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Germany’s falling birth rates and rising rental costs have driven a sharp drop in demand for nursery places in Berlin, once among the city’s most coveted services with waiting lists that could stretch for years.
“There has been a huge decline,” said Claudia Freistühler, managing director of Kindergärten City. “There are just fewer children in total.”
The state-funded group, which operates 58 day-care centres in the German capital, usually cares for more than 7,000 toddlers. But in 2025, “we won’t make it over 6,000”, Freistühler said. She noted that the trend had developed “suddenly”, with families also driven out of central districts by skyrocketing rents.
Germany still lacks more than 300,000 day-care places for children under three, a shortfall often cited as a key reason why Europe’s largest economy has a comparatively high share of women working part-time.
But in several major cities — including Berlin and some parts of Frankfurt and Münster — falling birth rates are now producing the opposite problem: excess capacity. Germany’s fertility rate fell to 1.35 children per woman in 2024, down from 1.38 the previous year. In Berlin alone, 97 nurseries have closed over the past two years, according to the city’s senate department for education, youth and family.
Martin Bujard, a professor at the Federal Institute for Population Research, said that low birth rates were “disadvantageous” and “cost a great deal of prosperity”, at a time when the German economy struggles to exit its longest postwar stagnation.
Claudia Freistühler, managing director of Kindergärten City, acknowledges a ‘huge decline’ in demand for pre-school places © Annette Koroll/Kindergärten City
“Crises are poison for family planning,” he said. “The people were burdened by the Covid-19 pandemic . . . Then there was the war on Ukraine, then there was inflation, economic concerns.”
Berlin kitas, or preschools, used to have long waiting lists, prompting local authorities to allocate more funding. But the additional facilities and workers came “too late”, Freistühler said. She is now actively reaching out to immigrant families from “different social milieus” and “backgrounds” to stay afloat.
Maria Chiara Ferrante is one of them. The 36-year-old data analyst from Milan said that securing a kita place for her daughter was much easier than feared.
“We applied to about 10 kitas and got a positive answer from seven to eight,” Ferrante said.
When the family took some time to make a decision, they received emails from eager kitas asking if they were still interested, she added.
Vikasni Kannan was similarly surprised by the “enthusiasm” that followed her applications and visits.
“The first thing that I noticed is that they have this huge wall with flags of all the nationalities of kids in the kita,” said the 31-year-old psychologist, who moved from India with her husband a couple of months ago. “That is something that they did highlight and make sure that I saw.”
Preschools in Berlin are reaching out to immigrants and seeking to attract families who would not necessarily think of using childcare at all © Omer Messinger/Getty Images
Paulina Woznicki, the manager of one of the Fröbel kitas in Berlin, said she was trying to make the day-care centre more attractive for families like the Kannans. The day-care centre had put “a focus on skilled workers who speak a foreign language” to remain competitive, she noted.
The Fröbel group is seeking to attract families who would not necessarily think of using childcare at all by advertising in foreign languages on social media with the help of artificial intelligence.
Its group chair Stefan Spieker said: “We experimented with building different avatars that can speak Ukrainian or Arabic and that was really successful.”
The group also offers a “parent academy” to help foreign families overcome bureaucratic hurdles, Woznicki said. She noted the contrast to past years when “it used to be the case that we were overrun and we always had a long waiting list”.
Rising rents in the capital are also a problem. “More and more families are moving away,” Woznicki said.
With fewer children, the nurseries need to cut costs because their funding is directly tied to enrolment. “We only get money for the children that we are looking after,” Freistühler said.
The trend is more pronounced in eastern German states, where fertility has fallen to 1.27 children per woman and the overall number of women is lower.
Waltraud Weegmann, head of the German Nursery Association, said that even in the wealthier western states “waiting lists are getting shorter”.
She added: “It is all happening very quickly.”