Les premiers pas d’un expatrié en Allemagne

This chapter is about order. Not about what you have to do in Germany, which every list on the internet will tell you, but about what has to happen before what, and why so many of those lists quietly get the sequence wrong. Your first steps in Germany are not a set of independent errands you can tick off in any order you like. Some of them genuinely block others. Some of them only appear to. Telling those two groups apart is the difference between a settled first month and eight weeks of driving between offices being told to come back with a document you could not possibly have yet.

What follows is the map of the section. Each of the tasks below has its own chapter with the detail in it, and this chapter does not repeat that detail. What it does instead is put the tasks in the order that works, name the clocks that are actually running, and be honest about the famous chicken-and-egg problem. That problem is real, but it is smaller than its reputation, and part of the reason it looms so large is that newcomers are told to treat institutional habits as if they were law.

One framing to carry through everything that follows. German administration is not one system. It is several systems that were built separately, run by different levels of government, and connected only at specific points. Registration is municipal law. Immigration is federal law administered by the Land. Tax is federal. Health insurance is a separate self-governing world of its own. The reason your first weeks feel fragmented is that they genuinely are fragmented. Nobody is coordinating them on your behalf, and no single office has a view of your case. Once you accept that, the sequence stops feeling arbitrary and starts making sense.

Your First Steps in Germany Begin Before You Get on the Plane

The single most consequential decision about your first steps in Germany is made before you arrive, and it is made in a consulate or not at all. Whether you need a visa to enter, and whether you may collect your residence permit after arrival rather than before, depends entirely on your nationality. Get this wrong and no amount of diligence afterwards repairs it.

There are three broad situations. Citizens of the European Union, the European Economic Area and Switzerland have freedom of movement. They need no visa and no residence title, and they will never deal with the immigration authority in the ordinary case. Citizens of a small group of privileged countries may enter without a visa even for a long stay and apply for their permit from inside Germany. Everyone else needs the right visa in their passport before they board, and the type of visa matters, because a visa issued for one purpose does not convert into a permit for another simply because your plans changed.

The privileged group is worth naming precisely, because a great deal of confused advice circulates about it. Section 41 of the Aufenthaltsverordnung, the Residence Ordinance, allows nationals of Australia, Israel, Japan, Canada, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States to enter Germany visa-free even for a stay that is not a short stay, and to obtain the required residence title inside Germany after arrival. Section 41(2) extends the same privilege to nationals of Andorra, Brazil, El Salvador, Honduras, Monaco and San Marino, but only where they will not take up employment. Section 41(4) removes the privilege where an ICT card is being applied for. If you hold one of those passports, you can land, register and apply from within the country, and you do not need to sit in a consular queue abroad.

The condition attached to that privilege is the part people miss. Section 41(3) requires the necessary residence title to be applied for within ninety days of entry. Ninety days from the day you land, not ninety days from when you feel settled, and not ninety days from when the Ausländerbehörde finally offers you an appointment. That deadline is about applying, not about being decided, which is a distinction we come back to below because it is the most useful single fact in this chapter for anyone in that group.

For everyone else the pre-departure work is the visa application itself, and the honest advice is to start it far earlier than seems necessary. Consular appointment waiting times vary enormously by post and by season, and they are outside your control. The federal government’s official portal for skilled workers at make-it-in-germany.com sets out the entry and residence routes, and the Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge, the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees usually shortened to BAMF, is the authority on which titles exist and what each one requires. Use those two rather than a forum post, because immigration rules have moved repeatedly since 2023 and a confidently written answer from two years ago may simply describe a rule that no longer exists.

Two documents deserve attention before you fly, because they are far harder to obtain once you are in Germany. The first is anything that needs an apostille or legalisation: birth certificates, marriage certificates, divorce decrees, academic transcripts. Getting one from your home country’s records office while you are still standing in that country takes an afternoon. Getting one from Germany takes months and often a courier and a sworn translator. The second is proof of your qualifications in a form somebody can read, because recognition of foreign qualifications is a separate process from immigration and it has its own timeline.

The Visa Is Not the Permit, and the Bürgeramt Is Not the Ausländerbehörde

Two confusions cause more wasted appointments than everything else combined, and both are about mistaking one thing for another thing that has a similar name.

The first: a visa is not a residence permit. A national visa, the D visa, is permission to enter Germany and to stay for a limited initial period. An Aufenthaltstitel, a residence title, is permission to live here, and for most people it arrives as an elektronischer Aufenthaltstitel or eAT, a card the size of a credit card with a chip in it. The visa is the door. The title is the room. When the visa expires you must already hold, or have applied for, the title, and applying is a separate procedure at a separate office with a separate queue. Nobody converts your visa into a permit automatically, and the visa carrying a date some months in the future is not a signal that you can relax.

The second confusion is more expensive. The Bürgeramt, the citizens’ office, sometimes called the Einwohnermeldeamt or the Bürgerbüro depending on the city, registers your address. That is all it does in this context. The Ausländerbehörde, the foreigners’ authority or immigration office, decides whether you may stay in Germany and issues your residence title. These are different offices in different buildings under different law with different appointment systems and, usually, dramatically different waiting times. Completing your Anmeldung, the compulsory registration of your address, does not book, trigger or advance anything at the Ausländerbehörde. No clerk at the Bürgeramt is checking your immigration status while they type your address into the register. Our chapter on registration (Anmeldung) and legal documentation goes through both offices in detail.

What connects them is one-directional. The Ausländerbehörde will want proof of your registered address as part of your application, which is why the Anmeldung usually comes first. But you must book the immigration appointment yourself, and in many cities that queue is far longer than the registration queue. Book it the week you arrive, before you have all your documents, because in most cities the appointment is the scarce resource and the paperwork is not. You can assemble documents while you wait for a date. You cannot manufacture a date once you have assembled documents.

Here is the fact that makes this bearable for anyone relying on the section 41 privilege, and it is not widely enough known. Section 81(3) of the Aufenthaltsgesetz, the Residence Act, provides that where a person who is lawfully present in Germany without holding a residence title applies for one, their stay counts as permitted until the Ausländerbehörde decides. Section 81(5) requires the authority to issue you a Fiktionsbescheinigung, a certificate confirming the legal effect of your application. In plain terms: what you must do inside ninety days is apply. Once you have applied, the office’s own backlog is the office’s problem, not a hole in your legal status. Section 81(5a) goes further and provides that employment described in the future title counts as permitted from the moment issuance is initiated, with the permission recorded in the certificate. So the deadline you are racing is the application deadline, and a long decision queue afterwards does not put you out of status.

Your First Week: Somewhere to Live That You Can Legally Register

Almost everything in your first months depends on one thing, and it is not a document. It is an address that somebody is willing and able to confirm in writing.

The reason is statutory. Section 19 of the Bundesmeldegesetz, the Federal Registration Act, makes the Wohnungsgeber, the housing provider, legally obliged to confirm your move-in. That confirmation is the Wohnungsgeberbestätigung, and without it your Anmeldung does not happen. The law is specific about what it contains: the provider’s name and address, the owner’s name if the provider is not the owner, the move-in date, the address of the dwelling, and the names of everyone registering. It is also specific about who may issue it, namely the provider or a person the provider has authorised. The previous tenant cannot sign it for you. Your employer cannot sign it. A friend whose sofa you are sleeping on cannot sign it unless they are genuinely the housing provider for that dwelling.

This is why the accommodation question dominates your first weeks, and why it is worth reading our chapter on trouver un logement before you fly rather than after. It is also why the type of temporary accommodation you choose matters far more than its price. A hotel will not issue a Wohnungsgeberbestätigung. Many holiday-let platforms forbid their hosts from issuing one. A serviced apartment operator or a sublet landlord often will, and some advertise it explicitly because they know it is the thing their tenants need. Our chapter on solutions de logement temporaire covers the options. When you are comparing two short-term places, ask which one will confirm your move-in in writing, and treat that answer as more important than the difference in rent.

One line you must not cross, because it is drawn in the statute itself. Section 19(6) of the Bundesmeldegesetz prohibits offering or supplying a dwelling address for a registration where an actual move-in by that person neither takes place nor is intended. Services that sell you a registration address are offering to help you commit that offence, and the person who registers is exposed as well as the person who sells. Registering where you actually live, even briefly, and re-registering when you move on, is entirely lawful and is what large numbers of people do. Registering where you do not live is not a shortcut, it is a risk with your residence status attached to it.

The Two-Week Clock and the Three-Month Exemption Nobody Mentions

Section 17(1) of the Bundesmeldegesetz says it in one sentence: whoever moves into a dwelling must register with the registration authority within two weeks of moving in. Two weeks from the move-in date, not from your arrival in the country, not from when the appointment system deigns to offer you a slot.

The definition of dwelling is broader than people expect. Section 20 defines a Wohnung as any enclosed space used for living or sleeping. A room in a shared flat is a dwelling. A serviced apartment is a dwelling. A hotel room, read literally, is a space used for sleeping. That literal breadth is exactly why the statute needs an exemption, and it has one.

Section 27(2) is the provision that resolves the “do I have to register at my Airbnb” question, and it is almost never mentioned in English-language guides. Someone who is already registered in Germany and takes a dwelling for a stay of no more than six months need neither register nor deregister for it, and the duty only bites if they have not moved out after six months. The third sentence deals with everyone else: for persons who otherwise live abroad and are not registered in Germany under section 17(1), that duty arises after three months.

Read the condition carefully before you rely on it, because it carries a real limit. The exemption is written for people who still live abroad and are in Germany temporarily. It says “sonst im Ausland wohnen”, who otherwise live abroad. If you have given up your home in your old country and moved to Germany, you have moved into a dwelling in the ordinary sense of section 17(1), and the two-week clock runs from the day you move into the place you actually live. The exemption is not a licence to spend three unregistered months here after emigrating, and a Bürgeramt clerk will not read it that way. Where it genuinely helps is the narrow, common case of the person who is here on a short assignment, still has a home abroad, and is being told by well-meaning colleagues that they are already illegal after fourteen days. They are usually not.

For the ordinary newcomer the practical reading is simpler and it has nothing to do with fines. Register as soon as you have a dwelling whose provider will confirm the move-in, because the Anmeldung is the trigger for the rest of the chain, and every week you delay it is a week added to everything downstream. The deadline is a legal duty, but the reason to hurry is mechanical, not punitive.

One thing you do not have to do, and which trips up people who moved within Germany before: there is no Abmeldung when you move house inside Germany. Section 17(2) imposes the deregistration duty only on a person who moves out of a dwelling and does not take a new dwelling in Germany. Register at the new address and the old one is closed automatically. The Abmeldung exists for people leaving the country.

Do Not Go Hunting for an Online Shortcut in Week One

Germany has built a real national online registration service, and it is called the elektronische Wohnsitzanmeldung, the electronic residence registration, usually shortened to eWA. It works. It is expanding across the Länder. And for most readers of this chapter, in their first weeks, it is unavailable.

There are two reasons, and each on its own is enough. The service does not cover Zuzug aus dem Ausland, moving in from abroad, at all. And using it requires the Online-Ausweisfunktion, the electronic identity function, which in practice means a German Personalausweis or an EU eID card; a passport has no such chip and cannot be used. There is a third restriction aimed squarely at this audience: the service is currently not usable with an elektronischer Aufenthaltstitel, so even a third-country national who already lives here, already holds the German residence card, and simply wants to move across town cannot use the online route today.

The practical instruction is therefore blunt. If you have just arrived from abroad, plan on the in-person appointment and stop looking for a way around it. The time you spend hunting for a digital shortcut is time not spent refreshing the appointment calendar, which is the thing that actually determines when you get registered. Our chapter on registration (Anmeldung) and legal documentation sets out the current rollout and the exact restrictions, and it is the place to check before you conclude the online route is open to you.

The Document Chain: What Arrives on Its Own and What You Must Chase

After the Anmeldung, a chain of numbers and cards comes into existence. Understanding which ones arrive by themselves and which ones need you to act is most of what separates a calm first month from an anxious one.

The Steueridentifikationsnummer, the tax identification number usually shortened to Steuer-ID or IdNr, arrives on its own. You do not apply for it. The Bundeszentralamt für Steuern, the Federal Central Tax Office, assigns it once the registration authority has transmitted your data, which is to say your Anmeldung triggers it automatically, and the eleven-digit number then comes by post to the address you registered. There is no official promise about how long that takes. Plan for a few weeks. The BZSt does give you a backstop: if nothing has arrived within three months of your first registration in Germany, you can chase it through its online portal or in writing and it will follow up. The number is permanent and survives every later move, marriage and name change. It is not the same thing as a Steuernummer, which your local Finanzamt issues for a specific tax matter, and it is not a VAT number. Our chapter on Comprendre les impôts allemands explains how the numbers fit together.

The Sozialversicherungsnummer, the social insurance number, also arrives on its own, but only once you have a job. It is issued by the Deutsche Rentenversicherung, the state pension insurer, and it identifies you across the social insurance system for the rest of your working life. When you start your first job subject to social insurance contributions, your employer registers you with your Krankenkasse, your health insurance fund, the Krankenkasse requests the number from the pension insurer, and the confirmation reaches you by post. Since 2023 that document is called the Versicherungsnummernachweis, which replaced the older Sozialversicherungsausweis. If you are not yet employed, the absence of this number is not a problem you need to solve. It will appear when it is needed. Our chapter on the système de sécurité sociale explains what the number connects you to.

The elektronische Gesundheitskarte, the electronic health card usually called the eGK, is the one that does need you. It is issued by your Krankenkasse, not by any authority, and it only exists once you have actually enrolled with a fund and given them a photo. Nothing about your Anmeldung produces it. It is the card you show at every doctor’s reception, and until it arrives your practice will ask you for a provisional certificate from your fund or, in some cases, ask you to pay privately and reclaim. Our chapter on the German healthcare system covers how to use it and what happens if you turn up without it.

The pattern is worth stating plainly, because it removes a lot of unnecessary worry. Tax number: automatic, be patient. Social insurance number: automatic once employed, ignore until then. Health card: not automatic, act. And all three depend on post reaching you, which brings us to the least glamorous but most consequential task of your first week. Put your name on the letterbox, legibly. In Germany post is delivered to the name on the box, not to a flat number, and a missing nameplate is the single most common reason official letters vanish. If you are subletting, insist on having your name added. A Steuer-ID that goes back to sender because the box said someone else’s name will cost you more time than any queue.

The Real Dependency Graph Behind Your First Steps in Germany

Now the part this chapter exists for. The famous chicken-and-egg loop goes like this: you need an address for the Anmeldung, the Anmeldung for the Steuer-ID, the Steuer-ID for a bank account, a bank account to rent a flat, and a flat to have an address. Stated that way it is closed, and it makes people despair. Stated accurately, it is not closed at all, because two of those five links are not real.

Start with the links that are real. You genuinely cannot register without a Wohnungsgeberbestätigung; that is section 19 of the Bundesmeldegesetz and no amount of persuasion changes it. You genuinely cannot get a Steuer-ID without registering, because the registration authority transmitting your data is what triggers the assignment. Those two are statute. Everything else in the loop is softer than it looks.

The bank account link is the one most worth dismantling, because it is repeated everywhere as if it were law and it is not. German tax law does oblige a bank to record your Steuer-ID for every account holder. But the Abgabenordnung, the Fiscal Code, provides that if you have not supplied the number by the time the business relationship begins, the bank must query it from the Bundeszentralamt für Steuern by automated procedure, and it has until the end of the third month after the relationship starts to do so. The statute expressly contemplates an account being opened before the Steuer-ID is known, and puts the work of finding it on the bank. So a bank that tells you it cannot open your account because your Steuer-ID has not arrived is describing an internal preference, not a legal requirement. It is allowed to have that preference for an ordinary commercial account. It is not allowed to have it for a Basiskonto.

That is the second broken link. Every consumer lawfully resident in the European Union has a statutory right to a Basiskonto, a basic payment account, under the Zahlungskontengesetz. The grounds on which a bank may refuse one are a closed list, and creditworthiness is not on it. Neither is a negative Schufa record, nor unemployment, nor the absence of any German financial history at all. Neither, crucially, is the absence of a registered address: the entitlement extends expressly to people with no fixed abode, which it must, since a right that excluded the homeless would exclude precisely the people it was written for. Our chapter on ouvrir un compte bancaire en Allemagne sets out the full refusal list and the free BaFin complaint route if a branch says no anyway.

One more piece of folklore worth killing while we are here: your foreign IBAN is not allowed to be a problem. Under the SEPA Regulation, a payer or payee in the euro area may not insist that the account be held in a particular country. A landlord or employer who tells you they cannot handle a non-German IBAN is describing their own software, not the law.

So the honest graph looks like this. Accommodation whose provider will confirm the move-in is the true root, and it is the only genuine bottleneck. The Anmeldung depends on it. The Steuer-ID depends on the Anmeldung and then arrives by itself. The residence permit application depends on the Anmeldung, and for the section 41 group it has its own ninety-day clock running independently from the day of entry. Health insurance does not depend on any of them and should be started immediately. The bank account does not depend on the Steuer-ID and does not strictly depend on the Anmeldung either, though having the Meldebescheinigung, the registration confirmation, makes the ordinary commercial route far smoother. Everything else, and there is a lot of everything else, hangs off those.

The practical ordering that works for most people, therefore: secure any lawful accommodation whose provider will confirm the move-in; book both the Bürgeramt appointment and the Ausländerbehörde appointment the moment you have a move-in date, because appointments are the scarce resource; sort your health insurance in parallel, since it depends on nobody; register; let the Steuer-ID come to you; open the account with the Meldebescheinigung, or with a Basiskonto application if you cannot wait; give the Steuer-ID to your employer as soon as it lands so you are not taxed in the emergency bracket; and only then start on the long tail.

The Clocks That Are Actually Running

Four deadlines are worth putting on a calendar in your first week. Everything else can be sequenced around them.

Fourteen days from moving into your dwelling for the Anmeldung, under section 17(1) of the Bundesmeldegesetz. Ninety days from entry to apply for your residence title, if you are relying on the section 41 privilege, and remember that this deadline is about applying rather than being decided. One month from the day your insurance duty arises, if you fall under the private-insurance obligation: section 193(3) of the Versicherungsvertragsgesetz requires every person resident in Germany to hold health cost insurance with an insurer licensed in Germany, and section 193(4) attaches a premium surcharge of one monthly premium for each further started month if you apply later than one month after the duty arises. And your visa’s expiry date, which is not a deadline for being decided but a deadline for having applied.

Two of those are worth a further word. The health insurance duty is genuinely universal and it attaches to residence, not to registration, employment or paperwork. Section 5(1) number 13 of the Fifth Social Code sweeps into statutory insurance anyone with no other entitlement to cover in case of illness, and section 193(3) of the Versicherungsvertragsgesetz catches everyone else. There is no lawful gap where you live in Germany and are simply uninsured. This is also why health insurance should be near the front of your queue rather than the back: it depends on none of the other steps, it is a standard requirement for the residence permit anyway, and the clock on it starts running whether or not you have noticed. Our chapter on Les essentiels de l'assurance en Allemagne covers what is compulsory and what is merely sensible, and the choice between statutory and private cover is set out in our chapter on public vs. private health insurance. That choice is much harder to reverse than it looks, so read it before you sign rather than afterwards.

The other is the ninety-day rule, because it fails quietly. Nobody writes to remind you. There is no letter. You simply discover, on day one hundred and ten, that the appointment you have been patiently waiting for was supposed to be preceded by an application you never filed. If you are in that group, find out this week how your city takes applications. Some accept a written application by post or through a portal that stops the clock, with the appointment for biometrics coming later. That distinction between filing and attending is exactly the distinction section 81(3) turns on, and it is the reason the rule is survivable.

What Feels Urgent But Is Not

An equally useful list is the one of things newcomers rush that do not need rushing, because rushing them costs the time the real deadlines need.

Electricity and internet are not week-one tasks. Electricity in particular has a legal safety net that almost nobody explains: if you move in and do nothing, you are supplied anyway by the local Grundversorger, the basic supplier, and you can switch to a cheaper contract afterwards with short notice. Nobody’s lights are off because they did not sign a contract on day three. Internet is different in the opposite direction: it cannot be rushed, since installation appointments in some cities run to weeks regardless of when you order, so order it early but do not treat a slow date as a crisis. Our chapter on configuration des utilitaires explains what is included in your rent, what is not, and the Rundfunkbeitrag letter that will arrive automatically after your Anmeldung whether you own a television or not.

Converting your driving licence is not urgent for most people, because foreign licences from many countries remain valid for an initial period after you take up residence, and the conversion process has its own rules and its own deadline. Do not spend week two on it. Our chapter on conduire en Allemagne covers the timing. Public transport is likewise a thing you can figure out as you go rather than in advance; you do not need a subscription on day one, and our chapter on les bases des transports en commun explains the fare systems once you have a reason to care. A Schufa record cannot be rushed either, because it is built from German financial history you do not yet have, and no amount of anxiety accelerates it. Landlords who insist on one are not entitled to a Basiskonto refusal on that basis, and our chapter on crédit et prêts en Allemagne explains what a thin file means and how it thickens.

Language learning belongs in this category too, but for a different reason. It is not urgent in week one and it is the most important thing you will do in year one. Do not confuse those. Our chapter on assessing your German language level is a sensible starting point once the paperwork settles, and our chapter on adaptation culturelle initiale covers the unwritten rules that no office will tell you about.

Month Two and Beyond: The Second Wave

Once you are registered, insured and paid into an account, a second wave of tasks arrives, and it is calmer because nothing in it is racing a statutory clock.

Your Steuer-ID goes to your employer’s payroll department the day it arrives. Until it does, you are likely to be taxed in Steuerklasse VI, the emergency tax class with the harshest deductions, and while the overpayment comes back to you eventually through your annual return, “eventually” means the following year. This is the single highest-value five-minute task of your first months and people forget it because nobody chases them for it.

Then come the things that were never blocked, only postponed: a Haftpflichtversicherung, personal liability insurance, which is not legally required and which almost every household here has anyway because German liability is unlimited; a Hausratversicherung if you own anything worth insuring; a look at whether your employer’s pension arrangements are worth joining. If you moved into a temporary place first, the Ummeldung to your permanent address comes now, and remember it is a registration at the new address, not a deregistration at the old one.

And this is the point where the general advice stops being useful and your specific situation takes over. A freelancer’s second month looks nothing like an employee’s. A family with school-age children has an entire parallel process nobody else has. A student has different insurance rules and a different permit. The section chapters listed at the end of this page are organised so you can go straight to the ones that describe you and ignore the rest.

Tools That Prepare the Paperwork

Werkzeu.ge is a browser-based collection of tools for German bureaucracy, built by Cryon UG, the company behind WeLiveIn.de. It is worth naming here because several of its tools map directly onto the sequencing problems this chapter describes. Two things to be clear about before anything else. It prepares and generates documents; it never submits anything to any authority. There is no Bürgeramt integration, no Ausländerbehörde integration, and no Finanzamt filing. You will still attend the appointment in person, with paper, like everyone else. And it is in beta until 30 November 2026, with its own terms saying tools may be incomplete or buggy, so treat its output as a well-prepared draft rather than an oracle.

For the pre-departure question of which title applies to you, the Aufenthaltstitel-Checker walks through the residence title categories, and the Blue-Card-Checker does the same for the EU Blue Card route specifically. Both are in the Gast tier, meaning free and usable without an account. They are orientation tools, not decisions: BAMF and the make-it-in-germany portal are the authorities, and your own Ausländerbehörde has the final word on your case.

For the paperwork itself, the Formule is the piece that matters most for a newcomer. It is a searchable library of official federal, state and municipal forms, each carrying a source link, a retrieval date, a status and a checksum, filled in the browser with your entries staying on your device, and with documented gaps where a form is missing rather than a silent omission. It is Gast tier, free without an account. Alongside it, the Amtsprofil stores the details you will otherwise retype onto every form for a year and prefills them. Amtsprofil sits in the Kostenlos tier: free, but it needs a free account, because it has something to store.

For the bank account, the Bank-Konto-Checkliste sets out what to bring, and it is Gast tier. For understanding what the Steuer-ID actually is before payroll asks you for it, Steuersystem 101 is also Gast tier. The Anmeldung/Ummeldung/Abmeldung tool covers the registration sequence in more depth, and unlike the others named here it sits in the paid Plus tier, so expect to pay for that one.

Three honest caveats. The free tier carries advertising. Tiers and features move during beta, so check current pricing at werkzeu.ge/en/pricing rather than trusting a figure quoted in any article, including this one. And none of it is legal, tax or financial advice; the platform’s own terms say so, and this chapter is not advice either. It describes how the offices generally work. Your case may not be general, and where your residence status is at stake, an immigration lawyer or a recognised advice centre is worth the fee.

Que faire ensuite

If you have not left yet, the useful work is all pre-departure. Establish which of the three nationality situations you are in, and if you are in the section 41 group, write “apply by [date]” ninety days from your planned arrival somewhere you will see it. Collect every certificate that might ever need an apostille while you are still in the country that issues them. Start the visa appointment process earlier than feels reasonable if you need a visa at all.

If you have already landed, do these four things this week and let the rest wait. Ask your accommodation provider, in writing, whether they will issue a Wohnungsgeberbestätigung, and if the answer is no, start looking for somewhere that will, because that single form is the root of the entire chain. Book the Bürgeramt appointment and, separately, the Ausländerbehörde appointment, without waiting until your documents are complete. Start your health insurance, because it depends on nothing else and its own clock is already running. And put your name on the letterbox, because every number in this chapter arrives by post.

Then read the chapter for whichever step you are on. The registration process in full is in our chapter on registration (Anmeldung) and legal documentation. The account, including the Basiskonto right and what to do when a branch refuses, is in our chapter on ouvrir un compte bancaire en Allemagne. What is compulsory to insure and what is merely wise is in our chapter on Les essentiels de l'assurance en Allemagne. And the housing market, which is the hardest part of all of this and the one nobody can shortcut for you, is in our chapter on trouver un logement.

The last thing worth saying is about expectations. Your first weeks in Germany will involve queues, forms in a language you may not read yet, and at least one clerk who tells you something that contradicts what the last clerk told you. That is not a sign that you are doing it wrong. It is a sign that you are dealing with several unconnected systems at once, which is what this country’s administration genuinely is. Knowing which step actually blocks which is the whole advantage, and if you have read this far, you now have it.