District heating prices: reading and judging your own price
No German authority publishes an average price for district heating. To know whether yours is high, you have to work it out and compare it with what the same heat would cost another way.
Worked through by Radif Partners · Editorial policy · How we calculate
Your district heating price compared
District heating a year
€1,800
| Same heat from gas | €1,777 |
| From an air heat pump | €968 |
The 15 ct price is only a starting value: enter unit and standing charges from your bill.
There is no official average price for district heating (Fernwärme) in Germany: neither the Federal Statistical Office nor the Federal Network Agency publishes one. Destatis includes district heating only in the consumer price index, which shows the change, not the level; in September 2026 it was slightly below the same month a year earlier. You get your own price per kWh by dividing every cost of the billing year (unit, standing and meter charges) by the kilowatt hours delivered. For comparison, the same heat from a gas boiler at the average gas price of 11.58 ct per kWh costs about 14.81 ct per kWh of heat, from an air-source heat pump on a heat pump tariff about 8.07 ct. A household using 12,000 kWh of heat a year pays €1,777 with gas and €968 with a heat pump. If its district heating price is above 14.81 ct, a gas boiler would cost less to run, before purchase and servicing. Connecting to a heat network is funded under KfW 458, with €6,720 in our example.
No official average, for a reason
For gas and electricity the Federal Statistical Office publishes average prices every six months, and the Federal Network Agency does so for heating electricity. For district heating there is nothing comparable. It is delivered through local networks, often run by municipal utilities (Stadtwerke), and each network has its own costs for generation, pipes and losses. The Office lists district heating only in the consumer price index: it shows whether prices rose or fell on the previous year, not how high they are. In September 2026 district heating there was slightly below the year before, while heating oil rose sharply.
If you find a figure online such as “district heating costs this many cents on average”, it comes from an industry body, a comparison site or a single supplier. It may be right, but it is not official statistics. This page therefore does not use an average; it works with your own price.
What the supplier must disclose
Section 1a of the German ordinance on general conditions for district heating supply (AVBFernwärmeV) requires the supplier to publish its general supply terms online, in their current version. That explicitly includes the price rules, the price adjustment clauses and the price components. The information must be easy to access and generally understandable, and the supplier must clearly reference the sources of the indices and price lists it uses to adjust prices. It must also publish network losses, in megawatt hours per year, as the difference between heat fed in and heat delivered.
For you this means the price formula is public. If it says, for example, that the unit price follows a gas index and a wage index, you can see why the bill rises or falls. High network losses relative to heat delivered can point to an old or sprawling network whose costs customers end up sharing. The documents are in German; useful search terms are „Preisblatt“ and „Preisänderungsklausel“.
Working out your price per kWh
A district heating bill usually has several items: a unit price per kWh, a standing or capacity charge that may depend on the agreed connection capacity, and a meter charge for the heat meter. It only becomes comparable as an all-in price per kWh delivered. A worked example with assumed values:
| Item | Amount |
|---|---|
| Heat delivered | 12,000 kWh |
| Unit price 11.20 ct per kWh | €1,344 |
| Standing charge a year | €540 |
| Meter charge a year | €72 |
| Total | €1,956 |
| All-in price per kWh | 16.30 ct |
Here the all-in price is 5.10 ct above the unit price. Comparing only the unit price with the gas price therefore understates district heating. Enter the heat delivered and the all-in price in the calculator above.
How your price compares with gas and a heat pump
District heating arrives without a boiler of your own; each kWh delivered is already heat. The fair comparison is therefore the price of a kWh of heat from your own system. At the average gas price of 11.58 ct and the efficiency this site assumes for typical boilers, that is 14.81 ct. An air-source heat pump on a heat pump tariff delivers it for 8.07 ct. For 12,000 kWh of heat a year:
| District heating price per kWh (example) | District heating a year | vs gas | vs air heat pump |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10.00 ct | €1,200 | −€577 | +€232 |
| 12.50 ct | €1,500 | −€277 | +€532 |
| 15.00 ct | €1,800 | +€23 | +€832 |
| 17.50 ct | €2,100 | +€323 | +€1,132 |
| 20.00 ct | €2,400 | +€623 | +€1,432 |
The table compares energy costs only. Your own system also costs purchase, servicing and the chimney sweep; district heating may instead involve a connection fee and a standing charge. If you can choose between the two, work both out over twenty years. The comparison of every system per kWh of heat is under heating costs compared; how the gas price is made up is under gas price.
Heating costs compared
Cheapest: Ground heat pump
€943
| Air heat pump | €1,193 |
| Oil | €2,016 |
| Gas | €2,189 |
| Storage heaters | €4,208 |
Cost a year, Lower Saxony climate, 2026 prices.
Grant for the connection
Connecting to a heat or building network is one of the measures funded by the KfW 458 heating grant, at the same rates as a heat pump. An owner-occupier on €45,000 replacing a 24-year-old gas boiler gets 56 % of €12,000, which is €6,720. A landlord receives only the basic grant, €3,600. The bonuses require the house to be your main residence. Under information sheet 458, the connection must go together with optimising the entire heating distribution system in the house. If the plot lies in an area with compulsory connection and use, KfW funds only the network connection there, not a system of your own (KfW).
How green district heating must become
The Heat Planning Act requires every heat network to draw a rising minimum share of its heat from renewables or unavoidable waste heat, with steps from 2030 and 2040, until every network is fed entirely this way by the end of 2044 at the latest (sections 29 and 31 WPG). For customers this means suppliers must invest over the coming years, and those costs feed into the price formulas. By how much, the law does not say. Whether a network is planned for your street is shown in the municipal heat plan; details under municipal heat planning. The heating cost calculator works out your yearly cost with your own price, the decision including purchase is under heat pump or gas boiler.