The Three-Month Ticket That Stayed

In the spring of 2022 the German government was looking for something to do about energy prices. What it produced was a relief package with two halves. One was a cut in fuel duty, and economists spent the summer arguing about where it actually went: the ifo Institute concluded that petrol prices took nearly all of it and diesel considerably less, while the RWI found the pass-through thinning as the three months ran on and varying sharply between regions. The other was the 9-Euro-Ticket: nine euros a calendar month, June, July and August, unlimited travel on every bus, tram, U-Bahn, S-Bahn and regional train in the country.

Around 52 million of them were sold in three months. Regional trains to the North Sea coast ran out of room. Bicycles were turned away at doors. The scheme was designed as a temporary transfer of cash to households and it turned into the largest natural experiment in fare policy any European country has run, which is not what anyone in the finance ministry had in mind.

What three months proved and did not prove

The industry association claimed a saving of something like 1.8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, a figure contested from the moment it was published. The harder finding was duller and more useful: the ticket moved a great many journeys onto trains that already existed, on corridors that already had service, at times of year when people travel anyway. It did not put a bus into a village that had none.

It also did something nobody had planned. It abolished, for three months, the tariff structure of roughly sixty regional transport associations — the Verkehrsverbünde, the first of which, Hamburg's, was founded in 1965 and was the first integrated transport authority in the world. Nearly sixty years of zone maps, ring boundaries and cross-border surcharges stopped mattering. Passengers noticed immediately how much friction those maps had been generating, and it became politically impossible to put them back.

A flat fare is a price policy, not a transport policy, and the two are only the same thing where the bus already runs.

What it does not cover

The Deutschlandticket that replaced it launched on 1 May 2023 at €49 a month. It has been raised twice since, to €58 and then again for 2026, and it now sits at around €63. It is a rolling monthly subscription, personalised, digital, and cancellable only by the 10th of the month. Around fourteen million people hold one.

It buys Nahverkehr and nothing else. ICE, Intercity, EuroCity and Flixtrain are all outside it, and there is no partial credit — you cannot ride one stop on an ICE and settle the difference. A handful of Intercity stretches in the north are opened to regional tickets by agreement with the individual state, the line out to the North Sea at Norddeich Mole being the standing example, and they appear in the fine print rather than in the app. Everything else means changing at Leipzig and taking three and a quarter hours over a two-hour journey.

Who pays

The federal government and the sixteen states put in about €1.5 billion each per year to compensate operators for the revenue the flat fare removes. That is the whole mechanism: the ticket does not generate money, it redistributes who pays, and the difference is covered by a subsidy negotiated at a transport ministers' conference each autumn. The price rises have come out of those meetings, not out of any pricing formula.

Where the money goes is the part that gets argued about. Surveys since 2023 have consistently found that the majority of holders were already season-ticket customers — people who had been paying €86 for a Berlin monthly pass, or considerably more for a long regional commute, and who now pay a fraction of it. That is a real transfer to real households. It is not the same thing as new passengers, and the share of holders who were genuinely new to public transport has been the weakest number in every evaluation.

What it did not fix

Bus service in rural Germany is commissioned by the districts, not by Berlin, and a national fare does not commission anything. Across much of the rural east the last bus back from the district town leaves in the middle of the afternoon and there is nothing at all at weekends. A resident there can now buy unlimited travel on a network that, in their village, consists of two departures a day. The ticket is the cheapest it has ever been to reach the places that already have trains, and it has changed nothing whatsoever about the places that do not.