Pick a German city, add your income and household, and see what you can expect to pay and take home there: estimated net pay after German taxes plus a real breakdown of rent, groceries, transport, and utilities, plus what is left each month.
Most cost-of-living tools give you one vague number and call it a day. This one does not. Tell it where you want to live, what you earn, and who is in your household, and it works the city down the way you would actually feel it: estimated take-home pay after German income tax and social insurance, then what a one-bedroom, a full grocery cart, getting around, and the lights and heating add up to. The number that matters is at the top: what is left in your pocket at the end of the month.
In Berlin, a single person on €65,000 gross takes home about €2,882 a month.
Against roughly €1,578 in core monthly costs, that leaves about €1,304 a month after these core costs.
What actually lands in your account each month after German income tax, the solidarity surcharge, and mandatory social insurance. Income tax and social insurance are national, so this is the same wherever in Germany you live. A large slice comes off the top, most of it mandatory insurance rather than tax.
A big slice of your German paycheck is mandatory insurance, and the rest is on you to arrange. For health, liability, life, and the other policies Germany expects you to carry, Feather is the English-language insurance service I point expats toward, so you can compare and sign up without wrestling German paperwork or a commission-driven sales agent.
Check out Feather →The core monthly basket for your household in this city: rent, groceries, getting around, and utilities. Rent is the figure you chose; groceries scale with household size.
Rent is cold rent (Kaltmiete); heating and other utilities are listed separately. Groceries scale between a single person and a family of four. This is a core basket, not a full budget: it leaves out eating out, childcare, insurance premiums, and savings.
Every living-cost figure is an informed estimate, not an invoice. We anchor each category to published cost-of-living indices and to real city rent data, then review the outliers by hand so a cheap city reads cheap and an expensive one reads expensive. Rent is the figure you pick; groceries scale between a single person and a family of four. All figures are in euros, and each city carries the month it was last checked, shown in the context notes, because prices go stale.
The take-home pay figures use a simplified 2026 tax model: German income tax plus the solidarity surcharge plus mandatory social insurance (pension, unemployment, health, and long-term care). Single filers are taxed under class I; married couples are estimated with Ehegattensplitting on combined income, which is why a sole earner with a lower-earning spouse keeps more. Church tax, the childless long-term-care surcharge, and Kindergeld are included when they apply. Income tax and social insurance are set nationally, so take-home pay does not change from city to city; only your living costs do. The figures will not match your exact payslip, so treat them as a realistic ballpark and always run a real offer through a proper calculator before you accept it.
Data sources: WhereNext (CC BY 4.0), Destatis.