Germany Residence Registration (Anmeldung)

This file is the source-review record for this document version, per the manual-source-review-v1 practice. It documents the provenance of the published fields and flow and states the current verification claim honestly.

Current claim

• status: draft
• verification.method: manual-source-review-v1
• verification.lastVerifiedAt: 2026-07-01

The document was derived from and cross-checked against the official sources below, but the full field-by-field comparison the practice requires (manual-source-review-v1 → Procedure step 2) has not yet been completed and recorded against the live online (EWA) and in-person Bürgeramt flows. It therefore remains draft, not verified.

Why Germany, why now

Every jurisdiction published in the registry before this document — US, GB, IE, CA, NZ, AU — is Anglophone and common-law. GovSchema's charter calls for global/multi-jurisdictional scope "even when early coverage is narrow" (see discovery/README.md), and that narrowness had gone unaddressed for six authoring cycles. This document opens Germany as a seventh jurisdiction and the first non-English-source, civil-law one, which is also the first real test of whether the v0.2 field/flow model holds outside the Anglophone convention patterns (postal-code shape, name-and-nationality fields, address structure, document-type enumerations) it was implicitly built against.

Sources examined

• Document (id, version): de/bmi/residence-registration / 1.0.0
• Spec version: GovSchema 0.2.0
• Primary source URL (in-person channel, legal basis, deadlines, fee, documents): https://service.berlin.de/dienstleistung/120686/ — Berlin's official "Wohnsitz - Alleinige Wohnung oder Hauptwohnung anmelden" service page. Fetched directly (curl, 2026-07-01, HTTP 200) and its raw HTML text extracted and read in full, not summarized by a small model — the page cites its own legal basis by section number (see below), so this was checked directly rather than trusted from a paraphrase.
• Primary source URL (federal online EWA channel): https://wohnsitzanmeldung.gov.de/die-elektronische-wohnsitzanmeldung-schritt-fuer-schritt-642992 — the federal government's own EWA explainer, confirming the service is a joint Bundesministerium des Innern und für Heimat (BMI) / city digitalisation project rolling out municipality by municipality, not a Berlin-only service.
• Secondary source (field-level cross-check #1): https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/anmeldung-in-english-berlin and https://allaboutberlin.com/docs/anmeldung — a well-established, long-running expat resource that transcribes the ~54-field Meldeschein field-by-field (new/previous address, personal details, document details) and cites BMG section numbers (§17, §27 Abs. 2, §29, § 7 WoAufG Bln).
• Secondary source (field-level cross-check #2): https://www.settle-in-berlin.com/anmeldung/guide-anmeldung-form-in-english/ — an independent expat-guide site; its field table (new/previous dwelling type, document type codes RP/PA, marital-status labels, gender labels) was cross-checked against allaboutberlin.com and found consistent everywhere the two overlap.
• Structural confirmation (official form, different Land): the City of Munich's official fillable Meldeschein PDF (stadt.muenchen.de/dam/jcr:15cee8cc-bd9a-46f0-9c4b-052766dc547f/anmeldung_meldebehorde.pdf, retrieved 2026-07-01, HTTP 200). Its AcroForm field names, /Opt option arrays, and tooltip (/TU) text were extracted directly from the PDF's decompressed content streams (zlib-decompress; the /TU values are UTF-16BE hex strings — <FEFF…> — and must be decoded as UTF-16BE, not read as Latin-1 parenthesized strings, which is why an earlier pass missed the enumerated option lists). This confirms directly, from the form's own text: the multi-person Sections 1-5 structure (this document scopes to Section 1/one registrant only); the identity-document type codes PA/RP/KRP/KA/AKN and their expansions (see below); the full marital-status and gender code sets (see below); and the presence of birth-place/date, nationality, and religion fields matching the Berlin-sourced field list.
• Retrieved / reviewed: 2026-07-01
• Reviewer: GovSchema Engineering (initial authoring source-review)

What was confirmed directly against the primary source

From service.berlin.de/dienstleistung/120686/ (fetched and read in full):

| Source element | Field(s) / schema element | |---|---| | "innerhalb von 14 Tagen nach Ihrem Einzug" (14-day deadline) | moveInDate description | | "alleinige Wohnung" / "Hauptwohnung" / "Nebenwohnung" distinction | residenceType, previousResidenceType | | Online procedure (BundID, eID, AusweisApp, 18+, German/EU citizenship, moving within Germany, family-unit co-registration) | channel = online_ewa | | In-person procedure (Bürgeramt appointment, 16+, any nationality, guardian registers under-16, Vollmacht for a representative) | channel = in_person, representativeAuthorization | | Wohnungsgeberbestätigung requirement (landlord confirms in writing within 2 weeks; a tenancy agreement does not substitute) | landlordConfirmationProvided | | Guardian consent for a minor's move (joint-custody parents) | minorGuardianConsentProvided | | "Gebühren: keine" (no fee) | not modelled as a field (consistent with us/usps/change-of-address's deliberately-unencoded fee) | | "Durchschnittliche Bearbeitungszeit: sofort" (immediate) | informational only, not modelled | | Legal basis: BMG §17 Abs. 1 u. 3 (An-/Abmeldung), §21 Abs. 4 (mehrere Wohnungen), §23 (Erfüllung der Meldepflicht), §23a Abs. 2 u. 3 (elektronische Anmeldung), §24 Abs. 1 (Datenerhebung, Meldebestätigung), §27 (Ausnahmen) | cited in schema description; exemption cases (short stays, communal service accommodation) recorded qualitatively, not modelled as fields, since this document assumes the registrant is in scope |

Enum option codes — confirmed directly from the Munich PDF /TU tooltips

The Munich Meldeschein PDF's per-field tooltips (UTF-16BE /TU strings) enumerate the official code sets verbatim. Decoded directly:

• maritalStatus (famst field) — "Hier ist der personenstandsrechtliche Familienstand anzugeben:" — LD = ledig, VH = verheiratet, VW = verwitwet, GS = geschieden, LP = eingetragene Lebenspartnerschaft, LV = Lebenspartner verstorben, LA = Lebenspartnerschaft aufgehoben, EA = Ehe aufgehoben, LE = Lebenspartner für tot erklärt, NB = nicht bekannt. All ten are modelled in the schema's maritalStatus enum (an earlier draft carried only six).
• gender (geschl field) — M = männlich, W = weiblich, o.A. = ohne Angabe, D = divers (with the §22 Abs. 3 PStG note). Modelled as male/female/unspecified/diverse.
• identityDocumentType (Pass-/Ausweisdaten field, /Opt + /TU) — PA = Personalausweis, RP = Reisepass, KRP = Kinderreisepass, KA = Kinderausweis, AKN = Ankunftsnachweis. All five are modelled as explicit enum values; other is retained for non-German-national documents (foreign passport, residence title) that the Bürgeramt accepts but that carry no distinct Munich-form code.

From wohnsitzanmeldung.gov.de (EWA explainer): the three-phase online flow (data entry incl. optional family co-registration → authority review and email confirmation → digital Meldebestätigung plus an ID-card address sticker mailed by the Bundesdruckerei) — informational; not separately modelled beyond the channel field, since GovSchema does not model post-submission fulfilment steps for any published schema.

What was cross-checked against secondary sources

The full new-dwelling / previous-dwelling / personal-details / document-details field groups (newAddress*, previousAddress*, lastName through maritalStatus, identityDocument*) were not individually itemised on the Berlin.de service page (which describes the process in prose, not a field-by-field form spec — the same gap noted for gb/co/register-to-vote). They were reconstructed from the two independent expat-guide field transcriptions (allaboutberlin.com, settle-in-berlin.com), which agree with each other on field presence, ordering, and the document-type codes, and were then structurally confirmed against the Munich Meldeschein PDF's own AcroForm field names.

What is NOT yet independently verified

• Whether the exact enum wording matches every Land's template. The gender, maritalStatus, and identityDocumentType code sets are now confirmed directly from the Munich Meldeschein PDF's own /TU tooltips (decoded as UTF-16BE; see the confirmed-enum block above), superseding the earlier "modelled from general knowledge" hedge. What remains open is only whether other Länder's templates use an identical code set — the same cross-template caveat noted just below, not a gap in the Munich source read.
• Whether the field set is truly nationally uniform. The Bundesmeldegesetz sets the registration data model federally, and the Allgemeine Verwaltungsvorschrift zur Durchführung des BMG (BMGVwV) that Berlin cites (Nrn. 17.1, 17.3, 21, 22, 23.0, 36.2) implements it, but each Land/city publishes its own Meldeschein template. This document treats the Berlin and Munich templates as representative exemplars (same convention as us/ca/dmv/* for US state DMVs), not as proof every Land's template is byte-identical.
• The EWA online channel's per-municipality availability is not modelled. The federal EWA site frames the service as a joint BMI/city project offered for municipalities to adopt (the "Einer für Alle" / Nachnutzung principle), rolling out municipality by municipality rather than being uniformly live everywhere on day one; it does not publish a machine-readable list of currently-live municipalities on the pages reviewed (home, FAQ, Über uns, Leistungsbeschreibung, service-description, step-by-step). channel is therefore modelled as a flat enum without a jurisdiction-availability gate. (An earlier draft cited a specific "nine of the ten largest German cities" figure; that figure could not be located on any reviewed page and has been removed as unsupported.)
• Postal-code, and other string length limits are GovSchema conventions (5-digit German PLZ format is a well-established public fact), not citations of a published field-length rule.

Scope notes

• Single adult registrant only. The real Meldeschein supports registering up to several household members (spouse/civil partner, minor children) in one submission (Munich PDF sections 1-5); this document models one registrant's data, matching the scope discipline used for gb/co/register-to-vote and other single-applicant schemas. A future version could add a repeatable co-registrant field group once the spec supports a natural repeat construct.
• Sole/main residence only (Berlin dienstleistung 120686). Registering a Nebenwohnung-only, deregistering (Abmeldung, on moving abroad or having no further German residence), and the Beiblatt/Hauptwohnungserklärung multiple-residence supplement are out of scope. Each is a related but distinct service, flagged as future catalog candidates.
• Minors under 16 cannot self-register in person and are out of scope beyond the minorGuardianConsentProvided flag for an adult's own move with a child.

Path to a verified claim (next step)

To advance to status: verified, a reviewer applies manual-source-review-v1 (Procedure step 2) field-by-field against the live online (EWA) and in-person Bürgeramt flows. The address/name/document field groups still rest primarily on the two expat-guide transcriptions cross-checked against the Munich AcroForm field names, not a direct read of the live Berlin form's field list. The gender/maritalStatus/identityDocumentType enum codes are now confirmed directly from the Munich PDF tooltips and no longer block promotion. Confirm EWA per-municipality coverage if that ever becomes a modelled field, and record the outcome here with a current verification.lastVerifiedAt.

Re-verification

Per the practice's Cadence, nextReviewBy is set to 2027-01-01 (6 months). Re-check the source on or before that date and on any source.url change.