Where People Are Moving To In Germany In 2026

Germany's fastest-growing towns in 2026 sit on the edge of its biggest cities, not inside them. Brandenburg, the state that wraps around Berlin, gained 16,626 residents through migration alone in 2025, even as the state's overall population fell for the first time since 2013. The immediate Berlin Umland grew again, while the wider Brandenburg countryside continued to lose population. The same split shows up around Munich, Frankfurt and Leipzig as the core city keeps adding residents on paper, but a growing share of that growth belongs to towns just past the city limit. Housing costs are the clearest driver. Households priced out of the big cities are resettling twenty to sixty minutes out along commuter rail lines, and in a few places a single large employer, whether a Tesla plant in Brandenburg or Munich's airport, is pulling growth toward one specific town rather than spreading it across a whole region.

Falkensee

Falkensee, in Brandenburg's Havelland district on Berlin's northwest edge, has grown faster since reunification than any other German city that expanded within fixed borders. A cumulative rise of 87% that took the town from roughly 23,000 residents to past 44,000. Nearly all of that growth traces back to Berlin. The town sits at the end of a regional rail line into the capital, and its stock of single-family homes on generous lots draws young families who can no longer afford comparable space inside the city.

Falkensee is still adding housing to keep pace, with developer BUWOG building 472 apartments on former farmland south of the Falkenhagener See, part of roughly 1,500 new units planned through 2026. City officials describe the growth as a good problem, as schools, roads and kindergartens have needed constant expansion to keep pace with a population that shows no sign of leveling off.

Teltow

Teltow sits directly across Berlin's southwestern border in the Potsdam-Mittelmark district, and its population density climbed from about 1,035 people per square kilometer in 2011 to roughly 1,260 by 2022, one of the steepest increases anywhere in the Berlin Umland. Along with neighboring Kleinmachnow and Glienicke/Nordbahn, Teltow now packs in more than 1,000 residents per square kilometer, a density usually associated with the city it borders rather than its suburbs.

The draw is straightforward. Teltow reaches central Berlin by S-Bahn in well under an hour, while offering newer apartment stock at lower prices than comparable Berlin neighborhoods. Local governments across the Berlin Umland have answered the sustained inflow with continuous new construction, since the region's population growth has kept up even as some parts of outer Brandenburg lose residents.

Fürstenwalde/Spree

Fürstenwalde/Spree, about 50 kilometers southeast of Berlin in the Oder-Spree district, is one of the anchor towns in what regional statisticians now call Berlin's "second ring," roughly 50 towns and cities, together home to about 240,000 people, that the Amt für Statistik Berlin-Brandenburg expects to grow faster than the traditional Speckgürtel through 2040.

Fürstenwalde itself holds around 32,600 residents, the largest town in its county, and regional planners have credited Tesla's Grünheide gigafactory, roughly 25 kilometers away, with helping keep its migration balance positive even as births lag deaths. The town markets itself as a "Domstadt" for its medieval cathedral, and its status as a Regionaler Wachstumskern (regional growth center) has channeled state investment its way. As rail and road links into Berlin improve, planners expect towns like Fürstenwalde to absorb more of the growth that used to stop at the inner suburbs.

Potsdam

Potsdam, Brandenburg's state capital, sits directly across Berlin's southwestern border and reached 184,754 residents in 2024, extending a growth trend that has largely bypassed the rest of the state. Potsdam and the ring of towns immediately around it are now among the densest parts of Brandenburg outside Berlin itself. Several exceed 1,000 residents per square kilometer, a level normally associated with the capital rather than its neighbors.

Much of the inflow originates in Berlin as households priced out of the capital look first to Potsdam, drawn by direct rail access into the city center. The Havel lakes run through it, and its historic core has drawn steady restoration investment since reunification. That demand has pushed Potsdam's own housing market close to Berlin price levels, a shift that is now pushing newer arrivals further out toward Teltow, Falkensee and the emerging second ring beyond them.

Leipzig

Leipzig added just 1,030 residents in 2025, its smallest annual gain since 2002, yet it remains the fastest-growing German city with more than 500,000 residents over the past decade and a half, closing the year at 633,592. The growth is almost entirely migration-driven. Leipzig recorded 2,308 births against 3,810 deaths in 2025, so without inbound movers the population would be shrinking.

That inflow, worth a net 5,887 people in 2024 alone, has shifted over time from neighboring Saxony and eastern Germany toward western Germany and abroad. 21.5% of Leipzig's population now has a migration background, led by residents from Syria, Ukraine and Russia. The University of Leipzig, with more than 30,500 students, keeps the average age at a young 42.1, and the Südvorstadt district near downtown, home to about 26,700 people, anchors a bar and restaurant scene that keeps drawing new arrivals to a city where rents still undercut Munich, Frankfurt and Berlin.

Erding

Erding, northeast of Munich near the international airport, closed 2025 with 38,949 residents, just 36 more than the year before. The slowdown wasn't for lack of demand, as arrivals still outpaced departures by 151, and migration is the only reason Erding grew at all, since deaths (382) outnumbered births (267) for the year.

Erding has deliberately tried to manage its growth rate since 2014, when the town set an internal cap on how fast it wanted its population to expand, even as demand from the wider Munich region kept pushing outward. New-build prices in Erding and neighboring Freising, Garching and Eching now regularly exceed €10,000 per square meter, evidence that the corridor along the S-Bahn and airport rail line remains one of the tightest housing markets in the Munich Umland, a market held together by airport-adjacent employment and a direct rail line into the city center.

Hanau

Hanau, 20 kilometers east of Frankfurt in the Main-Kinzig-Kreis, has grown from roughly 93,600 residents at the 2022 census to 106,799 on the city's own population register as of April 2025. Whichever count is used, the direction is the same. Hanau is filling up with people who once would have looked only at Frankfurt.

A three-room apartment rents for around €980 in Hanau versus more than €1,500 for something comparable in Frankfurt, and resale apartments trade around €2,280 per square meter, less than half the Frankfurt price. Regional housing analysts expect Hanau's household count to keep climbing as long as land near Frankfurt itself stays scarce. The former industrial city is increasingly marketed on that history alongside its price advantage, repositioning old factory sites as residential neighborhoods for commuters priced out of the capital of Rhein-Main.

The pattern behind the numbers

Across every region in this list, population growth is concentrating in the towns just outside Germany's big cities rather than inside them, and in places like Brandenburg's second ring or Hesse's former industrial towns. Berlin, Munich and Frankfurt keep adding residents on paper, but a rising share of their metro areas' actual growth is happening across a city line that the statistics don't always capture in the same table.

For anyone living in these regions, the practical effect is straightforward. Commuter rail capacity, school enrollment, and land prices in towns that were once considered remote are now moving in the same direction as the cities they surround. Absent a change in how much housing gets built inside the core cities themselves, that outward push is likely to keep reaching new towns through the rest of the decade.