Speeding

The catalogue splits speeding for cars into 10 bands per location, and it knows only two locations: inside a built-up area and outside one. There is no separate motorway table — a motorway counts as outside a built-up area, which surprises most drivers and is simply how the instrument is written.

Bands are integer ranges, each one carrying a standard rate, sometimes points, and sometimes a driving ban. Inside built-up areas the range runs from 30 € at the bottom to 800 € in the open-ended top band (over 70 km/h); outside built-up areas the same structure runs from 20 € to 700 €. Together the two tables are 20 rows, and every one of them is read out of the payload on the speeding table page rather than typed anywhere on this site.

Location is not the only thing that picks a table. The annex bands speeding by vehicle class first, into 3 separate ladders: one for cars and vehicles of comparable weight, one for the heavy vehicles of § 3(3) no. 2(a) or (b) StVO — lorries, vehicle-and-trailer combinations and buses — and one for those same vehicles when they are placarded as carrying dangerous goods, or when a bus is carrying passengers. That is what the vehicle-class control above selects. All it decides is which table applies; the complete tables for the two heavy classes are on the trucks and buses page.

The lowest rates are not "fines" in the strict sense. A standard rate up to 55 € is collected as a Verwarnungsgeld — a caution payment — which inside built-up areas covers excesses up to about 15 km/h. It carries no fee and produces no register entry. Above that ceiling the same event becomes a Bußgeld with a formal notice, a fee, and a deadline structure of its own.

Points begin at 21 km/h over the limit. Below that the row exists, the money is real, and the register stays empty.

A standard driving ban is a different threshold again. Inside built-up areas the first band with a ban is 31 to 40 km/h; outside built-up areas it is 41 to 50 km/h. This is the single most common error in circulation about German speeding: the band below the ban threshold is expensive and carries points, but it does not, by itself, take the licence. At the severe end the standard ban reaches 3 months.

One more structural detail worth knowing if your notice mentions poor visibility: the catalogue reuses this same table for excesses committed in fog, snowfall or rain where sight was heavily reduced. It is the same row set, read through a different offence description.

Two numbers in German speeding law sit close together and mean nothing like the same thing. Points start at 21 km/h. The repeat rule keys on 26 km/h — and it is a rule about history, not about severity.

It works like this: if you were charged with an excess of at least 26 km/h, that decision became final, and within 12 months of that finality you committed a second excess of at least 26 km/h, the catalogue provides a standard driving ban of 1 month even where the table for the individual offence provides none. The clock runs from the moment the first decision became final — not from the date of the first offence, and not from the date on the first notice.

The tool cannot look this up. Nobody can look up your register from outside it. The toggle above is an assertion you make, and the result changes accordingly.

A German driving ban is an order not to drive in Germany; what your own licensing authority does with a German decision depends on arrangements between the two states. This site has not sourced those arrangements and therefore does not describe them. What it can tell you accurately is what the German notice itself says and when its deadlines run — which is usually the part under time pressure.