Gross yield and vacancy rate for every city in our dataset, why the two move together, where they do not, and how to check an offer against it in ten minutes.
Quick answer
In our dataset the seven cities yielding 4.3 percent or more carry a median vacancy of 3.1 percent. The five cities under 3.5 percent sit at 0.4. Part of every high yield pays for empty months, so check vacancy before you trust the yield.
The pattern across all 25 cities
Gross rental yield is the number every listing leads with. Vacancy rate is the number that decides whether you ever collect it. Across the 25 largest German cities in our dataset the two move together with uncomfortable consistency: the cities with the highest yields on paper are, with a handful of instructive exceptions, the cities where a flat is most likely to stand empty.
The table shows both figures for every city, sorted by gross yield. Yields are city averages of annual asking cold rent divided by average asking price. Vacancy figures come from official sources with different definitions and reference years, so each row states what was counted. Two cities have no verifiable current figure and say so rather than carrying a number we could not confirm.
| City | Gross yield % | Vacancy % | What was counted | Data year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wuppertal | 4.9 | 5.7 | total, city analysis | 2022 |
| Leipzig | 4.8 | 5.4 | total, Zensus | 2022 |
| Mönchengladbach | 4.7 | 3.1 | market-active, derived from 5.1 total | 2025 |
| Stuttgart | 4.5 | 0.5 | market-active | 2022 |
| Dortmund | 4.1 to 4.7 | 2.2 | city survey | 2024 |
| Essen | 4.3 | 3.0 | market report | 2023 |
| Bremen | 4.3 | 3.7 | total, Zensus | 2022 |
| Duisburg | 4.3 | not verified | no verified current figure | |
| Berlin | 4.1 | 0.3 | market-active | 2024 |
| Cologne | 4.1 | 0.8 | market-active | 2024 |
| Frankfurt am Main | 4.1 | 0.1 | market-active | 2024 |
| Wiesbaden | 4.1 | 1.7 | market-active | 2022 |
| Dresden | 4.0 | 6.7 | total, city statistics | 2024 |
| Hanover | 4.0 | 3.3 | total, Zensus | 2022 |
| Bochum | 4.0 | 3.6 | total, Zensus | 2022 |
| Nuremberg | 3.9 | 0.8 | market-active | 2022 |
| Augsburg | 3.9 | not verified | no verified current figure | |
| Düsseldorf | 3.5 to 4.2 | 1.6 | market-active | 2022 |
| Bonn | 3.8 | 0.9 | market report | 2023 |
| Mannheim | 3.8 | 1.1 | market-active | 2023 |
| Bielefeld | 3.5 | 0.4 | housing-company survey | 2025 |
| Karlsruhe | 3.4 | 0.7 | market-active | 2020 |
| Münster | 3.3 | 0.2 | market-active | 2024 |
| Munich | 3.2 | 0.1 | market-active | 2024 |
| Hamburg | 2.6 | 0.5 | market-active | 2023 |
Read the extremes first. Wuppertal, the highest gross yield in the dataset at 4.9 percent, carries a vacancy rate of 5.7 percent. Hamburg, the lowest yield at 2.6 percent, has 0.5 percent. Munich pairs 3.2 percent with 0.1 percent, which in practice means a queue at every viewing, not a re-letting risk. Across the 23 cities with a figure, the correlation between yield and vacancy is 0.58, and that is with mixed definitions blurring the picture. Every one of the eight cities with vacancy at or above 3 percent yields 4.0 percent or more.
Why the two numbers move together
There is no mystery here, only pricing. A gross yield is rent divided by price, so a high yield means the market pays little for each euro of rent. Buyers as a group are not generous by accident. Where demand for flats is weak, two things happen at once: purchase prices stay low, which pushes the yield up, and flats take longer to fill, which pushes the vacancy rate up. The same weakness produces both numbers.
That is why part of every high headline yield is not profit but payment for risk. The market hands you 4.9 percent in Wuppertal instead of 3.2 percent in Munich because someone has to be compensated for the months a flat might sit empty, for slower rent growth, and for the thinner pool of applicants when a tenant leaves.
Our study on rent regulation found the same signal from the other direction: of the six cities among the 25 without a rent cap, five are in North Rhine-Westphalia, and the cap-free markets average 9.40 euros per square metre against 13.42 euros in the capped ones. Regulators cap where demand overwhelms supply. Where they see no need to cap, the market is telling you something, and so is the vacancy column.
The exceptions are the interesting part
Four cities yield 4.0 percent or more with market-active vacancy under 1 percent: Berlin at 4.1 and 0.3, Cologne at 4.1 and 0.8, Frankfurt at 4.1 and 0.1, and Stuttgart at 4.5 and 0.5. On the logic above they should not exist. They do because something other than weak demand is holding the ratio where it is. Berlin's rents are regulated well below what open demand would produce, Frankfurt and Stuttgart combine high prices that corrected after 2022 with rental populations that turn over quickly, and Cologne sits between them.
The mirror image exists too. Dresden reports 6.7 percent vacancy, the highest total figure in the table, at a yield of only 4.0 percent. There the vacancy is concentrated in specific stock and districts and has not pulled city-wide prices down with it, which is exactly the kind of case where a city average misleads in both directions.
Pairs like these are where the vacancy check earns its keep. A 4.1 percent yield backed by 0.3 percent vacancy is a different asset from a 4.1 percent yield backed by 4 percent vacancy, and the listing will not tell you which one you are looking at. The two numbers only mean something together.
What a vacancy rate actually measures
Before you compare cities, check what was counted. Three kinds of figures circulate, and they are not interchangeable.
- Total vacancy, Zensus 2022. Every empty dwelling on census day, 15 May 2022, including flats mid-renovation, inheritance cases and stock nobody will ever rent again. Leipzig, Bremen, Hanover and Bochum carry this figure in the table.
- Market-active vacancy, CBRE-empirica Leerstandsindex. Flats in multi-family stock that are actually available to let within a few months. This is the number that describes your re-letting risk, and it is the one the A-cities report. National average 2.2 percent in the 2024 data year, 1.2 percent across the large cities.
- City housing market reports. Each municipality with its own method and cut-off date, some surveying only professional housing companies. Dortmund, Wuppertal, Dresden and Bielefeld fall here.
The difference is not academic. Bochum reports 3.6 percent total vacancy from the Zensus, but the market-active share is around 2 percent, below the roughly 3 percent that housing economists treat as a balanced market's fluctuation reserve. Mönchengladbach publishes 5.1 percent total, of which about two points are modernisation-related, leaving 3.1 percent market-active. Whenever a single vacancy number is quoted at you without a source and a year, ask for both.
What vacancy does to your return
The arithmetic is blunt. One empty month costs 8.3 percent of that year's rent. A flat that takes three months to re-let turns a 4.9 percent gross yield into roughly 3.7 percent for that year, which is much closer to the Munich number than the listing suggested, and that is before you spend a cent on the re-letting itself.
Applied to the city averages: if your Wuppertal flat matched the city's vacancy profile over time, the 4.9 percent gross narrows toward 4.6 percent, while Munich's 3.2 percent is close to guaranteed. The headline gap of 1.7 percentage points is real, but smaller than it looks, and in a weak district of a high-vacancy city it can disappear entirely. City averages also hide more than they show: vacancy concentrates street by street, so the city figure is a warning level, not a verdict on your specific flat.
None of this makes high-yield cities a mistake. It makes them a different job. A well-kept flat in the right district of Wuppertal or Leipzig can outperform Munich for a decade. But the selection work that makes it safe is precisely the work the gross yield number lets you skip, and that work is where the excess return comes from.
The ten-minute check before you trust a yield
- Ask for the vacancy rate behind the offer, with source, definition and year, and whether it is total or market-active. A seller who leads with gross yield and has no vacancy figure to hand has made a choice, not an oversight.
- Look one level below the city. The district figure in the city's housing market report, and how long comparable listings in the area stay online, which is a free proxy for re-letting time.
- Stress-test the yield. In our rental yield calculator, set the vacancy allowance to 3.5 percent, which is two empty months every five years, or to the city's market-active rate if it is higher. If the investment case only works at zero vacancy, it is not a case, it is a hope.
- Compare after stress-testing, not before. Put the lower-yield city through the same calculator with its own vacancy figure and look at the gap that survives. That gap, not the headline one, is what you are being paid for the extra risk.
Where to go deeper
For the German side, all 25 city reports behind this piece are free on this site, each with its own vacancy risk analysis, together with the source-verified dataset of prices, rents, yields, vacancy and transfer tax, and the calculators referenced above. If the question is which city at all, or whether to buy given how long you will stay, the two guides under Related answer that before this one becomes relevant.
If you are weighing Germany against other European markets, the team at Investropa does this comparison work at country level, and we have been collaborating with them on their Germany coverage. Their country guides and property packs pair local price and rent figures with the practical buying steps, country by country, and are kept current, which is rarer than it should be in this niche. For a first structured look at a market we do not cover, their packs are where we would point a friend.
Limitations and what we do not know
- The vacancy figures come from sources with different definitions and reference years, from the Zensus of May 2022 to city reports with a 2025 cut-off. They are comparable in order of magnitude, not to the decimal, and the table says for each row what was counted.
- Duisburg and Augsburg carry no verifiable current figure. Duisburg's last city-wide count dates from 2014 and we do not repeat it as if it were current.
- Gross yields are city averages over asking prices and asking rents. Realised yields on individual flats differ, and after-tax results depend on the buyer's situation, financing and holding period.
- The correlation described here is a market-level pattern across 23 cities, not a prediction for a specific property. Inside any one city the spread between districts is regularly wider than the spread between cities.
- The dataset is dated 7 July 2026 and is refreshed with our study pipeline. Figures on this page were checked against it on 31 August 2026.
What would change this answer
- The city dataset, dated 7 July 2026, which is refreshed alongside our study pipeline. The table on this page is generated from it and cannot drift from the city reports.
- The next CBRE-empirica Leerstandsindex, published each December, which would replace several 2022 and 2023 figures with a common definition and data year.
- Rent brake decisions, which change city by city and shift where regulated rents hold yields below what demand would produce.
Frequently asked questions
Is a high gross rental yield in Germany a red flag?
Not by itself. It is a price signal: the market is charging less per euro of rent, usually because letting risk is higher. In our dataset the cities yielding 4.3 percent or more carry a median vacancy of 3.1 percent against 0.4 percent for the cities under 3.5. A high yield with low market-active vacancy and solid district demand can be a genuine opportunity. A high yield with 5 percent vacancy and no district data is a bet, and should be priced like one.
Which vacancy figure should I use when comparing German cities?
Market-active vacancy wherever it is available, because it counts the flats that actually compete with yours for tenants. Zensus 2022 figures overstate lettable vacancy, since they include dwellings that are being renovated or will never return to the market: Bochum shows 3.6 percent total against roughly 2 percent market-active. Always note source and year; a 2022 census figure and a 2025 city report describe different markets.
Why do Berlin, Frankfurt and Stuttgart combine 4 percent yields with almost no vacancy?
Because regulation and price corrections, not weak demand, set their ratio. Berlin's rents are capped below the level open demand would produce, while Frankfurt and Stuttgart saw prices correct after 2022 while rents kept rising and tenants keep turning over. The combination changes the risk picture: the yield is moderate, but the probability of collecting it every month is high, which is the opposite of what the same yield means in a 5 percent vacancy market.
How much return does vacancy actually cost a landlord?
One empty month is 8.3 percent of a year's rent. Three months between tenants turns a 4.9 percent gross yield into about 3.7 percent for that year, before any re-letting costs. If a flat matched Wuppertal's 5.7 percent city vacancy over time, 4.9 percent gross would narrow to roughly 4.6. Over a holding period, the gap between a strong and a weak district inside the same city is regularly larger than the gap between the cities themselves.
Sources
- LDP city dataset 2026, the figures behind the table, with a source per value
- CBRE-empirica Leerstandsindex 2025, methodology of market-active vacancy
- empirica regio, Leerstandsindex 2025 results (data year 2024), December 2025
- Zensus 2022, municipality data sheet Leipzig, Statistisches Landesamt Sachsen
- Stadt Wuppertal, Wohnungsleerstandsanalyse 2023 (data year 2022)
- Stadt Dortmund, Amt fuer Wohnen, Wohnungsmarktbericht 2025
- Landeshauptstadt Dresden, Kommunale Statistikstelle, Wohnungsleerstand 2024
- Stadt Moenchengladbach, Wohnungsmarktberichterstattung 2024
Related
- Which city, and should you buy at all?
- Should you buy if you might leave in five years?
- Rental yield calculator with a vacancy allowance
- Mietpreisbremse map 2026: which of the 25 cities cap rents
- Wuppertal vacancy risk analysis
- Munich vacancy risk analysis