German ‘church tax miracle’ continues with revenues up and congregations down
Dioceses received 6.751 billion euros in 2025, up from 6.628 billion in 2024.
Germany’s 27 dioceses received a year-on-year increase in church tax revenue in 2025, despite losing more than 300,000 registered Catholics in the same year.
The German bishops’ conference announced July 7 that dioceses received 6.751 billion euros (around $7.72 billion) via the church tax system in 2025, up from 6.628 billion ($7.58 billion) in 2024 and 6.515 billion ($7.45 billion) in 2023.
German commentators have dubbed the counterintuitive phenomenon in which church tax revenue rises while the number of German Catholics shrinks the “church tax miracle” (Kirchensteuerwunder).
The German bishops’ conference did not provide a detailed explanation for why revenue increased again in 2025. It limited itself to presenting the latest figure in a table showing how church tax revenue has developed since German reunification in 1990.
The German bishops’ conference presents each year’s church tax revenue in a table with three main columns, showing the total annual sum, the percentage year-on-year change, and the percentage change relative to the baseline year of 1991.
The updated table shows that revenue rose 1.9% year-on-year in 2025 and that the 2025 sum marked a 73.9% increase compared to 1991.
The number of people leaving the Catholic Church in Germany fell to 307,117 in 2025, down from 321,659 in 2024 and 402,694 in 2023.
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In Germany, religious communities that are corporations under public law have a right to levy taxes on their members. Every person in Germany who is officially registered as a member of the Catholic Church is required to pay church tax equivalent to 8-9% of their income tax liability, depending on the region in which they live.
The state collects the sum on the Church’s behalf, usually directly from employees’ paychecks, while claiming roughly 3% of the total revenue.
Church tax revenues pay the salaries of staff working in pastoral care, schools, and social institutions, and go toward pensions, the upkeep of church buildings, and aid projects abroad.
The only way for Catholics registered as Church members to stop paying the tax is to declare formally that they are leaving the Church, after which they are told they may no longer receive the sacraments, hold Church posts, or serve as baptismal or confirmation sponsors, according to a 2012 general decree issued by the German bishops’ conference.
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Many analysts attribute the German “church tax miracle” to rising taxable incomes among remaining registered Catholics, combined with the country’s progressive taxation system, which together offset the fall in numbers.
To help explain this, consider a scenario in which Catholic A earns 30,000 euros a year and pays 3,000 euros in income tax. The church tax is calculated as 9% of their income tax liability, adding 270 euros to their tax bill.
Meanwhile, Catholic B earns 60,000 euros and pays 10,000 euros in income tax, meaning they owe an additional 900 euros in church tax.
While Catholic B earned twice as much as Catholic A, the Church received more than three times as much from Catholic B.
Germany experienced economic challenges in the early 2020s related to the COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukraine war. But inflation slowed and wages began rising again in 2023-2024. Germany’s statistical office recorded a 3.1% increase in real wages in 2024.
Some economists argue that the financial impact of the exodus of Catholics from the German Church is mitigated because many leavers are young people or lower-income earners who paid little church tax. This leaves an older membership base that includes many high earners contributing a large share of the annual revenue.
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Church leaders in Germany believe that the “miracle” cannot last indefinitely, because eventually the membership base will become too small to generate annual rises in church tax income.
Older high earners will eventually retire and die, while younger generations are less likely to remain registered Catholics, reducing the number of future high-income church tax payers.
Church leaders have announced austerity measures in anticipation of a fall in revenue.
In July 2025, Beate Gilles, general secretary of the German bishops’ conference, said that Church officials needed to make “hard cuts” to expenditure from a common fund known as the Association of the Dioceses of Germany, citing a declining number of Catholics and an anticipated fall in church tax income.
In February 2026, the Diocese of Rottenburg-Stuttgart announced that parishes would receive 167 million euros ($191 million) in church tax allocations in 2026, instead of an originally planned 183 million euros ($209 million). The diocese cited “significantly lower church tax income already in 2025.”
Also in February 2026, the Diocese of Fulda announced that it would continue to subsidize only around half of its parishes, because of a fall in parish membership and church tax revenue.
These moves highlight regional differences in church tax revenues that are not reflected in the overall national figure.
The Catholic Church’s church tax revenue followed a similar pattern in 2025 to that of the Evangelical Church in Germany, a federation of 20 independent regional Protestant churches.
The body, known by its German acronym EKD, received around 6.09 billion euros in church tax in 2025, up from 5.97 billion in 2024.
The increase in revenue also occurred despite the EKD losing around 586,000 members — roughly 3% of its total membership — in 2025.