We list 39 Economics master's programmes in Germany, and all 39 are taught in English. Not most. All of them. For a subject where the assumption is that you need German first, that is worth stating plainly before anything else.
A third of it is in Berlin
By city: Berlin (12), Hamburg (4), Munich (3), Bochum (2), Frankfurt am Main (2), with Göttingen and Cologne holding one each. By institution, the Berlin twelve split evenly across Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (4), Freie Universität Berlin (4) and Technische Universität Berlin (4), with Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München on three.
That is the same shape we found in Business Administration and in Computer Science: Berlin is not merely well represented, it is roughly a third of the German catalogue in every social-science and business subject we hold. Deciding whether Berlin is your city removes or retains a third of the list in one step, which is more than any ranking filter will do for you.
Two years, mostly
Durations: 24 months on 29 programmes, 18 months on 7, and 12 months on 3. The German norm is two years, and the handful of one-year options are the exception rather than a trend.
Against a 12-month UK Economics master's that is a second year of living costs and a later start to earning, bought in exchange for a longer thesis and more room to do something — an internship, a research assistantship — alongside the degree. We have set the same trade out in detail for Computer Science in the UK, where we can put real fee numbers on one side of it.
The English test nobody checks
This is the finding worth the read. Across the 39 programmes, the English requirements recorded on our listings name a much wider set of accepted tests than an Indian applicant usually expects: alongside IELTS Academic, we see UNIcert, telc English, TOEIC, PTE Academic, TOEFL iBT and Cambridge English qualifications — frequently several of them on a single programme, listed as alternatives.
The IELTS thresholds themselves run from 6.0 to 7.0 across the set, which is a wider band than most people assume for a German master's.
Two practical consequences. First, a band that rules you out of one Economics programme here does not rule you out of the subject — the 6.0 end is real. Second, if you have already sat a test that is not IELTS, check the programme page before you book another one. Most Indian applicants default to IELTS because it is what the UK and Australia built their systems around; German universities did not, and a test you have already passed may well be on the list.
We have written separately on how to read an English requirement properly and on choosing between the tests in the first place.
On fees
We hold no verified tuition figure for any of our 1,075 published German programmes, Economics included. That is a gap in our data and we are working through it rather than printing an average nobody checked. The German funding model is the reason the question is unusual in the first place — we have covered how that structure actually works separately, and every listing links to the page that can answer it for that specific programme.
Who it suits
A German Economics master's suits someone who wants a quantitative, research-weighted degree, is content with two years, and does not need the degree itself to be in German. The complete English coverage of this subject removes the barrier most applicants assume exists.
It suits you less if you need to be earning inside eighteen months, or if you are shortlisting purely on overall university rank — Bochum, Göttingen and Bayreuth do not announce themselves that way, and the department is what you are buying.
Browse the set: Economics in Germany, master's only, or Economics across every destination we list.
Catalogue figures counted from our published listings on 6 October 2026. We hold no verified tuition figure for German programmes at the time of writing — check each programme's official page. Photograph: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin by VitVit (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia Commons.