Do I must pay church tax?

When you registered your address in Germany, you were asked what religion you were.

That didn’t happen just for statistical reasons, if you named one of the religious institutions that charge church tax (scroll down to list on this page), in general, those are:

Roman-Catholic Church

Old Catholic Church

Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland

Jewish religious community

Freireligiöse Gemeinden

Unitarische Religionsgemeinschaft Freie Protestanten

Evangelical Reformed Church in Hamburg

Mennonites of Hamburg and Altona

French Huguenot Church in Berlin 

Unitarische Religionsgemeinschaft Freier Protestanten in Rheinland-Pfalz (source)

you will have to pay church tax, which is:

8% of your income tax amount if you live in Bavaria or Baden-Wuerttemberg, or

9% of your income tax amount if you live elsewhere in Germany.

The following religious institutions either do not charge church tax even though they would be entitled to do so, or are not allowed to do so under German law because they were not recognised as a “Körperschaft des öffentlichen Rechts” (source 1, source 2):

Orthodox Church (all kinds)

Humanistischer Verband

Bund für Geistesfreiheit Bayern

Bund Evangelisch-Freikirchlicher Gemeinden

Christengemeinschaft 

Zeugen Jehovas (Jehova’s Witnesses) 

Baptists

Methodists

Heilsarmee (Salvation Army)

Mormons

Adventists

Scientology

Buddhists

Hindus

Sikhs

Islamic religious communities (all kinds)

any other religious community not mentioned above

For all recognised religious institutions, i.e. that are “Körperschaften des Öffentlichen Rechts” (be they church tax charging or not) please see this list (going by Bundesland) on the official web site of the German Minstry of the Interior.

However, even if you filled in “no religion” when you registered, that’s not the final word.

For example, the Roman-Catholic Church is notorious for writing to your birth diocese and asking whether you were baptised: https://www.exberliner.com/features/opinion/germanys-greedy-churches/

Having been baptised anywhere in the world is sufficient for being considered a member of the worldwide Roman-Catholic Church and you will have to pay German church tax.

If you were baptised, I strongly suggest that you decide whether you want to pay 8%/9% of your income tax amount in church tax, or not. 

If you do not want to pay church tax, you can leave your religious community, but only with effect for the future by doing a Kirchenaustritt, details in here: https://www.kirchenaustritt.de/english.htm

If you’re content paying church tax, you should know that any church tax you paid will lower your taxable income, i.e. you get back from your income tax:

personal_income_tax_rate  x  church_tax_amount

Example:

If you’re:

unmarried and self-employed with a taxable income of 60,000€

no children

who lives in Bavaria and who is a member of a religious institution that collects church tax

 you will pay in income tax an amount of 16,063€ (source), so you will pay in church tax:

8% x 16,063€ = 1,285.04€

of which you will get back through your income tax return:

income tax on 58,714.96€ (= 60,000€ – 1,285.04€) is 15,523€

→ so you will get back 540€ (= 16,063€ – 15,523€) because of the 1,285.04€ in church tax that you had paid

So you will have ended up paying for your church/synagogue membership that year:

1,285.04€ – 540€  = 745.04€

Kirchgeld: if you’re not a church/synagogue member, but your non-earning/lower-earning spouse is

Then you may still have to pay a special form of church tax, called “besonderes Kirchgeld”, on your non-earning/lower-earning spouse’s 50% “share” of the family income.

If your non-earning or lower-earning spouse lives in Baden-Wuerttemberg (BW), Mecklenburg- Vorpommern (MV), Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen NI) and North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), you will only have to pay “besonderes Kirchgeld” if your non-earning/lower-earning spouse is a member of the “Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland”.

You may have to pay “besonderes Kirchgeld” if your non-earning or lower-earning spouse lives in one of the other states and is a member of the Roman/Old Catholic Church, a Jewish religious community or of the “Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland”. 

However, you will get out of paying “besonderes Kirchgeld” if you live in either (source 1, source 2, source 3):

Berlin (BE)

Brandenburg (BB)

Hamburg (HH)

Hesse (HE)

Saarland (SL)

Schleswig- Holstein (SH)

and are yourself member of one of the religious institutions which are entitled to charge church tax because they were recognised as a “Körperschaft des öffentlichen Rechts” and then chose not to do so, e.g. even if you don’t live in Bavaria, but say, in Berlin, you could still become a member of the:

Bavarian “Bund für Geistesfreiheit Bayern“, which charges a yearly membership fee of between 40€ and 60€ (this membership fee lowers your taxable income in your tax return) 

and you will:

not have to pay church tax because “your” religious institution does not charge it and 

you will not have to pay “besonderes Kirchgeld” for your non-earning/lower-earning spouse either.