Living in Germany is generally expensive, and house prices are only going up. This has led to more and more people choosing to rent rooms in shared flats to try and cut down on costs. But in which cities are rooms the cheapest?

Flat sharing in Germany

For years, the housing market in Germany has continued to get more expensive. All over the country, people are struggling to buy a house and even rent their own flat. This has led to a lot of people deciding to look into flat sharing. Flat sharing, known as Wohngemeinschaft or WG, is common amongst students and apprenticeship trainees in Germany, as well as people who aren’t planning on staying in the federal republic for an extended period of time.

While renting a room in a flat is usually a cheaper housing option, it can still end up being quite expensive in certain German cities. Housing market analyst Empirica recently conducted a survey to find where the cheapest (and most expensive) available rooms are in Germany. The study used data from thousands of adverts for rooms in shared flats, looking at warm rents (base rent plus additional costs) for unfurnished rooms between 10 and 30 square metres.

The study found that rents for rooms in shared flats have risen by 22 percent from the summer semester in 2017 to the summer semester in 2022. “In the university locations as a whole, the standard price for the current semester is 421 euros and thus 22 percent higher than in the summer semester 2017 - or 19 euros higher than in the summer semester 2021,” Empirica said.

Which cities have the cheapest rooms available?

House hunters on a budget can find the cheapest rooms in Saxony-Anhalt, specifically in the cities of Magdeburg and Halle. A WG room in Magdeburg costs 259 euros a month, according to Empirica’s study, whilst a room in Halle will set you back 260 euros a month. Cheap rooms can also be found in Erfurt in Thuringia (300 euros a month), Paderborn in North Rhine-Westphalia (305 euros a month) and Leipzig in Saxony (320 euros a month).

On the other side of the spectrum, the most expensive rooms can be found, unsurprisingly, in Munich. A WG room in the Bavarian capital costs around 650 euros a month. Germany’s other major cities - Hamburg, Frankfurt and Berlin - join Munich in the top five most expensive cities for rooms, with rents in these cities all around 500 euros a month. The top five is rounded off by Cologne, where a WG room costs a fraction less at 490 euros a month.