How do German mobile phone tariffs compare internationally?

Are mobile phone contracts in Germany expensive compared to other countries around the world? Well… no, not exactly, according to a new study.

German mobile phone tariffs neither cheap nor expensive in international comparison

The study by the digital association Bitkom, published last week, compared international prices for mobile phones. You might feel like you’re getting a raw deal from your provider, but actually, in the global comparison, Germany landed somewhere in the middle: neither the most expensive, nor the cheapest. 

For their study, Bitkom examined tariffs at 80 providers from 12 countries worldwide. To make comparisons easier, the authors of the study grouped tariffs into different groups according to how much data they included: XS for 1 gigabyte (GB) or more of data, S for 3 gigabytes, M for 10 gigabytes and L for 40 gigabytes. 

Overall, they found that people in Germany could find better deals for each of these tariff groups than users in the US, Switzerland and Finland, while two-thirds of tariffs were offered at lower prices in Germany than in the Netherlands. 

Best deals for people with low data use

However, most of the good deals in Germany seem to be reserved for those who don’t use much data: German operators had the lowest average cost for XS tariffs, and the third cheapest average price for S tariffs. 

If you spend more time using the internet on your phone, the deals are harder to come by: For M tariffs including 5G use, customers in Germany pay an average of 26 euros per month - compared to the equivalent of 72 euros in Switzerland, 14 euros in Spain and 15 euros in Italy. Germany’s neighbour Austria came in near the top of the list with a price of 49 euros. 

“Germany no longer needs to hide when it comes to mobile communications,” said Bitkom president Achim Berg in a press statement. “The prices are internationally competitive and even very cheap compared to Finland, Switzerland and the USA. The competition between national providers is fierce and there are attractive offers at low prices in the entry-level segment as well as in the new 5G network, which many other countries outperform.”