Minijob and geringfügige Beschäftigung

A large share of German employment is not a job in the sense the rest of this repo describes. It is geringfügige Beschäftigung — legally employment, with a contract, a minimum wage and holiday entitlement, but deliberately placed outside most of the social insurance system.

It matters here for three reasons: it is how much of hospitality, retail, cleaning and student work is structured; it is a common first job for new arrivals; and the version used in private households is the legal alternative to what is otherwise an overwhelmingly undeclared market.

Two different things called “geringfügig”

§8 SGB IV defines two, and they are not variants of each other:

Geringfügig entlohnt (Minijob) Kurzfristig
Limit An earnings ceiling per month 3 months or 70 working days per calendar year
Earnings cap Yes None
Duration cap None Yes
Condition — Must not be berufsmäßig — i.e. not your livelihood
Typical use Ongoing side work Harvest, events, seasonal trade

The kurzfristige form is the 70-day rule that structures German harvest labour — see Landwirt/in, where it is the dominant employment model and carries a documented enforcement record.

The earnings threshold is not a fixed number

Do not memorise it. Since October 2022 the Minijob ceiling has been indexed to the Mindestlohn by statute:

monthly ceiling = Mindestlohn × 130 ÷ 3, rounded up to the full euro

The formula represents ten hours a week at the minimum wage. It means the ceiling moves every time the minimum wage does — including on the rise already scheduled for 01.01.2027. Any figure written down here would be wrong within the year, so compute it, or read the current value from the Minijob-Zentrale.

Two practical points the formula hides:

  • Occasional overruns are allowed. Unpredictably exceeding the ceiling in a limited number of calendar months per year does not destroy the Minijob status. Planned overruns do.
  • Multiple Minijobs add up. Take a second one and the combined earnings are tested against the same ceiling. Alongside a main insured job, exactly one Minijob stays exempt; a second is fully insurable from the first euro.

What a Minijob does and does not build

This is the part that is routinely misunderstood, usually in the worker’s favour and against their interest.
Income tax Normally none — the employer pays a 2% flat Pauschsteuer instead
Health insurance Builds nothing. A Minijob does not insure you. You must be covered some other way — family cover, a main job, or your own contributions. See health insurance
Unemployment insurance Nothing at all. Minijobs are exempt, so no Minijob-year ever counts toward an ALG I claim, however many you hold and however long
Pension Compulsory by default, and you contribute a small top-up — but you may opt out with a Befreiungsantrag, and most people do
Accident insurance Full cover, employer-funded, including in private households

The opt-out is the trap. Signing the Befreiung raises your take-home by a few euro a month and costs you the pension credit, the entitlement periods that pension credit protects, and Riester eligibility. Someone working Minijobs for a decade and opting out each time reaches retirement with that decade nearly empty. Think before signing it; the form is usually put in front of you on day one as a formality.

Rights a Minijob does carry

Because it is employment, all of the following apply, and all of them are routinely denied in practice:

  • the Mindestlohn, and therefore a strict limit on how many hours the money can buy
  • paid holiday, pro rata to the days worked per week
  • Entgeltfortzahlung — continued pay when sick, and on public holidays
  • Kündigungsschutz, Mutterschutz, and written-contract rights
  • documented working time — recording hours is mandatory for Minijobs under the MiLoG, and is the thing a Zoll check asks for first

If your Minijob has no holiday and no sick pay, it is not a different kind of job. It is a non-compliant one.

Midijob — the Übergangsbereich above it

Earn above the Minijob ceiling and you land in the Übergangsbereich, running to €2,000 per month. Here you are fully insured — health, care, pension and unemployment — but your employee contributions start near zero at the bottom of the band and slide up to the normal rate at the top. The employer pays more, not less.

Since the 2022 reform, pension entitlement in a Midijob is calculated on the full gross, not on the reduced contribution. So a Midijob builds full cover at a discount, and is strictly better for the worker than a Minijob at the same hours.

This is worth knowing when an employer offers to keep you “just under the limit”. The step from Minijob to Midijob is the step from no unemployment cover and no health insurance to both.

Private households: Haushaltsscheck and §35a EStG

The overwhelming majority of domestic cleaning and care in Germany is undeclared. It is the largest Schwarzarbeit market in the country, and the reason is a belief that declaring it is expensive and complicated. Both halves of that are wrong.

The Haushaltsscheck procedure — register the household employment with the Minijob-Zentrale (run by Knappschaft-Bahn-See), who calculate the contributions and collect them by direct debit twice a year. There is no payroll to run.

The employer-side flat rate for a household Minijob is roughly half of the commercial one — about 15% of gross including accident insurance, against roughly 30%+ for a commercial Minijob.

Then §35a EStG gives most of it back. The household deducts 20% of the cost directly from its tax bill — not from taxable income, from the tax:

Route Deduction Annual cap on the deduction
Haushaltsscheck Minijob 20% of costs €510
Employed above the Minijob limit, or an invoiced cleaning firm / self-employed cleaner 20% of costs €4,000
Handwerkerleistungen — tradesman’s labour in the home 20% of the labour element €1,200

Conditions for the larger two: an invoice, and payment by bank transfer. Cash kills the deduction, which is precisely the design.

Net effect: for a household Minijob at the ceiling, the levies and the tax credit substantially cancel. Declaring costs far less than most people assume — and the difference it makes to the worker is accident cover, sick pay, pension credit and a provable income history.

Caps are set in §35a EStG and change with tax legislation; figures accessed 2026-09.

Why the repo cares

  • It is the legal shape of the Reinigungskraft and Haushaltshilfe tiers, where there is no qualification and therefore no recognition story — employment status is the story.
  • It underpins the flexible staffing of hospitality.
  • For a new arrival, a Minijob is often the fastest legal income — and the one that builds the least. Know which trade you are making.

For non-EU citizens: a residence permit tied to skilled work does not automatically permit a Minijob on the side, and a Minijob alone supports no skilled-worker permit at all. Check the conditions printed on your own permit before taking one.

Sources

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