So you are considering marrying your boyfriend or girlfriend and thinking about what benefits that could get you in Germany?

There are actually quite a lot of useful benefits for being a married person in Germany. Checking what different Berlin expats have said, we collected the top benefits of being a married person in Germany:

• Taxes: When you are married, you as a couple are now assessed as one unit for tax purposes. So you would do one joint tax return (Steuererklärung) instead of doing two individual ones. This brings you a big advantage if your salaries have a large income difference, because both of your incomes will be averaged out and thus should result in paying a lower tax.
• Health insurance: if one person lost their job, the other person can get health-insurance for free under the other person’s coverage, as a family insurance. This is particularly useful in certain cases, for example when getting parental-leave (Elternzeit). Suppose you want to take a 5 months parental-leave, who is going to pay for your health insurance now since you are not working anymore? If your other half is working, then you simply can get added to their health insurance coverage. If both of you are not working, then you pay the basic health insurance coverage, which is at the time of writing is around 220 EUR. So you would only pay 220 EUR for the entire family, if both of you are not working.
• Rental: your partner can move in to your flat and the landlord can’t deny this. However, we heard that there is an exception! If your neighbors have made noise-complains against you, then the landlord could still deny it. So better to check it with a Mieterverein before informing the landlord about this.