Family track / Sponsor accommodation
Ausreichender Wohnraum: the square-meter gate behind family reunion
Before your spouse or child can join you in Germany, your home has to clear a measured threshold. The law calls it ausreichender Wohnraum (adequate housing), and under §29 Abs. 1 Nr. 2 AufenthG it is not a question of comfort or how many rooms you have. It is a square-meter count, taken against the people on the application. Clear the number and this condition is met. Miss it and the visa is refused, even when income, marriage, and language are all in order.
The gate, read as thresholds
Adequate housing is not a judgment call about whether your home looks comfortable. It is a set of hard checks. You clear each one or the reunion condition is not met. Here is what is actually measured.
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The benchmark threshold
The bar is the Sozialwohnung (social-housing) standard, and no higher. §2 Abs. 4 S. 1 AufenthG says the authority may demand no more than what would house an applicant in a publicly subsidised social rental flat. You are not asked for a spacious home, only a sufficient one.
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The square-meter threshold
Count the people, then the space. 12 m² for each member aged 6 and over, 10 m² for each child aged 2 to under 6, and children under 2 are not counted at all (§2 Abs. 4 S. 3). Nebenräume (kitchen, bath, WC) may be co-used and count in reasonable measure. A shortfall of about 10 percent is harmless.
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The "actually secured" threshold
The home must be legally and actually available (rechtlich und tatsächlich gesichert): a signed lease or ownership in the sponsor's name, usable by the family now. A Wohnberechtigungsschein (housing-entitlement certificate) plus a claim that a flat could be rented later does not clear it. And the space counts as Wohnfläche under the Wohnflächenverordnung, so rooms under sloping ceilings and balconies count only in part. The figure on the lease is not always the figure that counts.
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The occupancy threshold
Size alone is not enough. §2 Abs. 4 S. 2 also requires the condition (Beschaffenheit) and occupancy (Belegung) standards that apply to Germans. A flat packed past its occupancy limit can fail even when the total square meters add up.
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The sponsor threshold
Who you are joining decides whether the gate applies at all. The housing requirement of §29 Abs. 1 Nr. 2 binds reunion to a foreign-national sponsor: a spouse under §30, a child under §32, a parent under §36. Joining a German spouse under §28 does not carry this formal square-meter gate.
What the number looks like
The count is taken on everyone who will live in the home, including you. A few worked cases:
The 12 m² and 10 m² figures are the Richtwerte of the Allgemeine Verwaltungsvorschrift zum AufenthG (Nr. 2.4); the social-housing benchmark and the under-2 exclusion are set in §2 Abs. 4 AufenthG. The Länder apply their own Wohnungsaufsicht minimums, often lower (around 9 to 10 m² per person), and your Ausländerbehörde or the German mission abroad may measure slightly differently. Confirm the standard your authority uses before you commit to a lease.
The gate measures the people on the application, not the flat you live in today. Two things follow. First, the count is taken on everyone who will live there, so a home that clears for a couple can fail the moment a school-age child is added. Sign a lease sized for the family you are bringing, not the household you have now.
Second, the gate reads the signed lease and the Wohnfläche on paper, not a plan to upgrade later, so the home has to exist before the visa, not after it. The quiet variable is the sponsor: join a German spouse and the formal square-meter gate falls away; join a foreign-national sponsor and it binds in full. The number itself is not large. Missing it is almost always a sequencing problem, not a money problem.
Map the gate before you sign the lease.
Family Access lays out the housing count, the income formula, and every sponsor condition for your exact family, in one place.
See Family Access
