Price per m² in Germany's 25 Largest Cities 2026: Only Three Are Still Under €2,500

Key findings

Only three of the 25 largest cities average under €2,500 per m²: Duisburg (€2,080), Wuppertal (€2,250) and Mönchengladbach (€2,320). Bochum misses the mark narrowly at €2,510. At the city average, a 70 m² flat costs €145,300 in Duisburg and €574,000 in Munich, almost four times as much for the same floor space. The median of the 25 cities is €3,930 per m² (Mannheim).

Seven of the ten cheapest cities are in North Rhine-Westphalia: Duisburg, Wuppertal, Mönchengladbach, Bochum, Dortmund, Bielefeld and Essen. North Rhine-Westphalia also charges 6.5% Grunderwerbsteuer, the joint highest rate in Germany, so part of the low price comes back as purchase cost: on the Duisburg flat the tax alone is €9,400, and the all-in price with 2% notary and land registry is €157,700. The cheapest cities outside North Rhine-Westphalia are Leipzig (€2,640), Bremen (€2,930) and Dresden (€2,970).

A low price per m² is not a low price relative to what the flat earns. Measured in years of rent, the same measure as our Price-to-Rent Ratio 2026, Duisburg ranks only 6th with 23.1 years; Wuppertal needs 20.4, the fewest of all 25. Stuttgart costs twice as much per m² as Duisburg (€4,310), yet needs fewer years of rent: 21.4. At the other end, Bielefeld is joint 7th-cheapest at €2,780 but needs 28.2 years of rent; only Hamburg, Munich and Karlsruhe need more. The rents in the dataset are mostly asking rents for new lettings, and their definitions differ by source (for Stuttgart, the mid-tier location value), so read years of rent as an indication rather than a precise ranking.

Not every average measures the same thing. For Berlin, Frankfurt am Main and Münster the figure is an average notarised sale price based on Gutachterausschuss (valuation board) data, for Berlin via the GUTHMANN Estate market report; for the other 22 cities it is an asking-price average or a portal's price-map estimate. Asking and paid prices can sit far apart: in Wiesbaden, where both are on file, the asking average of €4,300 (July 2026) is 14% above the notarised resale average of €3,760 for 2024, part of which is two years of price change. Small gaps between neighbouring ranks therefore say little; the ranking is most useful in tiers.

What to do with the ranking

The city average tells you where entry is cheapest, not whether a particular flat is fairly priced. Districts inside one city spread wider than many of the gaps in this table, and each city page lists a price range with its source. To test a single listing against notarised data, use our guide How to check whether a German property price is fair. For the cash you need on top of the price, see Cash Needed 2026, and if you buy from outside Germany, the Non-Resident Equity Gap 2026.

Vacancy is the obvious next question for the cheapest cities, and it is deliberately not ranked here: the sources measure it in different ways (market-active vacancy against census vacancy including empty flats that are not on the market), so the numbers are not comparable across all 25 cities. Where a verified figure exists, it is on the city page with its definition (there is no current verified city-wide figure for Duisburg and Augsburg), and the comparison logic is in our guide to vacancy rates against rental yields.

Methodology and sources

Data: LDP Group 25-city dataset (July 2026), every figure cited to its source on the city page. Price per m²: the average apartment price as published by the named source (for Munich and Cologne the ImmoScout24 WohnBarometer asking price for an existing reference flat); dates differ by city, from H1 2025 (Frankfurt am Main, Gutachterausschuss) and Q3 2025 (Munich and Cologne, ImmoScout24 WohnBarometer) to July 2026 for most others. Prices per m² are rounded to the nearest €10 for display, all calculations use the unrounded figures; the CSV download carries the unrounded values (for example €2,076 for Duisburg).

70 m² flat = average price per m² x 70, rounded to €100. All-in adds the state's Grunderwerbsteuer (3.5% in Bavaria to 6.5% in North Rhine-Westphalia) and 2.0% for notary and land registry; no agent commission, which varies by transaction and is often zero for new builds. Years of rent = price per m² / (net cold rent per m² x 12), gross, before costs, vacancy and tax; the rent is the city-level figure in the dataset, mostly an asking rent for new lettings. The full table is available as CSV: cheapest-sqm-big-city-2026.csv.