The German cover letter in 2026: when the Anschreiben still matters — and when to skip it
JobWin Team · Research
No part of a German application causes internationals more anxiety than the Anschreiben — the formal cover letter that tradition says must accompany every CV. The good news: its status has genuinely changed, and in many applications today you can skip it entirely. The bad news: in the applications where it still matters, it matters a lot, and sending a generic one is worse than sending none. The skill worth learning is not writing cover letters faster — it is telling the two situations apart.
Where the ritual comes from
The classic German application was a physical folder — the Bewerbungsmappe — containing Anschreiben, tabellarischer Lebenslauf, and copies of certificates and references. The letter itself follows conventions codified in DIN 5008, the German standard for business-letter formatting: sender block, recipient block, date, subject line, formal salutation. That heritage explains why older application guides treat the Anschreiben as sacred, and why some hiring managers — especially in traditional industries — still notice when it is missing or sloppy.
What the rules actually say
No law requires a cover letter. What an application must contain is entirely the employer’s choice, and the place they express that choice is the application form itself. Modern applicant-tracking systems used widely in Germany — Personio, SAP SuccessFactors, Greenhouse and others — let companies mark the cover-letter upload as required, optional, or leave it out of the form altogether. That field setting is the single most reliable signal you will get: it was configured by the people who will read your application.
The dam broke years ago
Deutsche Bahn — one of Germany’s largest employers — dropped the cover-letter requirement for its apprenticeship and dual-study applications back in 2018, with its personnel board arguing publicly that the letter was a hurdle for applicants and provided little insight for recruiters (the tech magazine t3n covered the change and its results). Since then, "Bewerbung ohne Anschreiben" has become a normal option in German hiring rather than a provocation, particularly for high-volume roles, tech positions, and companies competing hard for candidates.
Who still expects one
Three settings where skipping the letter is a real risk. The public sector (öffentlicher Dienst): formalized selection procedures tend to expect complete, conventional application documents. Traditional Mittelstand companies, especially outside the big cities: the conventions are simply alive there, and the letter signals you took the application seriously. And any role where writing IS the job — communications, legal, consulting, sales with heavy proposal work: here the letter is a work sample, whatever the form says.
How to decide in practice
Read the posting and the form, in that order. If the posting explicitly says no cover letter needed ("kein Anschreiben erforderlich") — believe it. If the upload field is optional and the role is not writing-heavy, a strong tailored CV plus complete form answers will not lose to an applicant who padded a template letter. If the field is required, or the posting asks you to address specific questions ("Bitte gehen Sie in Ihrem Anschreiben auf … ein"), write a real one — that instruction is often a screening device, and ignoring it reads as carelessness.
If you write one, make it earn its page
A German Anschreiben that works today is short — half a page to one page — and does three things: says specifically why this company and this role (one paragraph, with a detail you could not have written about any other employer), matches two or three of the posting’s core requirements to concrete evidence from your experience (not adjectives — outcomes), and handles the practicalities the posting asks for, typically earliest start date and, where requested, salary expectation. What it must never do is retell your CV in prose or open with "hiermit bewerbe ich mich" — the reader has seen that sentence ten thousand times.
One honest disclosure about how we handle this at JobWin: when an application form asks for a cover letter, JobWin drafts one grounded in your actual CV and the actual posting — and it is built to never invent experience you do not have, because a letter that overstates you costs you the interview it wins. You review it, edit it, and decide. The tool removes the blank page, not your judgment.
The Anschreiben is no longer a tax on every application. Treat it as what it has become: a targeted instrument for the subset of applications where the reader genuinely wants it — and reclaim the evenings you used to spend writing the other kind.