Why does BAföG processing sometimes take so long?

You may have heard from others that it sometimes takes a long time to receive feedback on your BAföG application. Yes, processing can take a while in some cases. But we would like to explain why this is the case and how you can help yourself to speed things up.

When you submit your application, you have to provide a lot of information about yourself and your family and send in supporting documents. Your application will then be sent to our BAföG office. The colleagues there check whether everything is complete.

The problem is that only 11% of initial applications and 35% of applications for further funding actually reach us in full. If something is missing, we cannot process the application. Instead, we have to write to you by post and tell you what is still missing. We can only continue once you have submitted everything.

Last year, our office received almost 15,000 applications - 63% of them around the start of the winter semester alone. Because so many documents are incomplete, our employees spend a lot of time sending out additional requests and processing subsequent submissions. This naturally delays processing. When we receive your late submissions, we don't process them immediately, but your mail is queued up. We process what we receive in chronological order. Otherwise, we would have to keep new applications waiting until ongoing processing has been completed, even if they are complete.

As soon as your application is complete, the process is fast: we calculate your grant, you receive the notification and the money is transferred. If something is missing again, we will write to you again - and the cycle starts all over again.

As you can see, you can help our education funding office to process your application more quickly. Firstly, you can submit your application on time! You can also avoid the three most common mistakes and make sure that you don't forget these two documents.