Alcohol and drugs

Two groups are subject to a flat prohibition instead of a limit: drivers inside the probationary period, and drivers under twenty-one. For them any detected alcohol or cannabis is an offence, at 250 € with 1 point — and with no second tier in the catalogue, because escalation for this group runs through the probationary-period measures instead.

Beyond the administrative tiers the matter is criminal, prosecuted under the criminal code, and sentenced in daily units set by a court from net income. No amount for that appears anywhere on this site. The threshold at which German practice treats a driver as absolutely unfit is long-settled case law rather than statutory text, and our data set carries it as unverified because the primary court text was not reachable in the research pass — the alcohol calculator states it in exactly those terms.

Separately from the fine and the ban, the licensing authority can require a medical-psychological assessment before a licence comes back. It is a separate procedure under § 13 of the driving-licence ordinance (FeV), and this site names the provision without stating a reading, which the data set does not carry.

The columns above are the point people most often misread, so it is worth stating twice: first, second and further do not describe how much was in your blood. They describe how many relevant decisions are already recorded against you. A first offence at a high reading is scored in the first column; a second offence at a low one is not.

What escalates alongside the amount is the standard driving ban, from 1 month on a first decision to 3 months once there is a prior. The points do not escalate: every administrative family here carries 2 points at every tier, which is a deliberate feature of the annex rather than a gap in our reading of it.

The reading still matters, of course — but it matters at the boundary rather than inside the range. It decides whether you are in this table at all, and whether you are above it, in the criminal tier where no table applies.

Alcohol has a limit: 0,5 ‰ in blood, 0,25 mg/l in breath, and below it there is no offence under this provision. Cannabis has a limit of its own, 3,5 ng/ml in serum, added as a threshold rather than folded into the older drug rules. The other listed intoxicants have no limit at all — detection in serum is the offence, which means there is no "under the limit" to be in.

Cannabis together with alcohol is a fourth case, with a higher first-time amount (1.000 €) than either substance alone. And medication taken as prescribed for a specific illness has a carve-out in the statute, which is a legal question about your case rather than something a table resolves.

For most readers who arrive on this page, the amount in the first column is not what changes their year. The standard driving ban does, and so does the assessment the licensing authority can require before the licence comes back — a separate administrative procedure with its own timetable, not a step in the fine.

That is the honest ordering of consequences here: ban, then licence procedure, then points, then money. It is the order the calculator on this site presents them in.