The net-pay advantage does not apply to your pension
For net pay, the tax system works in your favour in part-time: net pay falls less than your hours. There is no such compensation for the German statutory pension. Only gross salary counts here, and it falls one-to-one with working time. This article calculates what a year of part-time costs and shows which periods narrow the gap.
How your pension is built
For every year in which you pay contributions, you receive pension points (Entgeltpunkte). If you earn exactly the average salary of all insured people, you get one point. The provisional average salary for 2026 is €51,944. In retirement, each point is worth the current pension value, which has been €42.52 a month since 1 July 2026.
Example calculation
At €4,000 gross a month, or €48,000 a year, you collect 48,000 ÷ 51,944 = about 0.92 pension points. At today's value that corresponds to about €39.29 of monthly pension for this one year.
If you reduce to 30 hours, you earn €36,000 a year. That gives about 0.69 points or about €29.47 of monthly pension. Each year of part-time therefore costs you just under €10 of monthly pension. After ten years, about €98 a month is missing, for life. At 20 hours the gap would be twice as large.
The calculation is simplified because the average salary and the pension value change every year. The ratio stays the same, though: 75% of the salary means 75% of the points.
What narrows the gap
Child-raising periods: for children born from 1992 you are credited with three years of child-raising periods (two and a half years for older children), each worth about one pension point per year. These points are added on top of your own contributions, even if you work part-time during that period, up to the contribution ceiling.
Consideration periods: until a child's tenth birthday, part-time contributions can be upgraded under certain conditions if you have a total of 25 years of pension-relevant periods.
Care: if you care for a relative with care grade 2 or higher for at least ten hours on at least two days a week and work no more than 30 hours, the long-term care fund pays pension contributions for you.
Transition zone: if your part-time salary is between €603.01 and €2,000, you pay reduced contributions but your pension points are calculated on the full salary. The midi-job calculator shows the exact figures.
Reducing temporarily limits the gap
What matters most is how long you stay part-time. Two or three years hardly count over a whole working life, twenty years very much do. If you only need part-time for a certain phase of life, for example while children are small or during further training, you can limit it from the outset with bridge part-time and automatically return to your old hours afterwards. How this works is explained in the right to part-time and bridge part-time.
Save for yourself
You can use the net-pay advantage of part-time deliberately. In the example you lose €1,000 gross but only about €558 net. Part of the difference between the two shares can be put aside for retirement, for example through a company pension, voluntary additional contributions or a savings plan. Even €50 to €100 a month over ten years closes a large part of the gap.
Your own figures
The part-time calculator shows how much net pay you keep in part-time. The pension calculator calculates what your statutory pension pays out net. You can find your personal pension points in your annual pension statement. All figures are estimates; only the information from the German pension insurance is binding.