Accounts and Insurance After You Leave Germany: What to Keep, What to End

1. Why You Keep One Account

Several payments arrive after your departure, and their timing is out of your hands.

Your tax refund for the departure year, which you can file for up to four years afterwards. Your rental deposit, which landlords may hold for months while the utility bill is settled. A final payslip or holiday compensation. And if you paid in for less than 60 months and left the EU, a possible pension refund, which takes a waiting period of two years before it is paid.

Keep one account open until those have landed. It costs nothing at a free direct bank and it saves the situation where a German office needs an IBAN and you no longer have one.

2. Which Accounts Survive a Foreign Address

Whether a bank keeps you depends less on the bank's marketing than on where you move.

Within the EU or EEA, most direct banks continue the account after you update your address, and your IBAN stays the same. Comdirect, DKB and N26 are among those known to work this way.

Outside the EU, it gets thinner. Some banks continue the relationship, others quietly terminate it once you become an administrative special case, and the letter often goes to the old address. This is the single most useful thing to check before you go: call and ask what happens to your account with your specific destination country.

Two practical points either way. Update the address rather than hiding the move, because a bank that discovers it later reacts worse than one that was told. And make sure your login still works from abroad, since some TAN procedures fail when a German mobile number lapses.

One thing that does not work is parking a friend's German address in your bank profile. Anti money laundering rules oblige the bank to hold your real residential address, a false one breaches your duties under the contract, and post about your account then lands with someone who cannot act on it. Move the address properly. If the bank drops you over it, you find out now rather than in the month you need the money.

For moving money between the account you keep and your new home currency, a dedicated transfer service beats a bank wire on both rate and speed.

3. What Ends by Itself, and What Does Not

This distinction is where the money leaks.

Ends with your departure: statutory health insurance ends with the compulsory membership, though you have to inform your fund and send the deregistration confirmation. Your employment contract ends on its own date. Nothing else stops just because you left.

Runs until you actively stop it: the Rundfunkbeitrag, your mobile, internet and electricity contracts, gym memberships, and every insurance policy you hold.

4. Insurance, Policy by Policy

There is no single rule, so go through the folder rather than assuming.

• Health insurance. Tell your Krankenkasse the date and send the Abmeldebestätigung. Ask for a certificate of your insurance periods, because your new country's system may need proof of continuous cover, and it is far harder to obtain a year later.
• Liability and household insurance. These cover a risk located in Germany, so moving abroad usually removes the basis for the contract. Check the wording, cancel in writing, and do not assume the policy lapses on its own.
• Private health or disability policies. These are the ones you may want to keep rather than cancel, especially disability cover, where the residence clause decides whether it still pays abroad.
• Car insurance. Ends with the deregistration of the car, not with yours.

Mind the gap between the two systems. German public cover ends on the day your insurance obligation ends, and cover in the new country often starts weeks later, once you are registered or employed there. Travel health insurance for those weeks costs a few euros a month and is the cheapest way to avoid paying a foreign clinic out of pocket. Ask your new employer or university when cover actually starts, not when you sign.

If you may return to Germany within a few years and hold private health cover, ask about an Anwartschaftsversicherung, a dormant continuation that preserves your entry conditions and health status for a small monthly amount.

5. Investments and Loans

Depots and loans follow their own logic and neither ends because you moved.

Many German brokers require a domestic residence and will ask you to transfer or close the depot once you notify them. Ask before you go, because a forced sale on their schedule is worse than a transfer on yours.

Running loans continue exactly as agreed. What changes is the reach: the lender keeps the claim, and international debt collection is normal rather than exotic. Tell them your new address.

The tax side of holding shares when you leave is only a specialist question when you hold a substantial stake in a corporation, which our guide to the final tax return touches on.

6. The Order That Works

1. Deregister at the Bürgeramt and get several copies of the Abmeldebestätigung. Everything below asks for it.
2. Tell your Krankenkasse and request the certificate of insurance periods.
3. Deregister the apartment with the Beitragsservice for the Rundfunkbeitrag.
4. Cancel the contracts tied to the flat: electricity, internet, and anything with a meter.
5. Update the bank address, confirm the account survives your destination, and check that login works from abroad.
6. Leave the account open until the deposit, the tax refund and any pension refund have arrived.

One more thing about post. Once you have no German address, the Finanzamt may ask you to name an authorised recipient in Germany. If you do not, a letter counts as delivered one month after it was posted, so the objection period starts running even when the envelope takes six weeks to reach you. A friend or your tax advisor as recipient costs nothing and keeps a tax assessment from becoming final while it is still in transit.

Our leaving Germany checklist sets the wider sequence, and cancelling contracts when moving abroad covers the notice periods and the special termination rights that a move triggers.

7. The Pension Money Most People Leave Behind

If you are not an EU citizen, contributed for less than 60 months, and are leaving the EU for good, you can apply to have your own pension contributions refunded, which is typically the employee half of what was paid in.

The application has a waiting period of 24 months after your last contribution, so this is a payment that arrives long after your move, into whichever account you named. It is the strongest single argument for keeping a German account alive. Our pension refund guide covers who qualifies and what the application needs.