Germany breaks naturalisation record for fifth year in a row

Nearly 310.000 people naturalised as German citizens in 2025, marking the fifth consecutive year Germany has broken its annual record for the number of international residents naturalised.

How many internationals became German in 2025?

According to preliminary figures reported by Welt am Sonntag, 309.852 international people naturalised as German citizens in 2025, compared to 291.955 people in 2024.

The newspaper collected figures from naturalisation offices in 14 of Germany’s 16 federal states. The Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) is yet to release the official 2025 figures.

The preliminary figures suggest that 2025 was the fifth consecutive year in which Germany broke its own annual record for the number of international nationals naturalised.

While 128.900 people were naturalised in 2020, numbers fell slightly to 109.900 people in 2021. The sharp, ongoing increase accelerated in 2022, when 168.800 people were naturalised. 200.100 people were naturalised in 2023, and naturalisation rates have been rising even faster since then.

Why is Germany seeing a sharp rise in naturalisations?

The ongoing sharp increase is generally attributed to two factors. In 2023, the largest group to naturalise as German citizens were Syrian nationals. This is because, in 2023, many of the Syrian nationals who had arrived in Germany as refugees around 2015 met the eight-year residence requirement for German naturalisation.

Then, in 2024, the SPD-Greens-FDP government reformed the German citizenship law. This reform reduced the residence requirement for citizenship from eight years to five years, and allowed dual citizenship for all nationalities, not just EU citizens.

Citizenship reform still a hot topic in the Bundestag

Following the 2024 reform, the CDU/CSU opposition put promises to reverse it at the centre of its 2025 election campaign. 

Once the centre-right party won the election and formed a coalition with the SPD, the two parties reached a compromise: only the “fast-track naturalisation” part of the 2024 reform would be scrapped. 

The “fast-track naturalisation” policy, which permitted naturalisation after three years of residence if applicants could prove “exceptional integration”, was then scrapped in October 2025.

Despite this compromise and a motion from the far-right AfD to reverse the reform recently failing in the Bundestag due to a lack of support from the governing centre-right CDU/CSU, certain CDU politicians remain unwilling to accept the 2024 reform.

In response to the record-breaking naturalisation numbers, Alexander Throm (CDU) called on his party to reverse the residence requirement to eight years. Throm also wants to make it harder for people who came to Germany as refugees to acquire citizenship.

At the moment, anyone who has legally lived in Germany for more than five years, whether with a temporary or permanent residence permit, is eligible to apply. 

Throm believes that people with protected status (Schutzstatus), such as refugees, should be required to obtain permanent residence (Niederlassungserlaubnis) before the time spent in Germany counts towards the five-year waiting period.

Speaking to The Local, Clara Bünger (The Left Party), said the CDU was "once more waging a dangerous campaign against millions of fellow citizens". "Demanding that people wait longer for citizenship just because more of them are applying is punishing success with bureaucracy," Bünger added.

“A longer waiting period does not make them more German, it just makes them less equal for longer,” the Bundestag member for Dresden said, accusing the CDU of "exploiting current naturalisation numbers for its cheap culture war".