Check your eligibility, calculate your monthly amount, and plan how to split the months between you and your partner.
Start your Elterngeld plan →
Elterngeld
Application
All in one tool
Answer questions about your visa and work. Know in 2 minutes if you qualify.
Enter your income. See your Basiselterngeld and ElterngeldPlus amounts.
Use the visual planner to decide who takes which months. Optimize your total.
And when you’re ready, we can pre-fill the entire 23-page application for you. Learn more →
Why Elterngeld Help?
You open the PDF. It’s 23 pages. In German. You don’t recognize half the words. You Google one of them and end up on a forum post from 2019 that contradicts the official page.
You close it. Tell yourself you’ll deal with it tomorrow. Tomorrow becomes next week. Meanwhile the deadline is ticking and every month you wait is money you won’t get back.
We make it simple. You go through your situation once, in plain English. We turn it into the official application. You print, sign, and send it.
Yes. While we built this with expats in mind, the guide works for German citizens too. The application process is the same for everyone.
We're Marijke and Jochen from Hamburg. Between us, we've run a nanny agency, built and led customer support teams, and turned complicated systems into intuitive digital tools. We spent months studying the BEEG law, the official Richtlinien, and every edge case we could find to build the most thorough English-language Elterngeld tool available.
All data is hosted in Europe and we're fully GDPR compliant. We don't sell your information and you can delete your account anytime.
We currently support the 13 states using the federal form (Bundesformular): Berlin, Brandenburg, Bremen, Hamburg, Hessen, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Niedersachsen, Rheinland-Pfalz, Saarland, Sachsen, Sachsen-Anhalt, Schleswig-Holstein, and Thüringen. States with their own forms are coming soon.
Elterngeld can only be claimed retroactively for 3 months. If you apply 4 months after birth, month 1 is gone. 5 months? Months 1 and 2 are gone. There is no extension.
Get your plan ready →
“If anything is confusing, just reply to any of our emails. I read every one and come back to you.”
Marijke, Hamburg