Notary fees arrive before the mortgage does.

What the notary is paid for

In Germany the notary is not optional. A purchase contract for land or an apartment is void without notarisation. That is not a formality but a protective mechanism: the notary owes the same duty to both sides and makes sure that money and ownership change hands in the right order.

What feels like a single item is in fact a series of separate services, and each one triggers its own fee:

• Notarising the purchase contract. The largest single item. The notary reads the contract aloud, advises both parties and records their declarations.
• The priority notice. An entry in the land register securing your claim to the transfer of ownership while the purchase price has not yet been paid.
• Execution and supervision. The notary obtains approvals and deletion consents, checks that the conditions for payment are met and oversees the settlement.
• Creating the land charge. Your bank’s security also has to be notarised and registered. It attaches to the financing rather than to the purchase, and it is treated separately for tax.
• The land registry entries. Priority notice, transfer of ownership and land charge. These fees are charged by the court but run through the same process.

For the financing the fourth point matters most. The cost of creating the land charge arises only because you are taking out a loan. What security the bank requires, and in what amount, follows from the mortgage lending value.

How the amount is calculated

Notary fees in Germany are set by law. The basis is the Court and Notary Fees Act, the GNotKG, which works with two figures: a Geschäftswert and a fee multiplier. For a property purchase the Geschäftswert is normally the agreed purchase price. The multiplier says how each service is weighted.

A fee table belongs to the Geschäftswert. At a Geschäftswert of 300,000 euros the single fee under Tabelle B is 635 euros; at 500,000 euros it is 935 euros. The table therefore does not rise in proportion to the purchase price but considerably more slowly. A house that costs twice as much does not produce twice the notary fees.

For notarising a purchase contract the fee schedule provides a 2.0 fee, with a minimum of 120 euros. At a purchase price of 300,000 euros that comes to 1,270 euros for the notarisation alone. Execution and supervision work as well as the land registry fees are added on top.

This is the point at which many guides make it too easy for themselves and quote a round total or a fixed percentage. We deliberately do not. Which services arise depends on the specific contract: whether settlement runs through a notary escrow account, how many deletion consents are needed, whether an approval has to be obtained. A reliable figure for your own case comes from the official fee calculator of the German Federal Chamber of Notaries. The tables themselves are published in the GNotKG fee schedule.

When the invoice arrives and when the loan is disbursed

So far this has been about the amount. Now comes the point that surprises most buyers in practice, and that no fee calculator answers: the notary’s invoice falls due before a single euro of the financing has moved.

The reason lies in the order of the settlement, which regularly runs like this:

1. Notarisation. The contract is signed. From that moment the notary has acted and has earned the fee.
2. The notary’s invoice. It usually arrives shortly after the appointment, typically within one to two weeks, and is payable on receipt.
3. Entry of the priority notice. The notary files it with the land registry. How long that takes depends on the registry and is outside your control.
4. Deletion consents and approvals. The seller’s existing land charges, for apartments the consent of the property management, for plots declarations regarding rights of pre-emption.
5. The Fälligkeitsmitteilung. Only once these conditions are in place does the notary confirm that the purchase price is due.
6. Disbursement. Many banks require the Fälligkeitsmitteilung as evidence before releasing the loan.

Several weeks regularly pass between step two and step six. During that period nothing moves out of the financing, yet the notary’s invoice is already on the table.

And it does not stay alone. The notary reports the contract to the tax office, and the land transfer tax assessment follows shortly after. That amount is also payable before the financing is released, and this is law rather than custom. Under § 22 of the Land Transfer Tax Act a buyer may only be entered in the land register once a clearance certificate from the competent tax office is presented. The tax office issues that certificate only when the tax has been paid, secured or deferred. Without the land transfer tax paid there is no transfer of ownership.

In the window between notarisation and disbursement two substantial amounts therefore fall due, and both land on an account from which nothing has yet flowed, because the loan has not been released.

At ME Finance we walk through this timeline before notarisation rather than after. Not because anything about it can be changed, but because nobody needs a surprise at that particular moment.

Why notary fees come out of equity

Notary fees are part of the Kaufnebenkosten, the incidental purchase costs. Those also include land transfer tax, the land registry fees and, where instructed, the agent’s commission. What these items have in common is that they do not increase the value of the property.

That is exactly what drives the financing logic. Banks size the loan against the mortgage lending value, meaning against what the property supports as security. Incidental costs have no counterpart there, so as a rule they are met from equity.

That does not mean financing without equity is impossible. Structures that include incidental costs exist. They are not the standard, they carry additional requirements and they are priced accordingly. Whether and on what terms this is available is decided solely by the respective lender. What does not shift either way is the timing: the notary’s invoice falls due before a loan is disbursed.

For planning, one simple rule follows. Do not treat the incidental costs as a residual item at the end, but as the money you need first. An overview of the individual items is in our guide to the incidental purchase costs, and how much equity makes sense overall is covered separately.

Who bears the notary fees

In practice the buyer does. That is not a legal inevitability but a term agreed in almost every purchase contract: notarisation, execution and the land register entries are allocated to the buyer.

One exception concerns clearing existing charges. If the property still carries land charges of the seller, it has to be handed over free of encumbrances. The cost of deleting those rights is usually borne by the seller, because they attach to the seller’s old financing rather than to your purchase.

What governs it in the end is always the specific contract. It is worth reading the clause on the allocation of costs in the draft before you attend the appointment. For consumer contracts the draft is provided to you in advance in any event.

When notary fees are tax deductible

Two cases separate cleanly here, and most guides only deal with the first.

For an owner-occupied home the notary fees on a property purchase are not deductible. They belong to private living expenses, and the amount does not change that.

For a let property it becomes more interesting, because the notary fees fall into two pots that are treated entirely differently:

• The costs around the purchase contract count as incidental acquisition costs. They do not take effect immediately but increase the basis for depreciation, and only in part: only the building is depreciated, while the share attributable to the land stays out of it.
• The costs of creating the land charge count as financing costs. They are fully deductible as income-related expenses in the year of payment. That is the item which takes effect fastest, and the one most often lost in general accounts.

On the depreciation rates a figure circulates that is wrong for most buyers. Under § 7 (4) of the Income Tax Act three percent applies only to residential buildings completed after 31 December 2022. For buildings completed between 1925 and 2022 the rate is two percent, and for those completed before 1925 two and a half percent. Anyone buying an existing property therefore normally calculates with two percent rather than three.

How this works out in your case depends on the split of the purchase price between building and land and on your personal situation. That belongs with a tax adviser. This section sets out the systematics and does not replace advice in an individual case.

Why notary fees are the same everywhere in Germany

Few topics are searched by federal state as often as this one: notary fees for Hesse, for North Rhine-Westphalia, for Bavaria. The instinct is understandable but leads nowhere. The Court and Notary Fees Act is federal law. The same service at the same Geschäftswert costs exactly as much in Frankfurt as it does in Rostock.

The misconception has an understandable origin. Among the incidental purchase costs there is indeed one item that differs considerably from state to state, and it is far larger than the notary fees: the land transfer tax. The states set it themselves, and the spread between the cheapest and the most expensive state is substantial.

So anyone asking what a purchase costs in their own state is looking in the right place under the wrong heading. For Hesse we have set it out in our guide to the land transfer tax in Hesse.