Status: 08/26/2022 11:17 a.m
In Germany every second household lives for rent. According to the Federal Statistical Office, many of them are overburdened with the housing costs. One-person households and low-income earners are particularly affected.
Around every eighth person living in a rented apartment in Germany is overburdened with their housing costs. This is the result of an evaluation by the Federal Statistical Office. Overburdening therefore means that all expenses for rent or loan payments, including the recent sharp increase in energy costs, consume more than 40 percent of disposable household income.
That was the case for 12.8 percent of tenants last year. For the total population, the value was 10.7 percent. According to the Federal Statistical Office, expenses for housing and, above all, rents are usually fixed monthly costs with little or no potential for savings.
One-person households are most affected
On average, people spend 23.3 percent of their income on housing, and the figure for renters is even 27.6 percent. According to the Federal Office, renting single-person households are most affected, as they have to spend an average of 35.4 percent of their disposable income on housing. On the other hand, childless couples have comparatively low costs at 23.7 percent.
Low-income households in particular are suffering from the cost pressure. In the bottom fifth of the income bracket, more than a third (36.2 percent) live in a household that is constantly financially overburdened.
With a tenant share of 50.5 percent of the total population, Germany is at the top in Europe. Only a few countries such as Austria (45.8 percent) or Denmark (40.8 percent) achieve similarly high values. As a result, cold rents have a high impact on inflation in these countries. They rose in Germany by 8.5 percent from 2015 to 2021 and thus somewhat more slowly than all consumer prices.