Germany Mandatory Driving Licence Exchange (Führerschein-Umtausch, Pflichtumtausch alter Fahrerlaubnisse in den EU-Kartenführerschein)

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

Authored from one representative local authority's live, fillable form, plus the federal legal text governing the process nationwide. A second Land's form was spot-checked for field-set consistency (not structurally extracted). Because the process is executed by several hundred independent Fahrerlaubnisbehörden rather than one national portal, the practice's field-by-field comparison has not been completed against every local variant — status remains draft, not verified.

Sources examined

• Document (id, version): de/kba/driving-licence-mandatory-exchange / 1.0.0
• Spec version: GovSchema 0.3.0
• Authority: Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt (KBA), which maintains the federal Fahrerlaubnisregister (central driving-licence register), under the Fahrerlaubnis-Verordnung (FeV). The exchange itself is filed with, and processed by, the applicant's local Fahrerlaubnisbehörde (Straßenverkehrsamt of a Landkreis or kreisfreie Stadt) — there is no single national online portal for this process, unlike e.g. Elster (tax) or the federal verwaltung.bund.de first-issuance flow.
• Legal basis (fetched live, 2026-07-03, HTTP 200, gesetze-im-internet.de — the official federal law portal):
  • https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/fev_2010/anlage_8e.html — Anlage 8e FeV, implementing § 24a Abs. 2 Satz 1 FeV. Quotes verbatim the two exchange-deadline tables: Table I, licences issued through 31 December 1998, keyed by the holder's birth year (before 1953 → 19 January 2033; 1953–1958 → 19 July 2022; 1959–1964 → 19 January 2023; 1965–1970 → 19 January 2024; 1971 or later → 19 January 2025); Table II, licences issued from 1 January 1999 onward, keyed by issue year (1999–2001 → 19 January 2026, stepping forward roughly one year per issue-year band, through 2012–18 January 2013 → 19 January 2033). Holders born before 1953 must exchange by 19 January 2033 regardless of issue year.
  • https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/fev_2010/__76.html — § 76 FeV (Übergangsrecht), Nummer 9 and 10: the class-conversion rules for pre-1999 old-law classes (e.g. old Class 3 converting to unrestricted C1E, plus the age-50-limited CE/CE79 extended towing-combination option and the Class T agricultural/forestry option this schema models as requestsExtendedTowingCombination/requestsClassT), and the medical/eye examination validity transitional rules (Anlage 5, Anlage 6 FeV).
• Process guidance (fetched live, 2026-07-03):
  • https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/aktuelles/faq-fuehrerschein-umtausch-1842574 — federal government FAQ confirming who must exchange, the deadline structure, required documents (ID, biometric photo, current licence), approximate 25 EUR fee, the new card's 15-year document validity, and the (waivable) 10 EUR fine for missing a deadline.
  • https://www.adac.de/verkehr/rund-um-den-fuehrerschein/aktuelles/fristen-fuehrerschein-umtausch/ — ADAC's consumer-facing deadline table and process summary, confirming the exchange happens "without examination or health evaluation" for a plain conversion and independently corroborating the Anlage 8e tables.
• Primary form source: Landkreis Ludwigsburg (Baden-Württemberg) — "Antrag auf Umstellung einer Fahrerlaubnis alten Rechts in einen neuen EU-Kartenführerschein" (2018 edition, marked "ausfüllbar"/fillable), retrieved directly from landkreis-ludwigsburg.de, a *.de municipal government domain. Two pages, a genuine fillable AcroForm (37 named widgets on page 1, 11 on page 2), extracted with pdfjs-dist's getAnnotations()/getTextContent() per this registry's established gov-form-PDF-extraction technique.
• Cross-check source (spot-checked, not structurally extracted): Kreis Rendsburg-Eckernförde (Schleswig-Holstein) — "Antrag auf Umstellung der Fahrerlaubnis", Stand 01.01.2025, retrieved from kreis-rendsburg-eckernfoerde.de. This form has no AcroForm widgets (its text is extractable but not fillable), so it was read via getTextContent() only, as a field-set consistency check rather than a second primary extraction. It independently confirms the same core field set (Familienname, Vornamen, Geburtsname falls abweichend, Geburtsdatum, Geburtsort, postal code and home town, street and house number, phone, current licence class(es)/issue date/issuing Fahrerlaubnisbehörde, the same CE79 extended-towing-combination and Class T options gated by age 50 and Anlage 5/6 medical certificates, and the same required-documents list — while pricing its own fee schedule differently (32.00 EUR for a plain exchange with direct mailing, 76.10 EUR for one that also extends the C/CE classes past age 50), confirming the fee is set per-Land/Landkreis rather than nationally fixed, as this schema's exchangeFee document already notes from the Ludwigsburg/national-guidance discrepancy (24 EUR vs ~25 EUR) alone.
• What the extracted Ludwigsburg text/widgets show, verbatim structure:
  • Page 1: personal-details header (Name, Geburtsname bei Abweichung, Vornamen, Geschlecht w/m, Geburtsdatum, Geburtsort, Straße, PLZ/Ort, Tel., Email-Adresse); current-licence block (ausstellende Behörde, Ausstellungsdatum, Führerscheinnummer); a 20-option Fahrerlaubnis-Klasse checklist (1, 1a, 1b, 2, 3, 4, 5, A1, A, B, BE, C1, C1E, C, CE, D1, D1E, D, DE, M, L, S, T); and a collection/return-method choice (old licence invalidated and new one mailed home — available only for licences issued by 31 December 1998 — vs. new licence collected in person at a named Fahrerlaubnisbehörde branch office).
  • Page 2: the Class-3-specific upgrade block — the extended >12t–18.5t towing combination (with the age-50 medical/vision-certificate extension), the Class T agricultural/forestry option (with its own irreversibility warning once the base conversion is completed), the fee (24.00 EUR quoted here), the required-attachments checklist (ID/birth record, biometric photo, medical certificate, vision certificate, agricultural-activity proof, Karteikartenabschrift), and a signature/date line.
• Interpretation calls:
  • currentLicenceCategories is modelled as a single delimited string, not a repeating/array value, for the same reason as this registry's other checklist-style category fields (e.g. fr/ants/driving-licence-renewal-duplicate): GovSchema v0.3 has no native multi-select field type (GSP-0009 not yet folded into the accepted spec).
  • The Anlage 8e FeV deadline tables (by birth year / by issue year) are documented in dateOfBirth's and currentLicenceIssueDate's descriptions and in this file, but are not enforced as a computed requiredWhen/validation rule: the condition grammar (GSP-0013 §1) compares a field against a literal or another field via equals/in/greaterThan-family operators, not against a table-lookup or date-arithmetic function of two fields. Flagged as an out-of-scope derived computation, not a silently-asserted rule.
  • isPre1999Class3Holder and its two gated fields (requestsExtendedTowingCombination, requestsClassT) are modelled as three separate booleans rather than deriving eligibility by parsing currentLicenceCategories for a "3" token, for the same reason the sibling fr/ants/driving-licence-renewal-duplicate schema asks involvesHeavyVehicleCategory directly instead of parsing its own delimited category string.
  • sex's enum is modelled ["W", "M"] (uppercase), matching this registry's existing convention on sibling DE schemas' single-letter enums, rather than the form's own lowercase "w/m" checkbox labels.
  • The office-reserved "Von der Fahrerlaubnisbehörde auszufüllen" block (Rendsburg-Eckernförde form) and the Ludwigsburg form's unlabeled generic checkbox pair for sex are administration-side or ambiguous widgets, not modelled as applicant-facing fields.

Test run (mock data)

A mock scenario — an applicant exchanging a pre-1999 Class 3 licence issued in 1991, who has already turned 50 and wants to keep the extended towing combination but does not request Class T, with the current licence's original issuing authority still being their present Fahrerlaubnisbehörde — was run against this schema version's required/requiredWhen/visibleWhen gating logic with a standalone validator script (not committed — ad hoc, mirrors the checks tools/validate.mjs and tools/validate-ajv.mjs already run structurally) before publishing. Committed as this version's conformance/.../application-packet.json fixture:

1. With isPre1999Class3Holder: true and requestsExtendedTowingCombination: true — confirms medicalCertificate and visionTestCertificate are correctly required, requestsClassT is correctly still asked (and answered false) rather than skipped, and agriculturalActivityProof is correctly not required.
2. With issuingAuthorityRecordsUnavailable: false — confirms recordExtract is correctly not required.
3. A second pass with isPre1999Class3Holder: false (not committed as a fixture, this registry's convention is a single application-packet.json per schema version) confirmed all three Class-3-specific fields (requestsExtendedTowingCombination, requestsClassT, and their gated documents) correctly become not-required and not-visible.

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

Scope

Out of scope for this version: computing the applicable Anlage 8e FeV exchange deadline from dateOfBirth/currentLicenceIssueDate (documented, not enforced, see above); any local Fahrerlaubnisbehörde's own online submission portal or appointment-booking flow (this schema models the underlying paper/PDF field set common across offices, not a specific office's screen-by-screen flow); and the separate, materially different process for exchanging a foreign (non-German, non-EU/EWR) driving licence, which falls under § 30/§ 31 FeV rather than Anlage 8e and is not modelled here.