Faster Company Registration in Germany in 2026: What the ‘Fast Formation’ Pilot Means for Founders

Setting up a company in Germany has long been known for its paperwork, its waiting times and its trips between four different public offices. That reputation is about to be tested. The German government has just launched the first pilot phase of “Schneller Gründen” (in English: “Faster Formation”), a project designed to make company formation simpler, fully digital and, in the long run, possible within 24 hours.

If you have ever started, or planned to start, a business in Germany, you already know the routine. You register your GmbH or UG in the Commercial Register, you wait for the tax office, you exchange the same information several times with offices that do not talk to each other. The faster company formation project sets out to change exactly that. Below we explain what is being tested, where, and what it could eventually mean for anyone looking to launch a GmbH, UG or other business in Germany.

What is the fast company formation project in Germany?

Fast formation is a flagship initiative within Germany’s Modernisation Agenda for the Federation and the Federal States (Modernisierungsagenda Bund und Föderal). It is being driven by the Federal Ministry for Digital Affairs and State Modernisation (Bundesministerium für Digitales und Staatsmodernisierung, or BMDS).

The headline goal is straightforward to describe and ambitious to deliver: to make it possible to start a business anywhere in Germany digitally, end to end, and eventually within 24 hours. Instead of a process that can stretch across weeks and several authorities, founders would move through a single, continuous online journey.

At present, the procedure described here is not yet available for international founders. For them, the faster company formation option, purchasing a ready-made company from GmbH-UG.com is a suitable alternative.

The digital combined application explained

At the heart of the pilot is a new digital combined application (Kombiantrag). In plain terms, it pulls two separate steps into one continuous online process:

• the commercial registration (Handelsregistereintragung),
• the business registration (Gewerbeanmeldung), and
• the tax registration (steuerliche Erfassung) with the tax office.

Today these are handled separately, often on paper or across systems that do not connect. The new application is designed to be “medienbruchfrei” – meaning there are no breaks in the chain where data has to be printed, re-keyed or posted between offices. Your information is entered once and carried through digitally.

Making this work in practice is not only a technical task. It requires close, well-coordinated cooperation between three sets of authorities that have traditionally operated in their own lanes:

• the trade offices (Gewerbeämter),
• the tax offices (Finanzämter), and
• the commercial registers (Handelsregister).

This coordination is being managed jointly by the BMDS and the relevant state ministries (Landesministerien).

Where is “Schneller Gründen” being tested in 2026?

Interest from the public sector was strong. Following a call for applications in April 2026, more than 330 municipalities attended the information sessions. From that pool, eight locations were selected to run the first pilot phase:

This spread is deliberate. By including large cities alongside rural districts, the project aims to gather results that hold up across very different administrative realities, not just in places with the most resources.

How were the pilot locations chosen?

The selection was not first-come, first-served. Locations were assessed against a defined set of criteria so the findings would be representative and reliable. The main factors were:

• the technical suitability and compatibility of the case-management systems already used by the local trade offices;
• their readiness to connect to the new digital combined application;
• sufficient staffing capacity within the participating authorities and state ministries to support the pilot;
• a balanced regional distribution between urban and rural areas; and
• a sufficient number of new business formations at each location to produce meaningful data.

Why test under real conditions?

Rather than perfecting the system behind closed doors, the project is following an agile approach: putting the new process to work in the day-to-day reality of public administration. The pilot uses real data and observes how founders actually behave, so that problems surface early and improvements can be fed back in quickly.

There is a second benefit. Running the system in live conditions builds the practical experience needed for a later nationwide rollout. It is far easier to scale something that has already been stress-tested in eight very different places than something that has only ever worked in theory.

What happens next?

The eight pilot sites are not the end of the story. The other authorities that applied are being kept closely involved: they can observe the pilot, gain early insight into the new workflows, and begin their own organisational and technical preparations for joining later.

Over the course of the year, the plan is to bring additional municipalities and federal states on board step by step, gradually widening the service towards full national coverage.

What does this mean for you as a founder?

For anyone planning to start a company in Germany, the direction of travel is encouraging. A genuinely digital, single-application route would cut the back-and-forth between offices, reduce duplicated paperwork and shorten the gap between deciding to launch and actually being operational.

A few points worth keeping in mind, though:

• It is still a pilot. For now the new combined application only runs in the eight locations above. Everywhere else, the established process still applies.
• It does not remove every step. A GmbH or UG still requires notarisation and entry in the commercial register (Handelsregister). The pilot focuses on streamlining business and tax registration and on getting the authorities to work as one connected chain.
• Good preparation still pays off. Whether the process takes 24 hours or several weeks, having your documents, shareholder details and registered business address in order is what keeps a formation moving.

Germany is clearly serious about catching up with the faster, digital-first formation systems seen elsewhere in Europe. If the pilot delivers, the days of a multi-week, multi-office company set-up may finally be numbered.

Are you considering setting up a company in Germany?

If you would like to start a GmbH or UG without getting lost in the bureaucracy, our team can guide you through every step – from choosing the right legal form to registration and your ongoing obligations.

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