Of Germany's 40 largest cities, the one where residents self-report the highest levels of satisfaction is the unassuming city of Kassel.
That is according to the "Happiness Atlas 2025" by SKL Glücksatlas, the most comprehensive and up-to-date inventory of life satisfaction in Germany.
Here are the German cities that boast the most satisfied residents.
Germany's happiest cities
Kassel, Krefeld and Düsseldorf ranked the highest for resident satisfaction in 2025.
Kassel also claimed the number one spot in last year's Happiness Atlas. Among the city's positive attributes, the report highlights a young population, good healthcare and numerous green recreation areas.
More than half (56 percent) of Kassel residents who were surveyed reported high satisfaction with their lives, whereas just three percent reported high dissatisfaction.
The top ten highest scooring cities for life satisfaction were:
- Kassel
- Krefeld
- Düsseldorf
- Augsburg
- Aachen
- Erfurt
- Minster
- Mönchengladbach
- Hamburg
- Duisburg
Interestingly, looking at the top ten performers reveals a range of different types of cities spread across the country.
Authors of the Happiness Atlas note that Kassel, Augsburg, Aachen and Münster are representative of young, student-dominated cities with above-average prosperity.
Whereas Krefeld, Erfurt, Mönchengladbach and Duisburg are marked by relatively high unemployment rates and low incomes in comparison. Yet residents here report comparable levels of satisfaction with their lives.
READ ALSO: Travel in Germany - Discovering the fairytale trail of Kassel
Hamburg and Düsseldorf are the only two cities in the top ten that have a population of over 500,000.
Germany's more populous cities are not the happiest
Germany's most populous cities - which tend to attract more new arrivals - tended to be ranked lower down.
Frankfurt am Main, for example, ranked 35th, Nuremberg ranked 36th and Berlin took 37th place (or the third least happy of the bunch).
Rostock was at the bottom of the list: here just over 27 percent of residents said they were highly satisfied versus about 21 percent who said they were dissatisfied.
Interestingly, the ranking suggests that perceived life satisfaction isn't necessarily aligned with the quality of living conditions, at least in Germany. (Researchers also ranked cities' by quality of life scores based on publicly available statistics on living conditions.)
For example, Karlsruhe was first in the quality of life ranking, but ranked second to last for life satisfaction.
READ ALSO: German project spotlights happiness through the eyes of a child
Munich, which regularly tops national and international quality of life rankings, only ranks 27th in terms of life satisfaction.
Krefeld is a good example of the opposite: It ranks near the bottom (37th) in quality of life but has the second highest life satisfaction of all 40 cities.
Overall, this year's report finds that satisfaction with life in Germany has increased slightly since last year, with scores coming in 0.13 points higher on average.
How were the cities evaluated?
The Happiness Atlas 2025 was based on 23,468 surveys carried out between January 2022 and April 2025.
Respondents were asked to rate their satisfaction with life on a scale of zero, meaning 'not at all satisfied', to ten, 'completely satisfied.'
You can find the complete list here.
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