Frequently asked questions

Inside built-up areas the first speeding band carrying a standard driving ban is 31 to 40 km/h; outside built-up areas it is 41 to 50 km/h. The band below the urban threshold is frequently described elsewhere as licence-losing. It is not: it is expensive, it carries points, and it leaves you driving. The severe bands reach 3 months.

The measures attach to ranges: 1 to 3 points is recorded silently, 4 to 5 brings an admonition, 6 to 7 brings a written warning, and 8 or more means the licence is withdrawn as a matter of established unfitness. Presenting those as four trigger numbers loses the mechanism — and the skipped-rung reset, which drops a total back to 5 or 7, only makes sense once you see them as ranges.

An offence is entered on the register only where the imposed fine reaches 60 €, or a driving ban was ordered. Below that, with no ban, it is zero points however the annex lists it. This one is worth checking on your own notice: the imposed amount is printed on it.

Not a single hit for discount, reduction, rebate or early payment in the whole Act on Administrative Offences or the fine catalogue. The reduction that exists is a hardship rule tied to economic circumstances, with a floor of 20 € on a caution payment. If a site offers you a percentage for paying within a week, it is describing a different country.

German federal law contains no tolerance deduction. The Measurement Act defines the permissible error margin and delegates the numbers; the implementing ordinance states none for speed-measuring devices. The margin is subtracted upstream by the measuring authority and the tables then apply to the charged value. That is why this site states no tolerance figure anywhere and why its speed calculator applies none.

A flat 6 months applies, uniform since this year’s amendment — verified in the promulgated gazette text. The shorter period widely quoted was the old two-stage law, which is exactly why the correction is worth printing.

A German notice reaching an address abroad raises a different set of questions, and three of them come up constantly.

Does the deadline change because I am abroad? No. It runs from service of the notice, and travel time in either direction is not added to it. Does a German driving ban affect my own licence? A German ban is an order not to drive in Germany; what your own authority does with a German decision depends on arrangements between the two states, which this site has not sourced and therefore does not describe. And who pays when the car was hired? The notice may reach the hire company as keeper of the vehicle first; what that company then charges you is a contract matter and not a fine, and it appears in no table here.

The one thing we can say with confidence in all three cases is what the German paper itself provides and when its deadlines run — which is usually the part with a clock on it.

Every item on this page was checked against the primary instrument rather than against other sites, and that is the whole reason the answers differ from the common ones. Two of the corrections came out of reading a commencement article instead of a headline date; one came out of a full-text search returning nothing; one came out of checking three annex lists for an offence that everybody reports as carrying points.

Where our own reading is not yet settled, this page says so rather than rounding it into confidence: the prosecution period carries an open question for our sign-off pass, and the absolute-unfitness threshold is presented as case law because its primary text was not reachable. A correction you cannot audit is just another confident claim.