A Nebenkosten statement arrives once a year, is written in German, runs to several pages of numbers, and ends with a figure you owe. Most people pay it. A large share of these statements contain errors, and German law gives you a year to look — plus the right to see every receipt behind the total.
1. What a landlord may charge you for
Two conditions have to be met before any operating cost can be passed to you at all.
Your contract has to say so. Without a clause transferring operating costs to the tenant, they are included in the rent and cannot be billed separately.
The cost has to be on the list. German law does not let a landlord invent categories. The Betriebskostenverordnung (BetrKV) sets out the catalogue — property tax, water and sewage, heating, lift, street cleaning and refuse, building cleaning, garden maintenance, lighting, chimney sweep, building and liability insurance, caretaker, communal aerial or cable, laundry facilities, and a narrow residual category for other genuinely recurring operating costs.
What is not on that list matters more, because it is where the money usually is: repairs and maintenance, administration costs, the landlord's own management time, bank charges, legal fees, and the cost of vacant flats. Those are the landlord's, not yours, however they are labelled.
2. The twelve-month rule, which cuts both ways
§ 556(3) BGB puts a clock on both sides, and the two are frequently confused.
- The landlord has twelve months from the end of the billing period to deliver the statement. A period running to 31 December means the statement must reach you by the end of the following December. Miss it, and a landlord generally cannot claim a back-payment any more — the narrow exception being a delay they were not responsible for. A credit in your favour survives regardless.
- You have twelve months from the day the statement reached you to raise objections. After that, objections you could have made are normally shut out.
Both are calendar deadlines, and calendar deadlines are the one thing on this page that is pure arithmetic. Work out your own date →
3. What a statement has to contain
A statement has to be understandable to a tenant without an accountant. As a minimum it needs to show:
- the billing period, which may not exceed twelve months;
- the total costs of the building, per category;
- the allocation key — how those totals are split between flats;
- your share, calculated from that key;
- the prepayments you actually made;
- the resulting balance.
A bill that gives you only a final figure, or that names costs without showing the building total and the key, is missing the parts that make it checkable at all.
4. The errors that turn up most often
- Repairs dressed as maintenance. Replacing a broken boiler is a repair. Servicing it is an operating cost. The line item rarely says which.
- Administration and management fees, which are not allocable to residential tenants at all, appearing under a name that sounds like a service.
- The wrong allocation key. Costs are normally split by floor area unless the contract or the law says otherwise. Heating and hot water are the exception — the Heizkostenverordnung requires a substantial share to be billed by measured consumption, typically between 50% and 70%.
- Empty flats billed to the tenants who stayed. The share belonging to vacant units is the landlord's cost, not a gap to be shared out.
- Periods that do not match your tenancy. If you moved in or out mid-year, you owe the part of the period you actually lived there.
- Prepayments understated. Check the figure against what left your account, not against what the contract said it would be.
5. Your right to see the receipts
You are entitled to inspect the underlying invoices and records — Belegeinsicht. This is the part almost nobody uses, and it is where disputes are actually resolved, because a category that looked plausible on the summary often turns out to be an invoice for something else entirely.
Ask in writing, and keep the request simple: you would like to inspect the receipts for the statement dated X. The landlord normally has to make them available; whether they must post copies to you rather than offer inspection at their office depends on the circumstances, and courts have taken different views where the tenant lives far away.
6. Do you have to pay while you are checking?
This is the question people get wrong in both directions. A demand does not become void because you disagree with it, and simply not paying can put you in arrears. Nor does paying it mean you have accepted it — a payment made while an objection is open can normally be reclaimed if the statement turns out to be wrong.
Where the objection is to a specific item rather than the whole bill, the undisputed part and the disputed part are different questions. Which of them applies to a particular statement, and what the safest sequence is, depends on the wording of your contract and what has already been said in writing — and that is the point at which guessing gets expensive.
7. The prepayment increase that follows
A shortfall usually arrives with a second letter raising your monthly prepayment for the year ahead. A landlord may adjust prepayments to an appropriate level after a statement — but the adjustment has to follow from a proper statement in the first place. Where the statement itself is contested, the increase built on it is contested with it.
If the same categories look wrong two years running, that is worth more attention than a single bill: the error repeats, and so does the money.