Leaving Germany: what happens to your pension

📌The short version

If you have at least 60 calendar months of contributions, you have earned a German pension. It is paid to you wherever you live, at German retirement age, for the rest of your life. Nationality is irrelevant and there is no requirement to return to Germany.

If you have fewer than 60 months, Germany pays nothing — but two routes may still be open. Foreign contribution periods can be counted towards reaching the five years, and where they cannot, a refund of your own contributions may be possible instead.

🛂How foreign periods help you qualify

Within the EU and EEA, and in Switzerland, contribution periods are aggregated. Three years in Germany plus four in Spain gets you over the German five-year line, and each country then pays its own pension for its own years. Germany does not pay for the Spanish years — aggregation helps you qualify, it does not transfer money between systems.

The same principle applies with countries that have a bilateral social security agreement with Germany. The list includes the United States, Canada, Japan, India, South Korea, Australia, Brazil, Turkey, Israel, the Philippines and others. The details differ agreement by agreement, which is why it is worth checking your specific case rather than assuming.

Where no agreement exists, German and foreign periods stay separate, and the five-year threshold has to be met with German months alone.

📌Getting paid abroad

Deutsche Rentenversicherung transfers pensions worldwide, to a German account or a foreign one. You apply from abroad; there is no need to appear in person.

Two practical points. Pensioners living outside Germany receive an annual Lebensbescheinigung — a life certificate to be signed by a local authority and returned; miss it and payments stop until it arrives. And where the pension is paid to a foreign account, exchange rate movements and transfer costs are yours to carry.

🧾Tax: which country gets to tax it

That depends on the double taxation agreement between Germany and your country of residence. Some agreements give the taxing right to Germany as the paying state, others to your country of residence, and a few split it. There is no single answer, and the treaty is what settles it.

Germany has also extended limited tax liability to pensions paid abroad in many cases, which surprises people who assumed leaving ended the matter. This is a question for a tax adviser in both countries, not a detail to work out from a forum post.

📌What to do before you go

📌If you are just short of five years

This is the situation worth getting advice on, because it is fixable in more cases than people realise. Voluntary contributions can fill missing months for those entitled to make them — which includes Germans abroad and, through EU equal-treatment rules, generally EU, EEA and Swiss nationals.

The cost is modest against the payoff: the minimum voluntary contribution in 2026 is €112.16 a month, and a lifetime pension from 67 is worth many times a one-off refund of the employee share.

📄A checklist for your last six months