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Apartment buildings in Frankfurt am Main
Photo: A3602 Frank Rumpenhorst / picture alliance / dpa
Times are not easy for tenant households: the prices for gas and electricity are rising rapidly, and a CO₂ tax on heating has been due since 2021.
A ton of carbon dioxide now costs 30 euros.
And the levy will gradually increase in the years to come.
The federal government now wants to relieve tenants by making landlords share in the CO₂ costs.
Previously, tenants had to bear the additional costs themselves.
According to SPIEGEL information, Robert Habeck's (Greens) Ministry of Economics has developed a stage model.
The share with which landlords participate depends on how climate-friendly the building is.
Buildings are divided into seven levels, depending on the amount of CO₂ emissions per square meter per year.
First, newspapers from the Funke media group reported on the plans.
At the lowest, most climate-friendly level with emissions of less than five kilograms of CO₂, the tenants have to bear the entire CO₂ costs for heating.
In the fourth stage, with CO₂ emissions of 20 to 30 kilograms per square meter and year, landlords will have to pay 40 percent and tenants 60 percent, according to the plans.
If the emissions are more than 45 kilograms, for example in poorly insulated and poorly renovated buildings, the residents only have to bear ten percent of the CO₂ costs.
The regulation follows the argument that tenants only have a limited influence on their own energy consumption: they can turn down the heating or, if they have a gas boiler, reduce hot water consumption.
However, you cannot decide whether the apartment is equipped with modern and economical heating or whether it is well insulated.
That is up to the landlord.
Actually, after a long struggle and under pressure from the SPD, the previous federal government had already agreed to split the additional costs of the CO₂ price equally between landlords and tenants.
Even then, there was talk of a tiered contribution by landlords based on the building's CO2 emissions.
But a regulation ultimately failed due to resistance from the Union faction.
She argued that splitting the rent in half was unfair because landlords had no influence on tenant consumption patterns.
There is now a dispute in the traffic light as to when the new regulations should apply.
Economics Minister Habeck had announced that the new model should already take effect in the middle of the year.
The coalition agreement also states that tenants should be relieved by June 1: "If this does not happen in time, the increased costs due to the CO₂ price will be shared equally between the landlord and tenant from June 1, 2022," it says in this.
According to SPIEGEL information, the federal cabinet should have a draft bill by March 16.
But because many older houses in Germany are not yet classified, the classification of the buildings could not work in time.
Marco Luczak, housing policy spokesman for the CDU/CSU parliamentary group, also considers the regulation with its seven levels to be too complicated.
"In the end we need a low-bureaucracy and practical regulation," he tells SPIEGEL.
"The traffic light has to deliver that now."