Credit Cards in Germany: What a Kreditkarte Actually Is

Search for the best credit card in Germany and you will get rankings that quietly assume a product Germany mostly does not sell. The assumption is that a credit card is a revolving line: you spend, you carry a balance, you pay interest, and the comparison is about the interest rate and the rewards. In Germany a large share of what is sold as a Kreditkarte is a charge card. You spend through the month and the full balance is collected from a linked current account by SEPA direct debit on a fixed date. No minimum payment. No carried balance. No interest, because nothing is outstanding long enough to accrue any.

That is not a small nuance. It changes what you are shopping for. If the product settles itself every month, the interest rate is close to irrelevant and the real variables are the annual fee, the foreign-currency mark-up, whether the card is accepted where you need it, and whether you can get approved at all. For someone who has just moved to Germany, the last of those is the hard one.

Start with the card you will actually be given

The first card most new arrivals receive is not a credit card at all. It is a girocard, the German domestic debit scheme, attached to a Girokonto current account.

girocard works well inside Germany and poorly outside it, because it is a domestic scheme rather than an international one. Historically it reached the outside world by being co-badged with Maestro or V Pay. That route has been closing: Mastercard stopped issuing new Maestro cards from 1 July 2023, and German banks have been migrating customers onto Debit Mastercard and Visa Debit products instead. Those do carry an international card number and do work online.

So check the marks on the card in your wallet. If it shows only girocard, expect it to work in German shops and at German ATMs, and to fail on foreign e-commerce, on many subscription sign-ups, and in a fair number of countries' terminals.

Then note the trap running the other way. A Debit Mastercard or Visa Debit is an international card, but it is still a debit card, and a meaningful set of merchants specifically require a credit card. Car hire desks and hotels asking for a deposit hold are the usual places this bites, because they want to authorise an amount against a credit line rather than freeze money in your current account. This is one of the few genuinely practical reasons a foreign resident in Germany needs a Kreditkarte at all — and it is a reason about acceptance, not about borrowing.

SCHUFA: you do not have a bad file, you have no file

Almost every consumer credit decision in Germany routes through SCHUFA, and so do a good many decisions that are not obviously credit at all — mobile contracts, some rental applications, some utility sign-ups.

The thing nobody tells new arrivals clearly: an absent SCHUFA record is not a neutral starting point in practice. It is not a bad record — you have not defaulted on anything — but automated decisioning has nothing to score, and systems tuned to avoid risk tend to treat an unknown conservatively. A first application declined in your first months in Germany is very often about the emptiness of the file rather than anything in it.

Two things change that over time: duration, and a German current account with regular incoming salary. Neither is fast.

What you should be sceptical of is the large English-language genre asserting which specific German banks approve foreigners without a SCHUFA history. Those claims are about one institution's onboarding policy at one moment. They are not law, they change without notice, and the only reliable source for any of them is the bank itself, in writing.

Your rights over the file are stronger than most people use

You can get a free copy of your data. Article 15(3) GDPR entitles you to a copy of the personal data being processed about you, and SCHUFA provides this Datenkopie without charge. Do it before you apply for anything significant, not after you are declined — errors are common, and correcting one takes time you will not have when a landlord is waiting.

Two Court of Justice rulings on 7 December 2023 changed the ground under credit scoring. In Case C-634/21, SCHUFA Holding (Scoring), the Court held that a credit agency's production of a probability value is itself an automated individual decision within the meaning of Article 22(1) GDPR, where a third party draws strongly on that value in deciding whether to contract. The practical consequence is that the safeguards in Article 22 — including a right to human intervention and to contest the decision — attach to the score itself, not only to the bank's final answer.

In Joined Cases C-26/22 and C-64/22, SCHUFA Holding (Discharge from remaining debts), the Court held it contrary to the GDPR for a private agency to keep data on a discharge of residual debt longer than the public insolvency register keeps it — six months.

Neither ruling gets a newcomer a credit card. Both matter if something inaccurate or stale is sitting in your file and an automated system keeps declining you because of it.

The account you have a right to, and the one you have to earn

Here is the part that is genuinely useful and almost never covered in English guidance aimed at people moving to Germany.

Germany implements Directive 2014/92/EU through the Zahlungskontengesetz (ZKG), the Payment Accounts Act. Under it, institutions offering consumer payment accounts must offer a Basiskonto — a basic payment account — and the terms are set by statute rather than by the bank's appetite.

The entitlement runs to consumers lawfully resident in the European Union, and the directive is explicit that this includes third-country nationals and people with no fixed address, and prohibits discrimination on grounds of nationality or place of residence. Refusal grounds are narrow and essentially anti-money-laundering based, or that you already hold an equivalent account.

If a bank refuses, the ZKG route does not end at the branch: you can bring the matter to BaFin, the federal financial supervisor, which can order the institution to open the account.

Two honest limits. First, a Basiskonto is a payment account, not a credit product — it gets you into the payment system, not into a credit line. Second, it does not guarantee you the premium account with the travel insurance and the cashback. It guarantees you banking. If a branch tells you an account is impossible because you are foreign, that is a description of that branch's habits, not of German law.

The order of operations nobody writes down

The sequence matters more than the choice of bank, because each step gates the next.

1. Anmeldung. Register your address at the local Bürgeramt after you move in — the deadline is set by each Bundesland and is commonly two weeks. You receive a Meldebescheinigung, the registration certificate.
2. Identity verification. Account opening is subject to the Geldwäschegesetz, the Money Laundering Act, so your identity must be verified — in practice by PostIdent at a post office branch, or by VideoIdent or an equivalent online identification procedure.
3. Girokonto. The current account comes first. Almost everything else in German life direct-debits from it, including the card you are about to apply for.
4. Then the card. Not before. A German card application generally assumes a German current account to settle against.

Trying to do step four first is the single most common way this goes wrong.

What the law gives you when a payment goes wrong — and what it does not

Two provisions of the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch carry most of the weight, and they are better than many arrivals expect.

Section 675v BGB caps your liability for losses arising from an unauthorised payment transaction made before you report the card at 50 euros. It falls to nil where the loss was not detectable by you, or where the payment service provider failed to require strong customer authentication. After you have reported the card, you bear nothing — unless you acted fraudulently. The cap does not protect you if you acted with intent or gross negligence.

Section 675x BGB gives you the right to demand a refund of an authorised payment initiated by or through the payee — a SEPA direct debit — within eight weeks of the debit. This is the provision that makes German direct debits safe to hand out, and it is the reason so much of German commercial life runs on Lastschrift.

Now the gap, and it catches British arrivals hardest. Germany has no equivalent of UK section 75. There is no statutory rule making your card issuer jointly liable with the merchant when a purchase goes wrong. The German Einwendungsdurchgriff in sections 358 and 359 BGB applies to linked contracts — a credit agreement taken out to finance a specific purchase — and ordinary credit-card spending is not that.

What you have instead is chargeback, which is a Visa or Mastercard scheme rule and a term of your card contract. It works, it is worth using, and it is not a statutory right, which means the deadlines and the outcome are governed by scheme rules and your issuer's process rather than by law. Our chargeback versus section 75 versus Regulation Z comparison sets out how differently the three regimes behave when a merchant fails.

The fee that actually costs a foreign resident money

If your card settles in full every month, the interest rate is not your problem. The foreign-currency mark-up is.

It applies every time the card is used in a currency other than the euro — which for a foreign resident is not an occasional holiday event but a recurring fact of life: family visits, a home-country subscription, a flight priced in dollars, an online shop that bills in sterling. A mark-up of a couple of percent on a few hundred euros a month is a real annual number, and it is easy to miss because it is folded into the exchange rate rather than itemised.

Alongside it sits dynamic currency conversion, the terminal or ATM offering to bill you in your home currency instead of euros. Regulation (EU) 2019/518 requires currency conversion charges on card payments to be expressed as a percentage mark-up over the European Central Bank's euro reference rates, and requires that disclosure before you complete the transaction. Use it: when a machine offers to convert, decline and pay in the local currency. The rule exists precisely because comparing is hardest at that moment.

Our no foreign transaction fee cards: 2026 reality check goes through how these charges are actually constructed, and why "no foreign transaction fee" and "no mark-up" are not the same claim.

Where a German card without those two fees fits

Given all of the above, the useful German card for a foreign resident is a narrow thing: no annual fee, no foreign-currency fee, settles by direct debit, and issued by a German bank so that it is accepted as a credit card where a debit card is refused.

The awa7® Visa Kreditkarte is one card in that shape. It is issued by Hanseatic Bank GmbH & Co KG, Hamburg, and the programme is operated by DZ-Media Verlag GmbH in Essen. Per the issuer's own material, it carries no annual fee and no foreign currency fee, offers flexible repayment with no minimum turnover requirement, repays by automatic SEPA direct debit, supports Apple Pay and Google Pay, and lets you set your own PIN. The advertiser's published material states credit limits up to 4,000 euros, with a student segment quoted up to 3,000 euros; the limit you are actually offered is set by the bank on your application, not by the advertising.

The eligibility conditions are the point at which this article has to be blunt with you, because they decide whether it is worth your time at all. Applicants must have a German bank account, a German mobile number and residence in Germany. Approval runs through a SCHUFA and CEG check plus the bank's own internal assessment, and then an identity verification by Online-Ident or PostIdent.

Read together with the SCHUFA section above, that means: this is a card for someone who is already resident and already banked in Germany. It is not a card you arrange before you move, and if you arrived last month with an empty SCHUFA file, an application now is more likely to be declined than approved — not because of you, but because there is nothing there to assess. The order of operations is not optional.

If your income is not in euros

None of the above solves the problem of being paid in one currency and living in another. That is a conversion question rather than a card question, and it is worth handling separately instead of absorbing it into a card's exchange rate.

A Wise multi-currency account holds euros alongside your home currency and converts at a disclosed mark-up, which suits salary or freelance income arriving in one currency and being spent in another. For business income across several countries, Airwallex does the same job at company level. Our multi-currency account versus travel credit card comparison sets out where each approach wins.

The honest limit is the same one that applies in every country in this series: neither is a German bank account, neither gives you a girocard, and neither builds a SCHUFA record. They solve conversion. They do not solve belonging to the domestic system.

The Bottom Line

Stop shopping for a German credit card the way you would shop for one at home. Most German cards clear themselves monthly, so the interest rate is close to meaningless and the annual fee and the foreign-currency mark-up are where your money actually goes.

Get the sequence right: register your address, verify your identity, open the current account, and only then apply for a card. If a commercial bank refuses you an account outright, you have a statutory route to a Basiskonto under the ZKG, judged on lawful residence in the EU rather than on your credit file, and BaFin behind it if the bank will not comply.

Expect your first card application to run into an empty SCHUFA file rather than a bad one, and treat that as a timing problem rather than a verdict. Pull your free Article 15(3) data copy early so that if something wrong is sitting in the file you find it before a landlord does.

And know the shape of your protection. Fifty euros of exposure before you report a card, nil after. Eight weeks to reverse a direct debit. No section 75 — chargeback instead, which is a scheme rule and works differently.

Germany is an EU market, which changes the opening move: before negotiating with any commercial bank you have a legal route to a basic account, set out in the EU right to a bank account for foreigners. After that the questions become the usual ones — credit history does not cross borders covers the file you are starting from, and why the same card tier is a different card in another country explains why a German-issued card carries a different package from its namesake elsewhere. Portugal and Poland are the closest comparisons in this series for other European markets.

This is information, not financial advice. Statutory provisions and issuer terms change, bank onboarding policies are set by each institution, and the credit limit and approval outcome on any application are decided by the issuing bank. Confirm current terms with the bank before relying on any figure here.