Search “best cities in Germany for international students” and you’ll get a dozen listicles ranking cities by vibes — nightlife, “friendliness,” architecture. None of that tells you whether you can actually afford to live there on an Ausbildung stipend, or whether your trade has openings there at all. Two things do matter, and both have real official data behind them: cost of living, and where apprenticeship demand and supply actually sit. Here’s what the data says, and how to use it rather than a ranked list that doesn’t apply to your specific trade.
Why there’s no single “best city”
The right city for a hospitality trainee in Bavaria and the right city for an IT trainee in North Rhine-Westphalia are unlikely to be the same place, because Ausbildung placement is driven first by which company offers you a contract, not by which city ranks highest on a list. Your actual decision is usually: given a shortlist of companies that have offered you a place, which one should you prioritise? Cost of living and regional apprenticeship strength are the two factors that should weigh into that choice.
Cost of living: the official picture
Germany’s Federal Institute for Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development (BBSR), working with the Institute of German Economy (IW Köln), publishes a regional price index covering all roughly 400 German districts and independent cities, built from the same consumer basket the Federal Statistical Office uses to calculate the national cost of living. It’s the closest thing Germany has to an official, apples-to-apples cost comparison across the whole country.
The index confirms what’s broadly assumed but puts real numbers on it: Munich is the most expensive city in Germany, with a cost-of-living index roughly 25% above the national average and housing costs over 80% above average. Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Hamburg, and Berlin follow, all meaningfully above the national baseline. At the other end, the cheapest places to live are concentrated in smaller cities and rural districts, particularly in eastern Germany — the study specifically names Pirmasens and Gera among independent cities, and rural districts like the Erzgebirgskreis in Saxony and Wunsiedel in Bavaria, all sitting around 8–10% below the national average. On housing specifically, the Vogtlandkreis in Saxony is the cheapest district in the country, roughly a third below the national average, while Munich’s housing costs are the highest.
The practical takeaway: if two companies offer you similar Ausbildung terms and one is in or near a major metro (Munich, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Berlin) and the other is in a smaller city, your stipend will stretch measurably further in the smaller city — often enough to offset a lower nominal salary if one is on the table.
Apprenticeship supply and demand: it’s regional, and it’s real
Germany’s apprenticeship market isn’t evenly balanced across the country. Nationally, 2025 saw roughly 530,300 registered training positions against about 560,300 people seeking one — a shortfall at the national level, but that number hides sharp regional variation. Baden-Württemberg is a useful concrete example: the state’s regional office of the Federal Employment Agency (Bundesagentur für Arbeit) reported almost 67,000 registered apprenticeship positions by May 2025 against roughly 46,300 applicants — and even with that surplus, more than 34,000 positions were still unfilled that month, while around 22,700 applicants were still searching. That gap is what German labour economists call a “Passungsproblem” — a matching problem, not a shortage of openings, often caused by mismatches in trade, location, or qualifications rather than a genuine lack of positions.
The pattern behind this is well established in German labour market reporting: states and regions with a strong Mittelstand (small and mid-sized manufacturing and engineering firms) — concentrated particularly in southern Germany — tend to report more registered training positions than applicants, while some other states run the opposite way, with more applicants than open positions. What this means practically for you: a state with an apprenticeship surplus in your specific trade is a state where employers are actively short of candidates, which generally works in your favour during placement and interviews.
How to actually check this for your trade
Don’t rely on a general “which state is good” answer — check it for your specific occupation. The Bundesagentur für Arbeit’s regional offices (Regionaldirektionen) publish their own apprenticeship market reports by state and by occupation group, and their nationwide shortage-occupation list shows which trades are structurally short of candidates across the country. We’ve broken that shortage-occupation data down separately in our guide to which Ausbildung trades are actually in shortage in Germany — cross-reference your trade against that list, then check whether the region you’re considering has an apprenticeship surplus or shortfall.
Factor in community and support, not just economics
Cost of living and job market data are the two hard, verifiable factors — but two softer ones matter in practice too. Larger cities (Frankfurt, Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Stuttgart, the Rhine-Ruhr region) have more established Indian community infrastructure — grocery access, temples and cultural associations, and a larger existing base of Indian students and professionals — covered in our guides to Indian food and grocery and Indian community and festivals. Smaller cities and towns often offer a lower cost of living and less competition for apprenticeship places, but a longer trip for community access. Neither is objectively “better” — it depends how much community proximity matters to you against how far your stipend needs to stretch.
A practical framework, not a ranking
When you’re weighing more than one Ausbildung offer, ask three questions in order: does the region have a registered surplus of positions in your specific trade (check the relevant Bundesagentur für Arbeit Regionaldirektion report); how does the city’s cost-of-living index compare to the national average (check the BBSR regional price index); and how far is it from an established Indian community if that matters to your day-to-day life. That combination will get you a genuinely useful answer — one specific to your trade and your priorities — in a way no ranked list of “top 10 cities” ever can.
If you’d like help interpreting your specific offers against this framework, contact our team — we work through this with trainees as part of our broader Ausbildung placement support.
Where this comes from
Cost-of-living figures are from the BBSR/IW Köln Regional Price Index, published by Germany’s Federal Institute for Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development: bbsr.bund.de. National apprenticeship market figures for 2025 are from BIBB (Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training): bibb.de. Baden-Württemberg’s regional apprenticeship figures are from the Bundesagentur für Arbeit’s Regionaldirektion Baden-Württemberg, as reported by nussbaum.de.
