According to the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis), 2.2% of all students in Germany’s general education schools repeated a grade level during the 2024/2025 school year. This amounted to 148,100 students who either had not been promoted previously or chose to repeat the grade voluntarily. This rate remains consistent with the previous school year (2023/2024), which also saw 2.2% of students repeat a grade.
In the 2024/2025 academic year, over half of the students who repeated a grade were male (56.4%), with 43.6% being female. This gender disparity is also reflected in the percentages: 2.5% of male students repeated a grade, compared to 1.9% of female students. This difference was slightly larger than the previous year, when 2.4% of male students and 2.0% of female students repeated a grade.
However, significant regional variations exist regarding the number of repeaters across the different federal states. The highest proportion was noted in Bavaria, where 3.4% of students repeated a grade in the 2024/2025 school year. Saxony-Anhalt also reported a high rate at 3.2%. Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Rhineland-Palatinate, and Thuringia followed with each showing a repeat rate of 2.9%. In contrast, Berlin registered the lowest proportion of repeaters at just 0.8%. Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg also reported relatively low rates, both at 1.3%. These differing proportions between states are partly attributed to variations in local promotion rules.
