Dashboard Digital Administration: How Federal States and Districts perform

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How far along is Germany in terms of digitalization? Which federal states are pioneers, which are lagging behind? What is digital in my district or my independent city, and what isn't? The federal government's “Dashboard Digitale Verwaltung” (Digital Administration Dashboard) is intended to provide answers to such questions. The powerful tool aggregates and visualizes data from numerous sources, such as the “Portalverbund Online-Gateway,” with over 3.5 million entries. It also vividly illustrates the mammoth task that administrative digitalization represents.

However, interpreting the dashboard's data is not easy. It talks about “administrative services,” “online services,” and “maturity levels.” Furthermore, information such as a service, for example, for re-registration, being available at “4%” in a particular district or federal state is confusing. In the following, we explain what lies behind such terms and values.

1. Number of Online Services for Administrative Tasks

On its homepage, the Dashboard displays a map of Germany showing the “online availability of all administrative services.” At the federal state level, Hamburg is currently the leader with 1618 services, closely followed by North Rhine-Westphalia with 1556 and Bavaria with 1442.

It is important to know that the mentioned values only include services that are available online across the board in the federal state (or district). Even if a service is online in 99 percent of the associated municipalities, it is not counted as being available across the board. The dashboard only reveals how many additional services are available “in at least one municipality.” Therefore, the ranking could also look different when related to the proportion of the population that can actually use online services.

And what exactly is an “administrative service”? Behind this are granularly defined actions from the “Service Catalog of Public Administration” (LeiKa). For example, if you want to re-register online, the administration performs half a dozen administrative services in the background, such as “Registration of Residence as Main Residence” and “Issuance of Official Registration Certificate.” According to the OZG Information Platform, a total of 8039 administrative services are relevant within the framework of the Online Access Act. If all these services are to go online nationwide, there is still a lot to do, even in Hamburg.

2. Online Services in Detail

But what exactly is available online where, and what isn't? The dashboard reveals this in the “Online Services” section for 45 carefully selected, important services. These include, for example, re-registration or business registration.

Here, a map shows how far federal states and districts have progressed in the digitalization of these 45 important services. This is where the confusing information mentioned at the beginning appears, such as the availability of online re-registration at “0.6%” in the Prignitz district. Such values arise because online services like re-registration involve multiple administrative services and because districts comprise many municipalities. If only one out of six services is available in one of 138 municipalities, the district-wide availability is 0.1 percent (1 / (6*138)).

All municipalities and all services are always weighted equally; the population size has not yet played a role in the map display.

3. Usage and Maturity Levels

Online services that are not used are of little benefit. For this reason, the dashboard's “Usage” section is also intended to provide usage figures. “Intended,” because so far, such figures are only available for very few services. In many cases, you only encounter the statement that no data is available yet. If figures are available, they are often not up-to-date. For example, the dashboard currently reports usage figures for re-registration only up to October 2025.

However, the information on the maturity levels of administrative services is also interesting. For example, you learn that “building permit and construction approval” consists of 26 individual services, of which 24 have only maturity level 2. Maturity level 2 means: “Online application is generally possible. Proof can usually not yet be submitted online.”

The information on maturity levels at least hints at the fact that a true end-to-end digitalization and “Once-Only” is still a long way off. The maturity levels are not considered in the dashboard's overview maps. Therefore, they do not reveal how digital and how efficient the authorities work internally.

4. Export

For enthusiasts of administrative digitalization, the dashboard offers an export function. Here you can download up-to-date raw data from the Portalverbund Online-Gateway (PVOG) and delve into it to research, for example, at the level of individual municipalities. Further information on the dashboard is provided by a current handout (PDF) from the responsible Ministry for Digitalization and State Modernization (BMDS).

c’t also reports on the Dashboard Digitale Verwaltung in the current issue of the newsletter D.digital. You can subscribe to the newsletter free of charge here.

(cwo)