The statutory notice period (§ 573c BGB)
Tenants of open-ended German residential leases always have a three-month notice period, regardless of how long the tenancy has lasted. Your letter must reach the landlord by the third working day of a month for that month to count. Landlords face longer periods: three months, rising to six after five years and nine after eight years of tenancy.
Written form is mandatory (§ 568 BGB)
A residential lease termination must be a signed physical letter, hand-signed by every tenant named in the contract. Email, WhatsApp, or fax do not satisfy the requirement. What counts is when the letter reaches the landlord — not the date you wrote on it. Registered mail (Einwurf-Einschreiben) or hand delivery with a witness secures proof.
Watch out for termination waivers
Many German leases contain a Kündigungsverzicht: both sides waive ordinary termination for a fixed time. In standard-form contracts, waivers longer than four years are generally invalid under Federal Court of Justice case law. Whether your clause actually binds you depends on its exact wording — which is precisely what Mietsicht checks against your contract text.
Special termination rights
Certain events unlock shorter notice: a rent increase (§ 561 BGB — extraordinary termination effective the end of the month after next), a modernization announcement (§ 555e BGB), or serious health-endangering defects (§ 543 BGB, immediate). Mietsicht flags when your situation may qualify and shows the contractual and statutory basis beside the answer.
What Mietsicht prepares for you
Upload your lease as a PDF. Mietsicht reads the termination clauses, computes your applicable deadline as a concrete date, and drafts a termination letter you can review, adapt, and send. Every statement links back to the clause and statute it rests on.