Mietpreisbremse Map 2026: Where the Rent Cap Applies, Where It Does Not

Key findings

The rent cap does not track city size or price level, it tracks state politics. North Rhine-Westphalia hosts 11 of the 25 cities and splits them almost down the middle: Cologne, Düsseldorf, Dortmund, Bielefeld, Bonn and Münster are covered, while Essen, Duisburg, Bochum, Wuppertal and Mönchengladbach are not. Two cities in the same state, 20 minutes apart on the S-Bahn, can sit on opposite sides of the rule.

Freedom to price correlates with weakness, not strength. The six uncapped cities average €9.40 per m² in net cold rent and €2,644 per m² in purchase price, against €13.42 and €4,181 in the covered group. Regulators designate tight markets, so the absence of a cap is itself a signal that supply is not scarce. The upside is yield: the uncapped group averages 4.33% gross against 3.97% for capped cities, and Wuppertal at 4.90% is the highest-yielding market in the entire dataset.

The cap is not a rent freeze, and it is not the only constraint. Where it applies, a new lease may exceed the local Mietspiegel reference rent by at most 10%, and the reduced Kappungsgrenze allows only 15% instead of 20% over three years within a running tenancy. On the 70 m² reference flat at the covered-city average of €939 per month, that 5-point difference is about €47 per month of forgone increase after three years.

Two exemptions do most of the work for investors. The first letting of a new build completed after 01.10.2014 is outside the cap entirely, as is a comprehensively modernised unit. That is why capped cities remain investable: a new-build purchase in Munich or Berlin prices at market from day one. Run the numbers for a specific unit in the Rental Yield Calculator, and see the city-level detail in our city reports.

Frankfurt and Wiesbaden deserve their own line. Both are formally designated, both had that designation challenged in court, and neither has a settled answer as of August 2026. At €19.57 per m², Frankfurt is the most expensive rental market in the study after Munich, so the stakes are real. The prudent underwriting assumption is that the cap applies: a repaired ordinance is the likely outcome, and pricing above the permitted level exposes a landlord to tenant claw-back claims.

Methodology and sources

Coverage status per city verified against the applicable state ordinance (Landesverordnung) as of August 2026, with the federal framework in § 556d BGB, extended by the Bundestag on 26.06.2025 to run until 31.12.2029. Rents are average net cold asking rents (Kaltmiete) per m² and purchase prices are average price per m², both from the source-cited LDP research dataset covering the 25 largest German cities. Gross yield is computed as rent x 12 / purchase price and is deliberately unlevered and before costs. Population figures are the latest official municipal counts in the dataset and total 18,163,529 across the 25 cities. Background on the rule itself in the glossary entry on the Mietpreisbremse, and per-city treatment in each city's rent regulation page. Nationally, roughly 32 million people, about 39% of the population, live in a designated area: within Germany's 25 largest cities that share rises to 80.6%.