support the move.
Germany’s Labour Minister has warned that by 2030 no job in Germany will be untouched by AI, and is proposing that nearly two-thirds of working adults receive AI training at least once a year as a result.
Berlin-based Dunia Innovations has unveiled a €280 million gigalab that uses AI to speed up the discovery of new materials for clean energy and sustainable chemicals.
Consumer watchdogs have forced Starbucks to add a clearly visible no-tip option to its card terminals in Germany.
Germany’s rapid military build-up is raising concerns among civil liberties advocates that expanding defence spending and security measures could come at the cost of basic rights.
Despite 36 years of reunification, eastern German retirees now earn €309 a month less than those in the west, a gap that is widening rather than closing,
The lack of affordable apartments hits immigrants hard. Internationals spend more of their income on rent than Germans, are more apt to land in a homeless shelter, and face blatant racial discrimination in the application process.
Remitly conducted their Immigration Index 2026 report, highlighting the best countries to move to, and despite everything … Germany came in 5th.
Despite leaked reports suggesting Germany’s pension commission plans to raise the retirement age to 70, the government insists nothing has been decided.
Germany’s liberalised visa rules were designed to attract international talent, but a new report warns they have also made non-EU students and trainees vulnerable to exploitation.
Almost 310,000 people obtained their German passport in 2025, reaching an all-time record.
If you’re looking for something new to do in Berlin during June, check out these 11 new openings.
From classic spots like Schlachtensee and Müggelsee to clear turquoise water at Liepnitzsee, these five Berlin lakes are worth a swim.
For those rainy days, bookmark the best German-language films of all time for culture and language learning, plus the top podcasts to practice your listening.
Made with care & caffeine in Berlin. Tips to support our work are most welcome. ☕
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