Germany Business/Trade Registration (Gewerbeanmeldung, GewA 1) — § 14 GewO / § 55c GewO

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: 2026-07-03

The document was derived from three independent Länder/municipal editions of the nationally standardized GewA 1 form (each a genuine fillable AcroForm PDF), plus a city Ordnungsamt's own field-by-field completion guide. It closes the Business Formation vertical's last open jurisdiction (DE — see gov777-fr-national-id-and-vertical-audit.md, which left this as the only remaining gap after au/asic and nz/companiesoffice). No live municipal online-Gewerbeanmeldung portal was submitted end-to-end (channel varies by municipality — many remain paper/in-person only), so status remains draft, not verified.

Sources examined

• Document (id, version): de/gewerbeamt/business-registration / 1.0.0
• Spec version: GovSchema 0.3.0
• Legal basis: § 14 GewO (Gewerbeordnung) and § 55c GewO (itinerant trades), which require prompt notification of a new trade to the locally competent Gewerbeamt/Ordnungsamt; the exact nationwide form layout is fixed by the Gewerbeanzeigeverordnung (GewAnzV), a federal ordinance, which is why every municipality's "GewA 1" carries the same field content despite being administered locally (the same "nationally standardized, locally administered" pattern already used for de/bmi/residence-registration).
• Primary form sources, cross-checked against each other field-by-field:
  • Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg's own bilingual German/English GewA 1 edition (fhh1.hamburg.de/Dibis/form/pdf/Formular-Gewerbeanmeldung_en.pdf) — used as this schema's canonical field-numbering and label source, since its own official English translation is unambiguous and page 4 states the German original remains legally binding.
  • Freistaat Sachsen's formularservice edition (formularservice-sachsen.de/nfs/upload_formular/9/GewerbeAnmeldung_1.pdf) — a genuine fillable AcroForm (confirmed via pdfjs-dist getAnnotations() returning real F1xx-style field names), used to confirm the field ordering and printed cadre text independently of Hamburg's edition.
  • Freistaat Bayern's state-ministry edition (stmwi.bayern.de/fileadmin/user_upload/stmwi/publikationen/pdf/Gewerbeanmeldung.pdf) — a third independent copy, retrieved to confirm the Sachsen/Hamburg field set was not an outlier.
  • Hamburg and Sachsen carry identical field content in identical numbered order (1 through 33, with 25/27 reserved for section headings rather than data fields), which is the direct evidence for the "bundeseinheitlicher Vordruck" (nationally uniform form) claim in this document's description. Bayern is not a clean third confirmation of that numbering: its edition inserts one extra field — a "Name des Geschäfts ... (Geschäftsbezeichnung)" trade-name field, immediately after the register-entry fields — that Hamburg and Sachsen do not have, which shifts all of Bayern's own subsequent field numbers by +1 relative to Hamburg/Sachsen (its own intro text cites "Feldern 4 bis 11" for the personal-details block that Hamburg/Sachsen number "fields 3-9"). An earlier draft of this document mis-cited that Bayern-only field as Hamburg's field 3 (which is actually "Surname") and modelled it as a tradeName field; that field has been removed from this version since it is not part of the Hamburg/Sachsen canonical numbering this document otherwise uses throughout, and a Land-specific extra field is out of scope for a v1.0.0 built on the nationally-standardized form. Everything else in Bayern's field content and ordering (register-entry fields onward, once its own +1 shift is accounted for) matches Hamburg/Sachsen.
• PDF extraction method: pdfjs-dist's getTextContent() (full printed instructional text, in both German and — for Hamburg's edition — English) and getAnnotations() (each fillable field's internal AcroForm name), the same technique used for fr/inpi/micro-entrepreneur-activity-declaration. Hamburg's edition additionally carries English-translated tooltip/field text directly in its annotation values (e.g. "If yes, it contains the following conditions or restrictions:"), which is what let this document quote clean English field labels rather than translating the German originals by hand.
• Requiredness / conditional-visibility guidance: the City of Düsseldorf Ordnungsamt's own 4-page "Anleitung zur Gewerbeanmeldung" (duesseldorf.de/fileadmin/Amt32/ordnungsamt/Gewerbe/Anleitung_GewA1.pdf, plain informational PDF, no form fields) gives an explicit field-by-field completion guide, e.g. "Einzelunternehmen: Lassen Sie Feld 1 und 2 leer" (sole traders: leave fields 1-2 blank), "Nur bei Zweigniederlassungen oder unselbständigen Zweitstellen ausfüllen" (only for branches/dependent branches), "Nur für Handwerksbetriebe" (only for craft businesses). This document's requiredWhen/visibleWhen gates on applicantType, registrationScope, businessType, filingCategory, newEstablishmentReason, isGermanNational, and the permit/craft/ residence-permit boolean chains are traced directly to this guide's per-field explanations, not inferred from the bare form layout.
• Note-field numbering caveat: Düsseldorf's own instructional PDF uses a field numbering shifted by roughly +1 to +2 in the personal-details/ activity sections relative to the Hamburg/Sachsen form editions themselves (a cosmetic drafting difference between that city's internal crib sheet and the GewA 1 form proper) — this document's sourceRefs cite the Hamburg-numbered form fields (the form itself, which agents actually see), and use Düsseldorf's guidance only for the underlying rule (which entity type completes which section), matched by field content/label rather than by number, to avoid propagating that numbering drift. Bayern's own numbering is shifted similarly (see above) and was likewise not used for any sourceRef in this document — only Hamburg's numbering is cited.
• Supporting-documents list (documents[]): the GewA 1 form itself does not print a checklist of attachments; the identity-document copy, the register extract (for already-registered entities), the Handwerksrolle extract/Handwerkskarte (craft businesses), the residence-permit copy (non-German nationals), and the registration fee were cross-checked across several independent municipal/explainer sources (gewerbeanmeldung.de, taxfix.de, gruenderplattform.de) that agree on this set; none of the four is a primary/official source in its own right; see "Known gaps" below.
• Fee and deadline: the registration fee is set by each municipality's own Kostensatzung (cited secondary-source range: roughly EUR 10-65), so this document's registrationFeePayment document entry deliberately omits a fixed amount object rather than publish a number that would be wrong for most municipalities. The "register promptly, in practice within about a week of starting the activity" norm under § 14 GewO is likewise a secondary-source characterisation (gewerbeanmeldung.de, taxfix.de, gruenderplattform.de all agree), not a numeric deadline printed on the form itself, and is not modelled as a field.
• Deliberately out of scope for this version:
  • Full GmbH/AG incorporation (drafting the Gesellschaftsvertrag/Satzung, notarial certification under the Beurkundungsgesetz, and the Handelsregister entry itself) — this document begins only at the Gewerbeanmeldung step that follows any such entity's formation/ existence, per its description.
  • The Handwerksrolle entry application process itself (only a yes/no-plus-detail flag on whether a Handwerkskarte already exists is modelled here, matching what the GewA 1 form itself asks).
  • The Reisegewerbekarte (itinerant-trade licence) application — only the GewA 1's own "is this also an itinerant trade" checkbox is modelled.
  • A local manager/authorised-representative appointment mechanism for a foreign owner residing overseas, analogous to the scoping already used in sg/acra/sole-proprietorship-registration — this document assumes the registrant (or the entity's named representative) is available to sign in person or via the entity's own legal representative.
  • Corrections/re-registration (Ummeldung) and de-registration (Gewerbeabmeldung) — separate forms/processes, not this one.

Test run (mock data)

Two scenarios were run against this schema version's required/ requiredWhen/visibleWhen gating logic with a standalone Node evaluator script implementing the shared Condition grammar (GSP-0013) exactly as specified (not committed — mirrors the structural checks tools/validate.mjs and tools/validate-ajv.mjs already run):

1. A sole trader (Einzelunternehmerin) registering a brand-new, full-time retail trade at her own home address, German national, no branches, no employees, no permits — confirms every register-entry, branch-office, takeover, craft, and residence-permit conditional field is correctly gated off. Committed as this version's conformance/.../application-packet.json fixture. A deliberately broken variant (with activityStartDate omitted) correctly failed with MISSING required field: activityStartDate.
2. A GbR partner, non-German (Austrian) national, registering a craft business as a dependent branch office of another premises, taking over an existing business by inheritance, holding a conditional residence permit — exercises every conditional branch simultaneously (registeredCompanyName/gbrPartnerNames, otherNationality, principalEstablishment*, takeoverReason/formerOperatorOrCompanyName/ formerEstablishment*, hasCraftsRollCard/craftsCardIssueDateAndChamber, hasResidencePermit/residencePermitIssueDateAndAuthority/ residencePermitHasConditions/residencePermitConditionsDetail). Not committed as a fixture (single-packet-per-version convention), but a deliberately broken variant (with residencePermitConditionsDetail omitted despite residencePermitHasConditions: true) correctly failed with MISSING required field: residencePermitConditionsDetail; restoring the field passed.

Both tools/validate.mjs and tools/validate-ajv.mjs (full JSON Schema 2020-12 meta-schema, ajv) pass for this document.

Known gaps / future work

• Independently confirm the documents[] checklist (identity document, register extract, Handwerksrolle extract, residence-permit copy) against a Gewerbeamt's own published checklist rather than third-party explainer sites, ideally from several different Länder to check for local variance.
• Submit (or observe a submission of) at least one municipality's online Gewerbeanmeldung portal end-to-end to promote this document to verified.
• A natural next sibling is the Gewerbe-Abmeldung (de-registration) and Gewerbe-Ummeldung (change-of-details) forms, which share most of this form's identity/premises fields.

Scope

Out of scope for this version: GmbH/AG incorporation itself, Handwerksrolle entry application, Reisegewerbekarte application, foreign-owner local-manager appointment, and Ummeldung/Abmeldung (change/de-registration).