High tax country Germany?
That's how much Germans pay in their lifetime
Created: 07/20/2022, 16:06
By: Jasmin Pospiech
In hardly any other country do citizens pay as many taxes as in Germany.
Single people are particularly hard hit.
The wealthy have it better.
"Germany is a high-tax country" - This is shown by a current study by the industrialized countries' organization OECD.
It compares the tax and duty burden among the member states every year.
According to this, Germany is the sad runner-up in the country comparison when it comes to taxes and duties.
Only in Belgium do average earners have to pay even more.
Germans pay so many taxes and duties in their lifetime
However, it has been shown that the tax burden mainly affects singles.
A single person with average earnings had to pay 48.1 percent of their salary to the tax authorities in the previous year in the form of taxes and social security contributions.
For comparison: the OECD average was 34.6 percent.
But: "For the wealthy, Germany is still a low-tax country, especially because huge inheritances are almost tax-free," explains Stefan Bach, tax expert at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW).
Income tax accounts for the lion's share of taxes in a German's life.
© Andreas Gora/Imago
So it is only natural to want to know how much Germans have to pay in taxes and duties throughout their lives.
The fintech company Raisin (WeltSparen)
has determined
how much it actually is .
For the analysis, all taxes and duties, transfers and benefits in kind were taken at the personal level
compared, which are simulated in the current IW Report 7/2022 for each year of life.
It turned out that 814,212 euros in taxes and duties are incurred per person, excluding ancillary wage costs, which the employer also pays.
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The lion's share is made up of income tax and the solidarity surcharge (EUR 293,247), followed by VAT (EUR 154,416) and health insurance (EUR 139,390).
The average lifetime income of women and men was used for the results, which is 1,888,076 euros.
This means that the average tax and duty burden is 43.1 percent.
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But there is also good news: Germans still have more per capita, an average of even an increase of 53,738 euros over their entire lifetime.
These are transfer payments by the state, such as Hartz IV, parental allowance, child benefit or housing benefit, as well as state benefits in kind, such as the provision of medicines, dressings, remedies and aids.
This is made possible by the pay-as-you-go pension system, which has been financed annually with over 100 billion euros in additional tax revenue since 2020.