Got an Eigenbedarfskündigung in Berlin? The Hardship Clause Is Actually Winning Cases Right Now

The Official Rule

Berlin’s rental market is tight enough that receiving an Eigenbedarfskündigung, a termination because your landlord or a close relative genuinely wants to move into the flat themselves, raises an immediate, very practical question that families in less-squeezed cities rarely have to face this hard: where would you actually go. That question turns out to matter legally, not just practically, and Berlin’s courts have been treating it as central.

Under § 574 BGB, you can object to the termination and demand the tenancy continue if ending it would be a hardship for you, your family, or another household member, one that isn’t justified even when your landlord’s legitimate interest in the flat is properly weighed. Munich’s case law around this clause tends to center on school disruption and family circumstances. In Berlin, the ground that is actually deciding cases right now is more blunt: a genuine, well-documented inability to find another apartment on this city’s market.

The clearest recent example is a Landgericht Berlin II ruling from January 25, 2024 (case 67 S 264/22), and Berlin’s own courts published the details themselves. A landlord filed an eviction claim after an Eigenbedarfskündigung; the Amtsgericht Mitte had already dismissed it, finding the termination itself formally invalid. On appeal, the Landgericht Berlin II went further: even setting the formal question aside, the tenants had, in the court’s own words, applied for a large number of apartments across the entire city of Berlin over a period of almost two years, without success. Some legal commentary on the same case puts the number at over 244 individual listings. The court found that effort sufficient to satisfy the tenant’s duty to search seriously, continued the tenancy for two more years, and required only that the rent be raised to the market rate as a condition. The landlord’s appeal did not succeed. At the time of the court’s own press release, the ruling was not yet final.

What made that ruling possible is something genuinely specific to Berlin: tenants here don’t have to argue from scratch that the market is tight. The Mietenbegrenzungsverordnung (MietBegrV Bln), the same regulation that underlies Berlin’s Mietpreisbremse, already designates the entire city as a Gebiet mit angespanntem Wohnungsmarkt, an area with a tight housing market. The 67 S 264/22 court cited that designation directly, and noted that even the Geschützter Wohnungsmarkt, the city-run placement program that has matched over 30,000 homeless households with apartments since 1993 through a cooperation between Berlin’s housing companies, district offices, and the state health and social affairs office (Lageso), had no alternative to offer this tenant either. Berlin’s Kappungsgrenzenverordnung, which has capped rent increases in existing tenancies at 15 percent over three years since March 2023 and runs until May 10, 2028, and the city’s Zweckentfremdungsverbot rules, which raised the compensation ceiling for illegally repurposed housing from 4,100 to 4,600 EUR per square meter, point in the same direction: several separate, simultaneously valid city regulations all treating Berlin’s entire housing stock as scarce.

The Berliner Mieterverein’s own numbers back up how often this actually plays out in tenants’ favor. Its analysis of 501 Eigenbedarf cases handled between 2018 and 2024, published in December 2025, found that about a quarter of Eigenbedarf terminations end up in an actual eviction lawsuit, that tenants win those lawsuits outright roughly a quarter of the time, about twice the rate landlords do, with most remaining cases resolved through a Vergleich, a negotiated settlement. At least one in ten of the association’s roughly 2,000 Eigenbedarf consultations a year involves a concrete suspicion that the stated need is not genuine at all. Perhaps the single most striking number: Berlin alone accounts for roughly a quarter of every Eigenbedarf eviction lawsuit filed anywhere in Germany, a reflection of just how much pressure this city’s rental market puts on the relationship between landlords and tenants.

Not every hardship ground in Berlin runs through market tightness, though, and health-based claims come with their own, stricter evidentiary bar. An August 26, 2025 Federal Court of Justice ruling (VIII ZR 262/24) involved a Berlin tenant, born in 1939, living in the same flat since 1982, whose objection rested on a heart condition and a severe depressive episode that he argued made a move dangerous to his health. Both the Amtsgericht and, on appeal, Landgericht Berlin II had rejected the claim, with the Landgericht reasoning that since the tenant could still manage train travel, he could manage a move, a conclusion the BGH explicitly called an impermissible lay medical judgment for a court to make on its own. The BGH found the lower courts had relied on an incomplete and internally contradictory expert opinion without resolving the contradictions or seeking a further one, and sent the case back to Landgericht Berlin II for a properly clarified medical assessment. The practical lesson: a health-based hardship claim needs evidence specific enough that a court has no room to fill gaps with its own guesswork.

What Real People Say

Even landlord-side sources have started acknowledging how hard Eigenbedarf evictions have become to actually carry out in Berlin. Landlord forums discussing the city’s rental market cite trade publications describing it as, in practice, close to impossible to successfully enforce an Eigenbedarf eviction here right now, a notably different tone from how the same conversation plays out in less pressured cities.

On the tenant side, the Berliner Mieterverein’s roughly 2,000 Eigenbedarf consultations a year point to just how common receiving one of these notices has become, Eigenbedarf now ranks fifth among the topics its members bring in, behind rent level disputes, defects, heating and utility cost disputes, and subletting questions. People going through it describe the apartment search itself as the real work: applying across districts rather than staying local, and treating every rejection email as a piece of evidence worth keeping rather than something to delete.

The 67 S 264/22 case has become something of a reference point in tenant advice circles specifically because it shows the strategy working end to end: two years of documented, citywide searching, combined with pointing to Berlin’s own regulatory recognition of its housing shortage, was enough to keep a tenancy going even after a landlord won on appeal everywhere else in the argument.

Step by Step

1. Read your Eigenbedarfskündigung carefully and check whether the notice itself meets the formal requirements, since the Amtsgericht Mitte case underlying 67 S 264/22 was initially dismissed on exactly that basis, not the hardship clause.
2. Start documenting your apartment search immediately, applying across the whole city rather than just your own district, and keep dated copies of every application and every rejection.
3. If your ground is health, age, or pregnancy rather than lack of replacement housing, get a specialist medical assessment that directly addresses your ability to relocate, not just your diagnosis, given how the BGH treated a contradictory, incomplete opinion in the August 2025 ruling.
4. Send your written objection so it reaches your landlord no later than two months before the tenancy ends, citing both your documented search and, where relevant, Berlin’s Mietenbegrenzungsverordnung designation of the whole city as a tight housing market.
5. Get a review from the Berliner Mieterverein or a lawyer before finalizing your objection, since members who joined more than three months before receiving their termination get legal defense included, and the hardship clause remains a case-by-case balancing test.

Compliance Note

This page explains the general rules around the hardship clause under § 574 BGB and how Berlin’s courts have been applying it, but this is not legal advice, and whether your specific situation qualifies can only be confirmed by a tenant association or a lawyer familiar with your full circumstances.