Digital administration: where you can re-register online – and where not

Anyone who moves house has to register their new place of residence with the authorities. Nationwide, this happens around 5.5 million times a year. Online re-registration is therefore one of the most important digital administrative services. However, there are major differences between the federal states when it comes to the introduction of this service, as an overview map from the Hamburg Senate Chancellery shows.

The federal state of Hamburg has developed an online service for re-registration that other federal states can offer their municipalities. Only in the city states, Schleswig-Holstein and Rhineland-Palatinate is this service already available practically everywhere. In some other federal states, such as Baden-Württemberg, North Rhine-Westphalia, Hesse and Bavaria, the rollout is underway. Thuringia also wants to use the service.

Thousands of registration authorities need to be connected

The main challenge in the rollout is that there are around 5000 local registration authorities in Germany. Each one has to be individually connected to the online service. Success depends heavily on how the federal states support their municipalities “organizationally and financially and how they drive the rollout politically,” Marie-Dominique Enjalbert, project manager for residence registration at the Hamburg Senate Chancellery, told c't.

Schleswig-Holstein has created a state law obligation for municipalities to digitize the re-registration process, “and this has worked very well,” Enjalbert emphasized. Rhineland-Palatinate has also supported its local authorities very well. “And in Baden-Württemberg, the rollout is proceeding at an incredible speed, even though there are around 1100 registration authorities there. We have connected over 100 municipalities there on some days.”

Three federal states have other plans

Brandenburg, Saarland, and Saxony are not planning to use the Hamburg online service, according to the federal government's Digital Administration Dashboard. They may introduce other online services for re-registration. However, the one developed by Hamburg is currently the only one that can update the data in the chip of the ID card, so that no visit to the office is necessary for this either.

You can read a detailed interview with Marie-Dominique Enjalbert about the introduction of electronic residence registration (eWA) and the usage rate in D.digital, the newsletter from c't on the subject of digitalization. You can subscribe to D.digital free of charge here. (cwo)