Medical residency in Germany.
Paid specialty training, no NEET-PG, no bond — how residency really works in Germany, and how an international doctor actually gets a position. From a doctor who trained in Europe.
Back home, "residency" means a war for a handful of seats — NEET-PG, cut-offs, bonds, and years of your life riding on one exam. In Germany it's a different world: residency is a paid job you apply for, not a prize you fight 50,000 others for. If you've spent years rolling that rock up the hill, read this slowly. It's genuinely how it works.
What "residency" means in Germany
In Germany, residency is called Facharztausbildung — specialty training. You do it as an Assistenzarzt (resident doctor), employed and paid by a hospital, while you train toward becoming a Facharzt (specialist). You are an employee with a salary, holiday, and rights — not a fee-paying student, and not cheap labour at the mercy of a professor.
No NEET-PG. No bond. No capitation fee.
This is the part that's hard to believe if you trained in India or Pakistan. Germany has no nationwide entrance exam for residency. There's no NEET-PG bottleneck, no bond tying you down for years, no huge "management quota" fee to buy a seat. Once you're licensed and your German is in place, you apply directly to hospitals for an open Assistenzarzt position — the way you'd apply for any job. Germany has more doctor vacancies than it can fill, so hospitals want you.
How long does residency take?
Specialty training usually runs 5 to 6 years, depending on the specialty — roughly 5 years for internal medicine or general surgery, longer for some fields. You're paid throughout, and your salary rises each year of training.
Which specialties can you train in?
Effectively the full range — internal medicine, surgery, anaesthesiology, paediatrics, psychiatry, radiology, general practice (Allgemeinmedizin), gynaecology, and many more. General practice and internal medicine tend to have the widest availability of positions, which can make them a faster way in, but you apply for what fits your goals.
How you actually get a residency position
Here's the honest order of operations. You don't land a residency first and sort the rest out later — you get licence-ready, then apply:
- German to B2, ideally pushing C1. No hospital hires a doctor it can't put in front of patients. This is step one — see how much German you really need.
- Documents translated and notarised to German standards, so recognition isn't delayed — done once, correctly.
- Pass the FSP (medical language exam) and, for non-EU doctors, the KP (medical knowledge exam), to earn your Approbation — or a temporary Berufserlaubnis that lets some doctors start working sooner.
- Apply to hospitals as an Assistenzarzt. With a licence and decent German, you're in demand.
The full sequence, start to finish, is laid out in the complete pathway to working as a doctor in Germany.
What you earn during residency
A resident (Assistenzarzt) typically starts around €5,500 per month gross and climbs every year of training. For many doctors from developing countries, that first-year resident salary already beats what a consultant earns back home. The full breakdown, from resident to Chefarzt, is in the doctor salary in Germany guide.
Life as an Assistenzarzt
It's work — real clinical hours, on-calls, responsibility. But it's work with dignity: a roughly 40–48 hour week under collective agreements, paid overtime, proper rest after on-calls, paid leave, and colleagues who treat you as a doctor, not a dogsbody. You're training to be a specialist and being paid a European salary to do it.
After residency: specialist, permanence, family
Finish your Facharztausbildung and you're a Facharzt — a recognised specialist, with a big jump in pay and options. The years you spend training also count toward permanent residency, and eventually citizenship — a life you can keep, and bring your family into. This isn't a visa that ends. It's a future.
The one thing standing in your way
It isn't talent, and it isn't a seat. It's getting licence-ready — the language and the two exams. That's the whole game, and it's exactly what we help doctors do, in order, until they have the job. You don't need ten websites and three agents. You need one path and someone who's walked it.
A paid residency — without the NEET-PG war.
Book a free call and I'll tell you exactly what your route to a German residency looks like, and the first step for you — doctor to doctor.