Germany's immigration offices have struggled to stay afloat as applications for naturalisation have flooded in since the end of June last year, when a reform of the country's citizenship rules was enacted under the leadership of the former federal government.
The legal change allowed dual-citizenship for non-EU German nationals, and also relaxed the requirements for foreign nationals to naturalise as German. Taken together, the changes opened the doors to German citizenship for a far wider proportion of foreigner nationals.
However, it was well-known that immigration authorities across the country were already over-burdened even before the dual-citizenship law took effect. Many applicants saw waiting times for naturalisation decisions lengthen dramatically as a wave of new applications came pouring in from the end of June last year.
As The Local has reported, in Germany's major cities, hopeful Germans-to-be are commonly made to wait months or even years to hear a decision on their application.
New figures give a sense of how many applications are still open in various German cities and states. Here's the latest:
How long does it take for a citizenship application to be processed?
According to the Ministry of the Interior, the average processing time for naturalisations in the state of Hesse was assumed to be two years in 2024.
Those who aspire to German citizenship in the state of Baden-Württemberg currently wait an average of 18 months.
In Hamburg, the duration of the proceedings is still around 13 months.
These figures, which were recently reported by the German Press Agency (DPA), are aligned with wait times given to The Local by authorities from various cities as of January this year.
At that time, wait times in Stuttgart - the capital of Baden-Württemberg - were said to be about 18 months, and in Frankfurt - the largest city in Hesse - they were said to be 26 to 30 months.
DPA did not report information for current wait times in other German cities or states, but The Local's last inquiry revealed expected wait times of; six to nine months in Leipzig, more than nine months in Düsseldorf, 12 to 20 months in Cologne, and 18 months in Munich.
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In Berlin the situation was a bit more complex. The capital city's immigration authority (LEA) told The Local that wait times were case dependent. As we have reported, it many older paper applications have been held up for years, whereas more recently submitted digital applications are moving through the system in a matter of months.
Number of pending applications remains high
Wait times at the Ausländerbehörden and various municipal immigration authorities are naturally correlated with increased numbers of pending applications.
Around 24,200 people in Rhineland-Palatinate were waiting for a decision on their application for naturalisation in March this year, according to DPA.
A survey by Mediendienst Integration found that the number of applications still open in Munich and Heidelberg rose by around 85 percent each compared to the previous year.
In Mannheim, the number of applications still in review was 2.5 times (or 250 percent) higher than a year earlier.
In Munich, there was recently around 33,000 open applications.
What's the hold up?
When pressed about long-wait times and applications piling up, immigrations authorities tend to cite the same issues across the board: not enough employees and too many applications.
The same issues have led to sometimes enormous wait times for residence permits in certain cities.
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A spokesman for the city of Magdeburg told the DPA: "A naturalisation procedure depends above all on documents that need to be obtained for identity verification..."
They added that this can take "between three months and five years."
They also noted that "the number of rejected applications is increasing".
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