“Bürgergeld is now history.”
With these words, Christian Social Union (CSU) leader and Prime Minister of Bavaria, Markus Söder announced the end of an era in Germany’s ever-changing welfare system.
The statement is a bit of an exaggeration: Germany’s long-term unemployment benefit known as “Citizen’s allowance” (Bürgergeld) is not really to be scrapped altogether so much as it is to take on a new name – “New basic security” (Neue Grundsicherung).
Along with the new name, it is also to be made less forgiving, with added penalties for recipients who miss an appointment at the Jobcentre, for example, or refuse a job offer which the Jobcentre deems reasonable.
READ ALSO: 'Bürgergeld is history' - How Germany's unemployment benefit is being reformed
But the change does mark a dramatic shift in how Germany’s widely used unemployment benefit is applied, and it will affect millions of Germans and foreign residents alike.
How many people receive Bürgergeld?
As of August 2025, around 5.3 million people received Bürgergeld, according to a report by the German association Für soziales Leben (For social life).
Of those, around 3.9 million were considered employable earners and 1.4 million were non-employable persons, mostly children under the age of 15.
Note that not every recipient of Bürgergeld is unemployed. There are also minors in poor families, students, people in professional training and people in integration courses or seeking further work qualifications.
Also many recipients face real hurdles to taking up employment, such as health issues or needing to care for children or relatives.
How many recipients are immigrants?
As of 2025, German citizens made up around 53 percent of Bürgergeld recipients, while people without a German passport made up the other 47 percent.
According to figures from the Federal Employment Agency, as of the end of 2024 this amounted to 2,599,139 foreign residents receiving the benefit.
Of those, the biggest group was people from Ukraine, who accounted for just over 700,000.
In a purported effort to cut costs, the black-red coalition government of the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) and centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) has moved to end Bürgergeld payments to Ukrainian refugees who have entered the country since April 1st of this year. They would instead be eligible for asylum seeker benefits.
But according to German media reports, the rule change won't amount to much savings in the national budget.
FACT CHECK: Would cutting benefits for Ukrainians boost employment in Germany?
After Ukrainians the next biggest groups of recipients were people from Syria and the Arab Republic (512,161), people from Afghanistan (200,578), people from Turkey (192,077) and people from the Western Balkans (111,529).
The numbers of foreigners receiving Bürgergeld has often been highlighted as evidence for arguments against immigration.
For example, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party had requested a list of the most common names of Bürgergeld recipients, presumably expecting that the names would primarily belong to foreign ethnicities. But the results showed that the top four names were traditionally German; Michael, Andreas, Thomas and Daniel.
Still, a common belief persists – fuelled by populist rhetoric and unfair reporting in German media – that foreigners take advantage of Germany’s welfare system more than the country’s native-born citizens.
A fact check by German non-profit newsroom Correctiv from 2023 unpacked how an article by Bild used real figures on benefit recipients to create graphs that were highly misleading. The Bild article was then cited by a number of right-wing politicians to back up populist anti-immigration arguments.
READ ALSO: Are immigrants in Germany taking advantage of the welfare state?
How much does it cost?
In 2024, the federal budget included costs around €51.7 billion for the Bürgergeld system.
That’s up significantly from ten years prior, when around €32 billion was spent on what was then called “unemployment benefit II” (ALG II) in 2014.
But the entire federal budget has grown in the past ten years, and measured against the size of the whole budget, unemployment benefits accounted for a similar share of expenses.
The total costs include not just the standard benefits and the rent paid out, but also costs for administration and support programmes.
A slight reduction in this expenditure is planned for the coming years: around €52 billion is planned for 2025, and just under €51 billion in 2026.
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