A new study conducted by the Moses Mendelssohn Institute (MMI) in partnership with WG-Gesucht has revealed the average rents that landlords in Berlin and other German cities are charging tenants in 2025.
An MMI assessment of 8.800 listings on WG-Gesucht, Germany’s most popular platform for finding a room in a shared house (Wohngemeinschaft or WG in German) or a one-bedroom apartment, has found that in 2025, tenants in Berlin can expect to pay an average of 650 euros in monthly rent.
Though already high, average asking rents for properties on WG-Gesucht have stayed the same since the same period in 2024. The findings make Berlin the third most expensive German city for prospective tenants using WG-Gesucht. Only in Munich and Frankfurt are average asking rents more expensive on the platform, at 800 euros and 665 euros per month respectively.
Cheaper rents in some eastern German cities bring the average rent for a WG room in 2025 down to 493 euros per month. The MMI listed Halle (Saale) and Dresden (both 350 euros per month on average), Magdeburg (330 euros), Cottbus (287 euros) and Chemnitz (265 euros) as the cheapest German cities for WG renters in 2025, though wages are comparatively low in these regions.
The MMI has been conducting the same assessment since autumn 2013, when the average monthly cost of a WG room in Germany was 335 euros. Since then, wages across Germany have risen more slowly than asking rents. Existing rent restrictions have done little to quell rises, with Conny - a company which helps tenants secure rent reductions if they find they are being charged illegally high amounts - estimating that 75 percent of Berliners pay illegally high rent.
While it is not only students who live in WGs in Germany, the MMI focuses on how rising WG asking rents impact students in particular.
The study assessed 88 cities, towns and regions where there are higher education institutions with over 5.000 matriculated students. The MMI found that only in 23 of these 88 locations was the 380-euro monthly rental allowance of the BAföG German student loan scheme enough to cover rental costs. This was predominantly the case in small places in eastern Germany.
“BAföG should be dynamic and based on price developments,” MMI project leader Stefan Brauckmann wrote in a press release. Brauckmann and fellow researchers made an “urgent appeal” to the German government to fund “budget-orientated housing” and better enforce existing federal programmes such as “Junges Wohnen”, which focusses on developing social housing for young people.
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