On Grundsicherung: after 21 days abroad your money stops
If you receive Grundsicherungsgeld — the payment that replaced Bürgergeld on 1 July 2026 — leaving Germany for more than three weeks will normally stop your money completely. This matters most to people who travel back to a home country to see family, because those trips are rarely short.
The rule sits in the law on reachability. Your habitual residence must be in Germany, and you must be reachable by the Jobcenter so that you can attend appointments or take up work at short notice. Absence from your local area is capped at 21 calendar days in a calendar year, and it must be agreed with the Jobcenter in advance — you apply, and you wait for approval. Within those 21 approved days your payment continues as normal.
What happens after day 22 is the part people underestimate. Payment does not merely pause for the extra days: entitlement stops from the first day of the trip, and it takes the rent contribution and your health and pension insurance contributions with it. When you return you must apply again from the beginning. If you are planning to be away for longer than three weeks, the safer route is to deregister deliberately before you go and reapply on your return, rather than to travel and hope.
There are two openings. If you live near a border, the law allows you to be in the neighbouring country within a strip reaching about 30 kilometres inland without that counting as absence. And in March 2026 a regional social court in Saxony confirmed that where there is an important reason, the 21-day ceiling does not apply at all. The case concerned a man whose doctors advised a stay abroad to recover from burnout and depression; he kept his flat in Germany, stayed reachable by phone and email, and had a trusted person check and forward his post. His payments — including rent — had to continue through an absence of nearly three months.
That decision is not a general permission to travel. It turned on documented medical necessity, on proven reachability, and on the Jobcenter having been told. Without an attestation and a written notification, a long absence still means losing everything. Tell the Jobcenter in writing before you go, keep the proof, and keep the reply.