Taxi Licence Cost in Germany: What the P-Schein Really Costs

A German taxi licence isn’t a sticker you pick up somewhere. Officially it’s called the Personenbeförderungsschein (P-Schein, literally “passenger transport certificate”), and without it you cannot legally drive a taxi or a private hire vehicle for pay anywhere in Germany. Anyone weighing whether to move into driving for a living wants one number first: what it costs, and how long until they’re allowed to carry a paying passenger. Both questions have real answers — just not a single nationwide figure, because this system is split by region like almost everything else in this trade.

What the P-Schein legally is

The basis is § 48 of the Driving Licence Regulation (FeV), read together with the Passenger Transport Act (PBefG). You need it the moment you carry passengers for payment — whether in a taxi, a private hire vehicle with driver, or now also many platform-dispatched jobs, which formally run as private hire operations. Without proof of the licence, your local driving licence authority simply will not register you to carry fare-paying passengers, and without that registration you cannot legally earn a cent doing it.

The authority responsible is the driving licence office at your place of residence, usually part of the road traffic or district administration office. The exam itself is set and marked by the local Chamber of Industry and Commerce (IHK) — not by a driving school, not by TÜV. That trips up a lot of newcomers: a driving-school course prepares you, it does not examine you.

What you need before a course even starts

Four things have to be in place before the authority accepts your application at all.

Minimum age 21 and a full Class B driving licence held for at least two years. That’s one of the few genuinely nationwide rules in this whole area.

A medical certificate confirming you’re fit for the job — eyesight, hearing, general physical condition, a cardiovascular system able to cope with the demands. Depending on the doctor and region, that runs roughly €70 to €150 (as of 2026), usually obtainable from a GP or a doctor qualified in traffic medicine.

An extract from the Federal Central Register and a check against the Federal Motor Transport Authority’s points register (the Flensburg file) — both show the authority you have neither a criminal record nor a worrying driving history. The fees for these run to a few euros each, typically under €15 combined.

A medical-psychological assessment (MPU) isn’t required for everyone. It’s only ordered if your driving record shows something specific — heavy accumulation of points, a previous drink-driving offence, or similar entries. A clean file gets you through without one. If you don’t have one, budget an extra €400 to €800, depending on provider and state, plus several weeks’ wait for an appointment.

The IHK exam: two parts, unequal weight

The exam itself splits into two blocks, marked separately.

The professional-knowledge exam covers traffic law (particularly the PBefG and its associated regulations), basic vehicle technical knowledge, first aid, how to behave at accidents and in hazardous situations, and basic commercial/business knowledge if you’re planning to run your own operation eventually. It’s usually a written multiple-choice or short-answer test.

The local knowledge test is the part that intimidates applicants most, and rightly so. You have to demonstrate you know the shortest and most sensible routes between arbitrary points across your licensing city — landmarks, government offices, hospitals, hotels, stations, major venues. In big cities like Berlin, Munich or Hamburg this is a serious exam component with its own weeks-long preparation time. Some municipalities have since eased the local knowledge test or paired it with sat-nav use — one of the changes the PBefG reform since 2021 has nudged forward, though how it’s implemented still varies city by city.

The IHK exam fee for both parts combined usually runs €150 to €250 (as of 2026), depending on the chamber. If you fail a part, you pay again to resit it — a cost many people forget in their first estimate.

What a prep course costs

Formally, a course isn’t compulsory — you can in theory prepare on your own and sit the IHK exam directly. In practice almost nobody does, because the local knowledge test especially is hard to pass without structured preparation.

Driving schools and specialist training providers run prep courses covering both the professional-knowledge exam and local knowledge together. The price range is wide: compact courses run over a few weekends sit around €300 to €500, while more thorough courses with extended local-knowledge training run €600 to €1,200 (as of 2026), depending on city, provider and course length. In dense metropolitan areas with a demanding local knowledge test, the upper end is more realistic than in smaller towns with a simplified procedure.

A first aid course almost always has to be booked and paid for separately, unless it’s already bundled into the IHK prep package. Budget €35 to €60 for a one-day course with a recognised provider.

The full bill, realistically totalled

Add every item together for someone without an MPU requirement, taking a mid-range prep course:

Medical certificate (around €100), register extracts (around €15), first aid course (around €45), prep course (around €700), IHK exam fee (around €200) — that comes to roughly €1,000 to €1,100 in total, with a realistic range of €700 to €1,500 depending on city and course choice. Add an MPU and the top end shifts up to around €2,000.

On timing: from application to a passed exam typically takes two to four months, longer in cities with long waiting lists for local-knowledge exam slots. Anyone doing it alongside a job while completing the course part-time should plan for the upper end of that range.

What changed after the 2021 PBefG reform

The reform of the Passenger Transport Act, which took effect in August 2021, opened up the market for private hire and platform-dispatched transport without abolishing the P-Schein itself. That’s a point a lot of people get wrong: you still need the passenger transport licence for platform-dispatched trips too, whenever you’re carrying passengers commercially. The reform mainly changed the licensing conditions for operators — for instance letting municipalities permit pooled rides and new operating models — and gave some cities more room to modernise the local knowledge test, in places supported by sat-nav rather than pure memorisation.

For the fees a driver actually pays, little has changed; the underlying structure of medical certificate, register extracts, IHK exam and optional prep course has stayed stable. What has shifted is the demand side: because more platforms are now legally hiring drivers, the P-Schein has become a more direct route into a second job or full-time work than it was before the reform, particularly in big cities with heavy platform density.

Who covers the cost — and when it pays off

Some taxi firms and larger private hire operators cover part or all of the course cost for drivers who commit long term, or offer interest-free advances deducted from the first few months’ pay. It’s worth asking before you pay out of pocket yourself — larger operators in cities short of drivers have a very concrete interest in lowering the barrier to entry for you.

The maths works out quickly: at typical taxi-trade hourly earnings, which vary considerably by city and utilisation, an outlay of around €1,000 is usually recouped within a few weeks of full-time driving. The real bottleneck is rarely the money — it’s the wait for an exam slot. In cities with high demand for exam places, that can delay starting work far more than the course fee itself.

For anyone weighing this outlay against what actually lands in a driver’s pocket once they’re working: the municipally set tariffs that determine your income as a taxi driver are covered in detail in taxi tariffs in Germany — base fare through to time rate is the structure you’ll be doing the maths on every working day. And to see how much the price level actually varies between cities, taxi fares in Munich is a concrete example from one of Germany’s pricier taxi markets — a factor worth weighing when choosing which city to get licensed in.

Whether the P-Schein is worth it for you comes down less to the course fee than to which city you want to work in and how strong local demand for drivers is. Metropolitan areas with a chronic driver shortage tend to offer the fastest routes in and the most willingness from operators to help with costs — smaller towns with an easier local knowledge test offer a shorter path to your first paid fare instead.