Latest News
The best expat cities in Germany, according to expats
December 4th 2019
By I AM EXPAT
An annual city ranking has revealed how expats rate life in 82 cities around the world, including seven cities in Germany. While Aachen has once again been named the best city for expats in Germany, the capital city of Berlin did not fare so well.
Internations Expat City Ranking 2019
More than 20.000 respondents in 82 cities around the world took part in InterNations’ 2019 Expat Insider survey, which is used each year to compile the “Expat City Ranking”, a list of the best and worst cities to move to. With the respondents representing 178 nationalities and living in 187 different countries around the world, it is one of the largest surveys of its kind.
Participants are asked to rate more than 25 different aspects about urban life in their city on a scale of one to seven. The scores from these subcategories are then grouped to provide an overall value for the four different areas that make up the Expat City Ranking: Quality of Urban Living, Getting Settled, Urban Work Life and Finance & Housing.
For a city to be included in the Expat City Ranking 2019, a sample size of at least 50 survey participants per city was required.
Expats struggle to find housing in Germany
Housing seems to be an area where plenty of expats struggle. While German cities generally ranked well on affordability, many expats highlighted the lack of housing availability as an area in need of improvement. Overall, Munich is the third worst city in the world for expat housing (80th), ahead only of San Francisco and Dublin.
In Berlin, nearly two-thirds (64%) of expats struggle to find a home, twice the global average of 32%. Housing is also Cologne’s biggest weakness, with just 12% of expats saying they believe that it is easy to find a house. Even in top-ranking Aachen, the figure is just 22%, well below the global average of 50%.
Expat life in 7 German cities
The top-scoring German cities in the 2019 ranking were:
11. Aachen
31. Düsseldorf
42. Hamburg
49. Frankfurt
50. Cologne
51. Munich
61. Berlin