German Levels A1 to C2, and Who Issues Them

A1 to C2 are the six levels of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, which belongs to the Council of Europe, and no single exam board owns them. Several separate organisations examine German against those levels, which is the part most people have not been told.

This page contains no exam fee, no exam format, no question count, no pass mark and no official level descriptor. That is a deliberate consequence of something that happened when we went to check, and the rest of this page explains it rather than papering over it.

What we could not read, and what we did about it

On 24 September 2026 we tried to read the two organisations that would actually know, and both refused.

The Goethe-Institut's website returned HTTP 403 — a flat refusal — to every request we made: its German exam overview, its US institute's exam page, and its own front page. We tried with two independent tools. Nothing was retrieved.

The Council of Europe's site, which owns the framework itself, returned a security block page instead of its level descriptions and its global scale, on both of the pages we tried, and its document server did the same.

So we have read neither the exam board's fees nor the framework's own wording for what each level means. Those numbers and descriptions are easy to find on language blogs, and copying them is exactly the move this site exists not to make: a fee we have not read is a fee we cannot date, and exam fees differ by country and by examination centre in any case, so a single figure would be wrong for most readers even if it were current.

What follows is what could be read, from sources that are not the exam board, clearly attributed to them.

The framework is not the exam

This is the confusion worth clearing up first, because it changes how you read every German course page you will ever see.

The CEFR is a description of what a learner can do, published by the Council of Europe, and it is not an examination. Any organisation may align its teaching or its testing to it. When a language school says its course takes you to B1, that is the school's own assessment of its own course against a public framework, and nobody audits it.

An exam certificate is a different object: a named body examined you and issued a document. Those documents have names — a certificate at a level from a specific issuer — and they are what a university admissions office or an immigration authority actually asks for.

So "I am B1" and "I hold a B1 certificate from a named body" are not the same claim, and only the second one is checkable by anybody else.

Who examines German

More than one organisation, which is the useful fact this page can give you.

Deutsche Welle, Germany's public broadcaster, publishes guidance for learners on German exams, and it names the landscape at A1 like this: the exam it calls Start Deutsch 1, which it describes as the Goethe-Zertifikat A1 and telc Deutsch A1, "offered globally in telc examination centers, at the Goethe-Institut and partner institutions"; Fit in Deutsch 1, which it describes as a special A1 exam for children and young people; the ÖSD Zertifikat A1, which it says is aimed at learners aged fourteen and up; and Switzerland's fide test, which it says assesses German at the A1 to B1 levels.

That is DW's description, quoted from its own page on 24 September 2026, and DW is a broadcaster rather than an examiner — so treat it as a well-informed third party pointing you at the right doors, not as the issuers speaking.

The practical upshot is that there is no single "German exam". There is a Goethe-Institut certificate, a telc certificate, an Austrian ÖSD certificate and a Swiss instrument, and which one you want depends entirely on who is going to read it. That is a question for the institution asking you for it.

Deutsche Welle also notes that these certificates get used for things like family reunification and au pair visas — which is a reminder that for many people this is not an academic exercise and the correct advice is to ask the receiving authority which certificate it accepts, not to read a blog.

What the levels roughly mean, and whose words these are

Since we could not read the Council of Europe's own descriptors, here is a vendor's paraphrase, clearly labelled as a vendor's paraphrase.

Lingoda, a commercial language school, publishes its own one-line gloss for each level it teaches in German. On 24 September 2026 its German page described A1 as "Absolute Beginner – Basic German words and phrases", A2 as "Beginner – Simple German language interactions", B1 as "Intermediate – Everyday conversations in German", B2 as "Upper Intermediate – Complex ideas and topics in German", and C1 as "Advanced – Proficient use of the German language".

Those are Lingoda's words about the levels it sells courses for. They are a reasonable orientation and they are not the framework's own definitions, and it is worth noticing that a page summarising the framework in passing also said it "has six levels" and then listed five, stopping at C1 — which is what its own catalogue goes up to.

Deutsche Welle groups the same six differently on its own course pages, into basic users at A1 and A2, independent users at B1 and B2, and proficient users at C1 and C2. Those three band names are the framework's, and DW uses them on pages that also name the framework in full.

If you need the actual descriptors — the official statements of what a B2 can do — get them from the Council of Europe rather than from us or from a school, and note that you may have better luck reaching it than we did.

What this means if you need a certificate

A short, honest checklist, none of which requires a fee we have not read.

Ask the institution that wants the certificate which issuers it accepts and at what level, before you book anything. A university, an employer and an immigration authority may each accept a different set.

Then contact the examination centre where you would actually sit it, and ask them for the fee and the dates. This is not evasion on our part: the fee genuinely varies by country and centre, so the centre is the only correct source for your number.

Take a placement test before you assume a level. Deutsche Welle publishes a free one alongside its courses, and it costs nothing to find out that you are not where you thought.

And separate the exam from the learning. Preparing for a specific certificate is a different activity from learning German, with its own formats and its own drills, and it is usually worth doing only in the last stretch before the exam. The routes into the language itself are a separate question, and how long any of it takes is a question almost nobody answers honestly.

Why the gap on this page is the point

It would have taken five minutes to fill this page with exam fees copied from elsewhere, and it would have read as authoritative.

The trouble is that a reader cannot tell the difference between a number somebody read at the source and a number somebody copied, and once a site publishes the second kind it has no way of telling you which is which. Leaving the gap visible is the only version of this page that keeps the rest of the site's figures worth anything.