German Bank Account Number and IBAN Explained (2026)

A German bank account number is 22 characters long, and it contains two older numbers inside it. Once you can read those, most of what confuses people about German banking stops being confusing.

The question that brings most people here is narrower and more urgent: is it safe to give out your IBAN. The honest answer has two halves, and both changed recently.

Someone with your IBAN alone cannot transfer money out of your account. They can attempt a direct debit, which is a real and documented fraud in Germany, and it is also reversible for eight weeks with no reason required.

This guide covers the structure of a German bank account number, what details someone needs to pay you, the name check that became mandatory in October 2025, and exactly what your IBAN does and does not expose.

Sending Money to a German Account? Check the Real Cost First

The IBAN is the easy part. What it costs to get money into or out of that account is where the money goes. Enter an amount and see what each provider actually delivers.

Then read on for the 22 digit format, what details a payer needs, and whether sharing your IBAN is safe.

What a German Bank Account Number Looks Like

A German bank account number, written as an IBAN, is 22 characters: the country code DE, two check digits, the eight digit Bankleitzahl, and the ten digit Kontonummer. Written out for a human it is grouped in fours, and typed into a payment form it runs together with no spaces.

The 22 Digits, Broken Down

Take an example IBAN, DE79 0000 0000 1234 5678 90. It reads left to right in four parts, and the Bundesbank sets it out the same way.

DE. The country code. Every German account starts with it.
79. Two check digits, calculated from the rest of the number. They exist so a mistyped IBAN fails validation instead of sending money somewhere real.
0000 0000. The eight digit Bankleitzahl, the bank routing code.
1234 5678 90. The ten digit Kontonummer, your account number at that bank.

That example uses a Bankleitzahl of all zeros, which the Bundesbank does not assign to any bank, so it cannot resolve to a real account. Be careful with example IBANs you find elsewhere: the one printed in the international IBAN registry uses a live Commerzbank routing code.

Where Your Old Kontonummer Lives

Germany did not replace the old bank account number, it wrapped it. Your Kontonummer is the last ten digits of your IBAN and your Bankleitzahl is the eight before it, which is why a German who has banked at the same place for thirty years can still read their old account number out of the new format.

If your Kontonummer was shorter than ten digits, it is padded with zeros on the left to fill the space. A six digit account number 123456 appears in the IBAN as 0000123456, which is why so many German IBANs have a run of zeros in the middle.

Bankleitzahl, Still There and Invisible

The Bankleitzahl is eight digits, numeric, and the Bundesbank assigns the first four while the bank itself sets the last four in consultation. It identifies the institution the way a sort code does in the UK or a routing number in the US.

Since 1 February 2016 you cannot use it to make a payment. Transfers work on the IBAN only, and the Bundesbank's own guidance says the Bankleitzahl is not to be stated separately. It has not disappeared though. The Bundesbank still publishes the full Bankleitzahlendatei four times a year, and the current file carries 13,760 records covering about 3,500 codes that take payments.

Do You Still Need a BIC?

Not for a payment inside the European Economic Area. The BIC requirement was abolished by law, on 1 February 2014 for domestic payments and 1 February 2016 for cross-border ones, and a bank is not permitted to demand it from you.

When the IBAN Is Enough

Article 5(7) of Regulation (EU) No 260/2012 says payment service providers shall not require customers to supply the BIC after those dates. Germany used the available derogation, which is why the practical date here is February 2016 for everything.

So a payment from Germany to Spain, Ireland, Poland or anywhere else in the EEA needs the IBAN and nothing else in the way of routing. The BIC still exists between the banks themselves, it is simply no longer your problem.

When You Still Need the BIC

SEPA is bigger than the EEA, and the IBAN only rule is not. For SEPA payments to Switzerland, Monaco, San Marino, Andorra, Vatican City and the United Kingdom, the Bundesbank says the BIC is still required alongside the IBAN.

Outside SEPA entirely, a payment into a German account is routed over SWIFT and the sending bank will ask for the BIC as a matter of practice. That is correspondent banking convention rather than a rule in the SEPA regulation, but you will still be asked for it.

What Details Someone Needs to Pay You

Inside Germany and across the EEA, two things: your bank account number as an IBAN, and your name exactly as the bank holds it. Since October 2025 the name has stopped being a courtesy and become the thing the payer's bank checks.

Inside Germany and the EEA

The regulation lists what the payer supplies: the amount, the payee's IBAN, the payee's name where available, and any reference information. The reference field holds 140 characters, which is where an invoice number or a flat number goes.

Publish your name in the form the bank actually holds. If your account is in the name of Maria Schmidt and your invoice says M. Schmidt Consulting, the payer's bank will flag a mismatch, and that now creates friction on every single payment you receive.

From Outside the SEPA Area

A payment coming from outside Europe needs your IBAN, your BIC, your full name, usually your address, and often the bank's name and address. The sender will also be asked for more information about themselves than a European payer would.

That is the EU funds transfer regulation at work, which since December 2024 requires transfers to carry the payer's name, account number and either an address, an official document number or a date and place of birth. Inside the EU the rule is lighter and the account numbers alone suffice. What details each route needs is covered further in what bank details you need to transfer money.

What Nobody Can Insist On

A payer cannot require your account to be in a particular EU country, and a company you are paying cannot refuse an account held in another EU state. That is Article 9 of the SEPA regulation, and refusing a valid EU IBAN is known as IBAN discrimination.

It matters if you hold euros with a provider that issues a Belgian or Lithuanian IBAN rather than a German one. The rule is on your side, and complaints in Germany go to BaFin for banks and to the Wettbewerbszentrale for everyone else.

Is It Safe to Share Your IBAN?

Broadly yes, with one real exception. A German bank account number is designed to be given out, it appears on every invoice in Germany, and on its own it cannot be used to move money out of your account by transfer. The exception is direct debit, and it is reversible.

What an IBAN Alone Cannot Do

It cannot authorise a transfer out of your account. Only you can do that, through your own online banking with your own authentication. An IBAN is not a password and it does not log anyone in anywhere.

A bank account number also does not reveal your balance, your transaction history or your address. What it reveals is which bank you are with, because the Bankleitzahl sits in plain sight in the middle of it.

What It Can Do: The Direct Debit Route

This is the real risk and BaFin has published a warning about it. Fraudsters use stolen IBANs to collect money by direct debit, usually operating from abroad under a fictitious company name.

The common mechanism is guest checkout. Some payment providers let a buyer pay online without an account by simply entering an IBAN, and the amount is then collected by direct debit. A criminal enters someone else's IBAN, obtained by phishing, and the victim's account is debited for a purchase they never made.

The structural reason it works is that your bank is not obliged to verify the mandate before debiting you. The direct debit rulebook defines the mandate as consent given to the creditor, and it does not require the debtor's bank to check that consent exists first. That is precisely why strong refund rights exist on the other side.

Your Refund Rights: 8 Weeks and 13 Months

Two separate rights, and both are worth knowing exactly.

8 weeks, no reason needed. You can reverse any SEPA core direct debit within eight weeks of the debit, without giving a reason. Your bank has 10 business days to refund and cannot refuse. It is in PSD2 Articles 76 and 77 and in section 675x of the German civil code.
13 months, unauthorised. If there was never a valid mandate, you have 13 months from the debit date to reclaim it. Your bank must refund immediately, at the latest by the end of the following business day, and restore the original value date.

BaFin states both plainly: no company may debit your account without a valid mandate, and for debits taken without one you have 13 months to demand the money back. So a stolen IBAN used for a fraudulent direct debit is a nuisance and a paperwork problem rather than a permanent loss, provided you check your statements.

How to Block Direct Debits Entirely

You can instruct your bank to set a Lastschriftsperre. Under Article 5(3)(d) of the SEPA regulation you have the right to limit collections by amount or frequency, to block all direct debits on the account, or to run a whitelist or blacklist of specific creditors.

For an account that only ever receives money, a salary account for a new arrival for example, a blanket block costs nothing and removes the entire attack surface described above. Check your statements monthly either way, because the eight week clock runs from the debit, not from the day you notice.

Give Out Details You Are Happy to Publish

If you invoice internationally, you are handing your account number to strangers by design. A separate account for receiving payments keeps your main German account details off invoices entirely.

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The Name Check That Changed German Transfers in October 2025

Since 9 October 2025 every bank in the eurozone has to check the payee name against the IBAN before you can authorise a transfer, and tell you if they do not match. It is free, it is compulsory, and it applies to ordinary transfers as well as instant ones.

What Verification of Payee Does

The rule is Article 5c of Regulation (EU) No 260/2012, inserted by the instant payments regulation of March 2024. Your bank asks the recipient's bank whether the name you typed matches the account behind the IBAN, and shows you the answer before you can approve the payment.

The check happens immediately after you enter the payee details and before you are offered the option to authorise, on every channel: app, browser, and paper orders handed in at a branch while you wait.

The Traffic Light

The Bundesbank describes it as green, amber and red, with four possible outcomes.

Full match. Proceed as normal.
Close match. Your bank shows you the name actually held for that IBAN, for example where two letters are transposed or a company trades under a different name than the one on the invoice.
No match. A warning that authorising might send the money to an account not held by the person you named.
Not possible. The account type or the country is out of scope, or the check failed technically.

You can always proceed anyway. The regulation is explicit that the service must not prevent a payer from authorising the transfer, and consumers cannot opt out of receiving the check.

Who Is Liable After the Check

This is the part that matters and almost nobody explains it. Once your bank has run the check properly, it is not liable if you ignore a warning and the money goes to the wrong place. If your bank fails to run the check and the payment goes wrong as a result, it must refund you without delay.

So the check moves responsibility onto you at the exact moment you click past a red flag. BaFin says it in one line: if the bank performed the verification, it is not liable for the loss.

What It Does Not Cover

Direct debits. The name check applies to credit transfers only, and BaFin confirms direct debits are not covered by it. So the one route a stolen IBAN actually enables is the one route the new protection does not touch.

It is also limited to current accounts. Savings, fixed term, custody, loan and trust accounts are out of scope, existing standing orders continue unchecked, and only new or amended ones are verified.

One anti-phishing point worth carrying: the Bundesbank stresses that the check only ever happens inside your own online banking before you release a payment. Nobody will legitimately ask you to enter details for a name check anywhere else.

Instant Transfers, and Why They Are Harder to Undo

Euro instant payments became compulsory in two steps. Since 9 January 2025 every eurozone bank has had to receive them, and since 9 October 2025 every one has had to offer sending them, at no more than the price of a normal transfer.

What Instant Actually Means

The recipient's bank has to make the money available within ten seconds of the payment order. If it cannot confirm within ten seconds, your account is restored immediately.

The old scheme cap of 100,000 euros per instant payment is gone from the current rulebook, and there is no per transaction limit in the regulation itself. Your own bank can still set limits, and you have the right to set your own daily or per payment maximum and change it whenever you like.

Irreversible, and Why That Matters

An instant transfer is as irrevocable as an ordinary one, and it arrives in seconds rather than a day. The Bundesbank is clear that recovering the money depends on the recipient agreeing to send it back.

Germany also has no scheme that reimburses you for a transfer you were tricked into authorising yourself, the way the UK now does. The name check is a warning, not a guarantee, and it is currently the main structural protection you have. An EU payment services regulation with wider fraud reimbursement has been agreed politically but is not yet law, so do not count on it.

Ten Seconds to Send, No Route Back

An instant transfer is irrevocable and Germany has no reimbursement scheme if you were tricked into authorising it. Slow down on anything large, and check the payee name warning rather than clicking past it.

Read the name check result, amber and red mean stop
Send a one euro test first, on any new supplier or landlord
Set your own daily limit, you have a legal right to one
Never act on details sent by email, call the payee on a known number
Compare before large transfers, the rate matters more the bigger it gets

Check a Transfer Before You Send It

Receiving Money From Abroad Into a German Account

A euro payment from inside the EEA is free or close to it and arrives in a day. A payment from outside it carries a transfer fee, a SWIFT charge and an exchange rate margin, and the margin is usually the largest of the three.

What It Costs and How Long It Takes

Inside the EEA a euro transfer must cost the same as a domestic one, and BaFin gives the benchmarks: one business day for euro payments within the EEA, two if submitted on paper, four for non-euro payments within the EEA, and no statutory limit at all outside it.

That last point is the one to plan around. A payment from outside Europe has no legal deadline, and it also passes through correspondent banks that can deduct their own charges from the amount in transit, so the sum that lands can be smaller than the sum that was sent. Timings across routes are covered in how long an international money transfer takes.

The exchange rate is where the real cost sits. German banks publish transfer fees clearly and mostly do not publish the margin they add to the rate, which is the argument our guide to what banks charge for money transfers sets out with numbers.

The 50,000 Euro Reporting Duty

Cross-border payments above 50,000 euros have to be reported to the Bundesbank under German foreign trade rules, with the threshold raised to that level from the January 2025 reporting month.

It is a statistical reporting duty on you as a resident, not a block on the payment and not a tax. It catches people moving a deposit, an inheritance or the proceeds of a house sale, and it is easy to miss precisely because the payment itself goes through normally.

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If you are paid from another country regularly, the fix is to be paid locally instead of internationally. A multi currency account gives you account details in the sender's own country, so the payment never becomes a cross-border transfer in the first place and the correspondent bank deductions never arise.

Conversions then run at the mid-market rate with the fee shown separately, rather than folded into a rate you cannot see. The product is scored in the Wise review and the mechanics are in the guide to using Wise.

Be Paid Locally Instead of Internationally

The cheapest cross-border payment is the one that never becomes cross-border. Local account details in the sender's own country turn an international transfer into a domestic one at their end, which removes the correspondent bank deductions entirely.

Account details in 20+ currencies: including euros, dollars and pounds
Mid-market rate: the conversion fee is a separate line
The full amount arrives: nothing skimmed in transit
Opens from outside Germany: no Anmeldung needed
Holds the balance in the currency you were paid in: convert when the rate suits you

See What Your Transfer Costs

A Belgian IBAN Is Still a Legal IBAN

Hold euros with a specialist and your euro account details will usually carry a BE or LT country code rather than DE. Sooner or later someone will tell you they need a German IBAN.

They are not entitled to insist. Article 9 of the SEPA Regulation prohibits requiring an account in a particular member state, in both directions, and BaFin states that the practice breaches the regulation. Quoting the article number ends the conversation more often than arguing does.

Check What a Transfer Really Costs

Enter the amount and the two currencies. What matters is what lands in the German account after the fee and the exchange rate, not the headline charge on the receipt.

Sending from the United States, the US to Germany corridor page has live rates for that route, and the general mechanics are in transferring money to an international bank account.

Wise transfer calculator showing the fee and exchange rate on a 1,000 GBP transfer

The Bottom Line

A German bank account number is 22 characters, with your old Bankleitzahl and Kontonummer sitting inside it. Give out the IBAN and your name exactly as the bank holds it, and you have given a payer everything they need inside the EEA.

On safety, be precise rather than anxious. Nobody can transfer money out of your account with your IBAN. They can attempt a direct debit, which is a documented fraud in Germany, and you can reverse it within eight weeks without giving a reason or within 13 months if there was never a mandate. If your account only ever receives money, ask your bank for a direct debit block and the risk goes to zero.

The thing that has genuinely changed is the name check. Since October 2025 your bank tells you when the payee name does not match the IBAN, and once it has told you, the liability for clicking past that warning is yours.

German Bank Account Number and IBAN FAQs

How many digits is a German bank account number?

A German IBAN is 22 characters in total: the country code DE, two check digits, an eight digit Bankleitzahl and a ten digit Kontonummer. The Kontonummer is the part Germans traditionally called the account number, and it sits in the last ten positions. If the original account number was shorter than ten digits it is padded with zeros on the left, which is why so many German IBANs contain a run of zeros in the middle. Written for a human it is grouped in blocks of four, and typed into a payment form it runs together with no spaces.

What is the German bank account number format?

DE, then two check digits, then eight digits of Bankleitzahl, then ten digits of Kontonummer, making 22 characters. As an example, DE79 0000 0000 1234 5678 90 has check digits 79, a Bankleitzahl of 00000000 and a Kontonummer of 1234567890. The check digits are calculated from the rest of the number under an international standard, so a mistyped IBAN fails validation rather than sending money to a real but wrong account. Be wary of example IBANs found online, since some widely copied ones use live bank routing codes.

Can scammers access my bank account with only my IBAN?

They cannot access it or transfer money out of it. An IBAN is not a password, does not authenticate anyone into online banking, and does not reveal your balance or your transactions. What a criminal can attempt with a stolen IBAN is a direct debit, and BaFin has warned about exactly this, typically through online guest checkout flows that collect payment by entering an IBAN alone. Your bank is not required to verify the mandate before debiting you, which is why the refund rights described below exist and are strong.

Can someone empty my bank account with my IBAN?

No, not in any way that sticks. The only route is an unauthorised direct debit, and every such debit is reversible. You can reverse any SEPA core direct debit within eight weeks of the debit date without giving a reason, and your bank has ten business days to refund you in full and cannot refuse. If there was never a valid mandate at all, you have 13 months to reclaim the money and your bank must refund it by the end of the following business day. The practical protection is checking your statements monthly, because the eight week clock runs from the debit rather than from when you notice.

Is it safe to give someone my IBAN in Germany?

Yes, and you have little choice, because the IBAN appears on every German invoice and is the only way anyone can pay you. The genuine risk is a fraudulent direct debit rather than theft by transfer, and it is reversible within eight weeks with no reason required. If you want to remove the risk entirely, ask your bank for a Lastschriftsperre, a direct debit block. Under Article 5(3)(d) of the SEPA Regulation you can block all direct debits, cap them by amount or frequency, or run a list of approved creditors.

Do I still need a BIC for a German bank transfer?

Not for a payment within the European Economic Area. Regulation (EU) No 260/2012 removed the BIC requirement, from February 2014 for domestic payments and February 2016 for cross-border ones, and a bank is not permitted to ask you for it. You do still need the BIC alongside the IBAN for SEPA payments to Switzerland, Monaco, San Marino, Andorra, Vatican City and the United Kingdom, and for any payment from outside SEPA, where the sending bank routes over SWIFT and will ask for it as a matter of practice.

What is a Bankleitzahl and is it still used?

The Bankleitzahl is the eight digit German bank routing code, the equivalent of a UK sort code. The Bundesbank assigns the first four digits and the bank sets the last four. You cannot use it to make a payment any more, since transfers have run on the IBAN alone since 1 February 2016 and the Bundesbank instructs that it should not be stated separately. It has not gone away though: it forms positions five to twelve of every German IBAN, and the Bundesbank still publishes the full directory four times a year.

What details does someone need to send me money in Germany?

Your IBAN and your name exactly as your bank holds it. No BIC is needed from anywhere in the EEA. The reference field carries up to 140 characters for an invoice number or similar. Since October 2025 the name matters more than it used to, because the payer's bank now checks it against the IBAN and shows a warning if it does not match, so publishing your name in a form that differs from the account will create friction on every payment. From outside SEPA the sender will also need your BIC, your full name and usually your address.

What is the payee name check on German transfers?

Since 9 October 2025 every bank in the eurozone must check that the payee name you enter matches the account behind the IBAN, and tell you the result before you can authorise the payment. It is free, compulsory, and applies to ordinary SEPA transfers as well as instant ones, which is a common misconception. You see a full match, a close match showing the name actually on the account, a no match warning, or a not possible result. You can always proceed anyway, but once the bank has run the check it is no longer liable if you ignore a warning.

Do I have to report large transfers into my German account?

Cross-border payments above 50,000 euros must be reported to the Bundesbank under German foreign trade rules, with that threshold applying from the January 2025 reporting month. It is a statistical reporting obligation on you as a resident rather than a tax or a block, and the payment itself goes through normally, which is exactly why people miss it. It typically catches a property deposit, an inheritance or the proceeds of a sale abroad rather than ordinary salary or family transfers.