German habitual abode and the six-month stay, explained

Germany does not run an annual day tally the way most people expect. Residence for tax arrives by two routes. The first is the Wohnsitz test: keep a dwelling in Germany at your disposal, and you can be resident with zero counted days — no counter of any kind protects you from it. The second is the habitual abode (gewöhnlicher Aufenthalt): an unbroken stay of more than six months makes you resident, and — this is the part that catches people — it does so retroactively, from the first day of the stay, not from the day the stay became long.

Both routes are questions of fact and circumstance. A day count here is one input into that picture, never a settlement of it, which is why this rule is advisory in Residay.

How days are counted

The evaluator watches for a contiguous run of presence rather than summing scattered days. Germany’s “more than six months” is modelled as an unbroken run of 183 days, assessed against the calendar year, with any part of a day in Germany counting as presence for that day.

Crucially, leaving does not necessarily break the run. Short interruptions — a holiday, a brief trip home — are disregarded and the stay is treated as continuing through them. Residay disregards gaps of up to 21 days when stitching the run together; the statute itself sets no fixed figure, so treat this as the app’s tracking heuristic, not a legal line. And because the effect is retroactive to the first day, a stay that quietly matures past the six-month mark recharacterises months of history at once.

What Residay computes and what it asks

This rule carries no attestation interview; everything shown is derived from the ledger: the length of your current contiguous run, the interruptions it has absorbed so far, and the projected date the run would reach the modelled length if it continued. What the ledger cannot see is the half of German law that needs no days at all — whether a dwelling is at your disposal, and whether your circumstances amount to an habitual abode in substance. Those turn on leases, keys, family, and intention. The count is evidence for that assessment, and Residay presents it as such; it will not tell you a German outcome has or has not occurred.

Exit taxation on leaving (Wegzugsbesteuerung)

German residence can be expensive to acquire quietly, and for some people it is expensive to give up. Section 6 of the Außensteuergesetz treats the end of unlimited German tax liability as a deemed disposal of substantial shareholdings: shares in corporations within the meaning of §17 EStG are valued at market and the unrealised gain is taxed as though they had been sold, with no sale and no proceeds to pay the bill from. The same charge can arise without anyone moving — by gifting or bequeathing the shares to a person resident abroad, or where a treaty reallocates Germany’s taxing right over them.

Two thresholds define who is caught. The holding must be substantial in the §17 sense — at least 1% of a corporation at some point in the five years before departure — and the individual must have been subject to unlimited German tax liability for at least seven of the twelve years preceding it. That prior-residence condition is itself recent: until the reform applicable from 1 January 2022 the test asked for ten years of unlimited liability in total, so a shorter German episode can now produce an exit charge that the older wording would have missed.

The same reform changed the payment position, and not in the taxpayer’s favour. Moves within the EU or EEA previously attracted an indefinite, interest-free deferral without security; that relief was withdrawn. The charge now falls on the same terms wherever you go, with payment in seven equal annual instalments available on application and generally against security. It can still be undone where the departure proves temporary and unlimited liability resumes within seven years, extendable on application, provided the shares were not disposed of in the meantime. With effect from 2025 comparable treatment was extended to substantial holdings in investment funds; confirm the current scope before relying on either limit.

The United Kingdom makes the contrast plain, and it is a contrast worth holding in mind on this corridor: the UK levies no exit tax on individuals at all, relying instead on temporary non-residence rules that recapture certain gains and distributions if you return within five years. Somebody leaving Germany for the UK therefore moves from a system that charges the departure to one that charges the return.

None of this is decided by a count. Whether unlimited liability has ended turns on the same facts as whether it began — the dwelling at your disposal, and the substance of where you habitually live. A departure that leaves an apartment available may not end liability at all; one that does end it can crystallise a charge on assets you have neither sold nor intend to sell. The run length above is evidence about your movements, and nothing more than that.

Planning notes

• A short exit does not reset the clock. If you intend a genuine break in the stay, make it a real one, and keep evidence of where you actually lived during it.
• Retroactivity means the risk crystallises backwards: by the time a run matures, the exposure covers the entire stay, including months you may have already treated as non-resident.
• Keeping an apartment, or even reliable access to one, can decide the question before any counting starts — take advice on the Wohnsitz limb before relying on travel patterns.
• If you hold a substantial shareholding, the exit charge turns on the fact of leaving rather than on how long you stayed, and it is valued at the departure — so advice belongs before the move, not after it.
• AO §9, linked above, is the operative provision; professional advice is required before acting on any German residence position.