Lohnsteuerbescheinigung explained

What the Lohnsteuerbescheinigung is

Lohnsteuerbescheinigung means wage tax certificate. Your employer makes it once a year, for the whole time you worked for them in that year. It shows how much you earned and how much wage tax was taken from your pay.

Your employer also sends the same data electronically to the tax office. The paper or PDF you get is a printout of that data. It is the most important document for a German tax return.

What is on it, in plain words

The layout can change a little from year to year, but the main parts stay the same. At the top you find your personal details. Below that are numbered lines with amounts.

• Your name, address and date of birth.
• Your Steuer-ID (Identifikationsnummer): 11 digits.
• Your tax class (Steuerklasse) and, if any, the number of child allowances.
• The Finanzamt that received the wage tax, with its name and 4-digit number. For people who no longer live in Germany, this is often the office the tax return goes to.
• Line 1: the period you worked for this employer in that year.
• Line 3: your gross pay (Bruttoarbeitslohn), the pay before tax and social insurance.
• Line 4: the wage tax taken from your pay (Lohnsteuer). This is the tax you can get part of back.
• Line 5: the solidarity surcharge (Solidaritätszuschlag), if any was taken.
• Line 6: church tax (Kirchensteuer), if any was taken.
• Further down: your social insurance contributions, for pension, health, care and unemployment insurance.

Where to get it

Your employer gives it to you. Employers usually make it by the end of February of the following year. So the certificate for 2025 is usually ready by the end of February 2026.

Some employers hand it out on paper, some send it by post, some put it in an online portal together with your payslips. If you left the job during the year, it is often sent to your last known address.

Look in your documents for a page with the title "Ausdruck der elektronischen Lohnsteuerbescheinigung" and the year.

If you lost it

Do not worry. The data is not lost, because your employer has it and sent it to the tax office.

• Ask your employer, or your old employer, for a new copy. A short email or letter with your name, date of birth and the year is often enough.
• If you worked through an agency, ask the agency. The agency is your employer, not the company where you worked.
• If the company no longer exists, you can ask the Finanzamt which wage data it has received for you.

If you had several employers

Every employer makes its own Lohnsteuerbescheinigung. If you worked for two or three employers in the same year, you get two or three certificates. You need all of them for the tax return of that year.

Worked for two employers at the same time, not one after the other? Then you may have had a duty to file a tax return. Geldback asks about this and tells you if your answers point to it.

How Geldback uses your Lohnsteuerbescheinigung

Geldback asks you for the main amounts on your certificate and shows you where to find each one. It uses them to calculate your estimate and to fill in your German tax return. You do not need to send the certificate itself to the Finanzamt, because the Finanzamt already has the data. Keep it safe with your own papers.