According to the study ‘University Town Scoring 2021’, people renting a room in a student hotspot currently have to shell out an average of €414 in ‘warm’ rent, meaning rent plus service charges and energy bills.

The Moses Mendelssohn Institute – who conducted the study – looked at around 25,000 advertisements for rooms in shared flats in 97 university towns across Germany between December and February.

They found that rents for students and other young people in these areas were higher than ever before.

Two years ago, the average warm rent for a room in a university town was €389 per month.

There are enormous differences in rents across different regions though – particularly across eastern and western university towns and in the major cities.

Unsurprisingly, Munich, which is home to the prestigious Ludwig Maximilian University, topped the scoreboard as the city with the highest rents for rooms in shared flats. 

In the Bavarian capital, students and other young people renting a room are currently expected to shell out a whopping €680 per month for their warm rent – far higher than any other university town in Germany.

The second most expensive city for room rentals was Frankfurt am Main, with average warm rents of €550 for a single room. In joint third place were Hamburg and Berlin, where single rooms cost €500 per month on average.

Outside of the capital, where rents have been soaring in recent years, flat-share tenants in other parts of eastern Germany can expect to pay around half of the average rents in the major cities. 

In the university towns of Freiberg, Mittweida und Chemnitz in Saxony, for instance, an average room in a shared flat will set you back €256 per month, including bills.

The cheapest city in the rankings, however, was Brandenburg’s Cottbus, where warm rents for a single room are just €230 a month.

The pandemic effect

Though average rents have gone up in recent years, experts say the price hikes have been dampened slightly by the pandemic, which has provided some relief on the housing market in some areas.

With online teaching becoming the norm in most universities at the height of Covid-19, many students were discouraged from looking for rooms in their university town and instead opted to save money by staying at home with their families.

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This initially dampened rising rents and even led to prices going down in some of the university towns that were studied.