Overview
- The Bundestag voted on the government’s bill Thursday to pay child benefit proactively without a parental application, but the measure still needs Bundesrat approval before it can proceed.
- The law is slated to take effect on January 1, 2027, with a phased rollout that aims to start automatic payments for births counted as a family’s second child in early 2027 and extend to first-borns later in the year.
- Automatic payments rely on data flows from local birth registries to the Federal Central Tax Office and then to the Familienkasse, and officials say a parent IBAN must be known to trigger a payment.
- The reform implements a Once-Only principle to spare parents repeated paperwork, allows families to supply or change their IBAN via the Elster tax portal, and permits households to opt out of automatic payments.
- Child benefit is a large program today—about €55 billion paid for roughly 17.57 million children—and the coalition plans a rise from €259 now to about €272 per month by 2028, which will affect household budgets and administration costs.