Germany: Amount Required for a Blocked Bank Account for Student Visa to Increase by 8.5% From Next Year
The move means that students now need to have a total of €11,208 in their account in order to obtain a German student visa or to extend their student residence permit in this country. Currently, the required amount for a blocked bank account is €10,332, AtoZSerwisPlus.com reports.
“From January 1, 2023, the presumed annual requirement that must be paid into the blocked account when applying for a visa amounts to €11,208,” the Federal Foreign Office points out, which means that students now need €876 more in order to open or continue such an account.
The Office further points out that as a result of the increase in the total amount required for the account, students will also be eligible to withdraw more money from these accounts on a monthly basis in order to cover their expenses.
“The account may only permit the withdrawal of a certain amount per month (for students currently €934),” notes the statement.
Currently, students can withdraw €861 at most every month.
The increase in the amount required for a blocked bank account had previously been warned by Studying-in-Germany.org, though the same had expected the German authorities to increase the amount to €11,172.
Education experts from this platform had linked the increase in the amount that international students were requested to prove they own, with the increase in the financial aid allocated to German students by the Ministry of Education under the German Federal Training Assistance Act (BAföG), after last April German authorities increased the aid allocated under BAföG from €861 to €931.
The Federal Foreign Office has also noted that the same will soon come up with a list of banks that provide the service of blocked bank accounts for students, noting that the list will not constitute of a recommendation, but rather of the service providers known to the authorities.
The list will not include Deutsche Bank, which stopped offering this service on July 1. Analysts from BlockedAccountGermany.com attribute the move to the bank’s incapability to keep up with the digitalization of the service, which up until 2016 had been the only bank offering such services for international students. However, the procedures had always been too bureaucratic for students, which after 2016 turned to banks offering completely digitalized procedures.
