Why childless employees over 23 pay more into German care insurance

Germany's statutory long-term-care insurance (Pflegeversicherung) is one of the five branches of German social insurance, and unlike the others it carries a rule most other contributions do not: the rate itself depends on whether the contributor has children. The standard employee rate is 1.8% (on top of a matching employer share), charged on gross pay up to the same contribution ceiling that applies to health insurance — 66,150 EUR a year in 2025.

Employees over 23 who have no children pay an additional 0.6 percentage points on top of that, taking their rate to 2.4%. Parents are exempt from the surcharge regardless of how many children they have or how old those children now are — the exemption is about having had a child at all, not about currently supporting one. The reasoning given when the surcharge was introduced (and raised, most recently in 2022) is that a pay-as-you-go long-term-care system depends on future workers to fund current claims, and raising children is what produces those future contributors — so parents are treated as already contributing in a different form.

Because the surcharge is a flat rate add-on rather than a separate calculation, it is straightforward to model: it is exactly 0.6% of the same care-insurance base, switched on or off by a single "children" input rather than by age or family structure beyond the yes/no distinction and the over-23 age gate.