# Moving to Hamburg with Family - Info needed



## Mithrandir2

Hi,

I got a job offer in Hamburg, and I will be moving with my wife and two kids (11 and 14 years old).
My gross salary will be 65.000EUR. Based on calculators online (wife doesnt works and two kids), it seems my net pay will be 3.606EUR per month? Can anyone more experienced confirm this value?

Also will it be a good salary for a family of four?

Thanks!


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## Geschenk

Judging from various German online calculators, your net/month would be around 3000 to 3200€ with 2 kids.

As for the other question, I cannot directly answer, as I'm not familiar with prices for living in Hamburg.


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## *Sunshine*

How well do your kids speak German? You won't be able to afford international schools and the especially the older will struggle in a German public school unless the child already speaks fluent German.


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## Nononymous

I'd second the comment about schools. We were looking at Hamburg as a possible location for a year's sabbatical and the schooling options were very limited. Our daughter (around 12 at the time) had decent enough German, would have been fine in a bilingual program but regular Gymnasium would have been difficult. There were next to no options for her. I don't have any evidence to support the claim but I do recall reading that Hamburg still has one of the worst systems in terms of early streaming (grade 5) and poor results outside of Gymnasium. I can't imagine that the migrant situation has improved matters for non-German-speaking children.

Hamburg is an expensive city to begin with, even 3600/month won't be living in luxury for a family of four, but then if they don't already have good German your children would have very poor prospects in the public schools, and private international school could be quite expensive (do a little research, maybe if it's income-adjusted with a sibling discount it's not so bad). Home-schooling is illegal in Germany so not an option.


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## despaired

From what I understand there are several Gymnasium's in Hamburg, which offer bi-lingual education: English | Gymnasium Hochrad just to name one... so that shouldn't be much of a problem.

And in terms of salary, depends on whether you are fine with renting an apartment or whether your expect a house/ town house in the suburbs, but overall salary is fair enough. Calculate approx. 1500 Euro for rent, to have a decent place for 4 people.


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## Nononymous

The OP hasn't been back for months so who knows where this is at. Nevertheless, a comment about school options:

From what I learned doing research on this, bilingual Gymnasium isn't necessarily suited to kids without German - it's not meant as an immersion program, it's a German-speaking school with some subjects taught in English. (At 11 and 14 the OP's kids are probably too old for sudden immersion.) 

The Europa school programs in Berlin made this point quite specifically - they were not intended for students with little or no German. The Mandela school was quite different, a dual-track program that could take English-only kids and teach them basic German, along with parallel German classes for native speakers.

There's also the problem of bilingual programs being very popular, so gaining admission would be difficult.

We were able to toss our daughter into regular Grundschule and Gymnasium for half-year stretches in both 4th and 8th class; her German was sufficient, but as we were leaving and returning home each time we had the luxury of telling her to focus on language and forget about her subject marks. This is not really possible for a permanent move.


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