Information for International Employees

As a rule, you will receive your lifelong tax ID after you have registeredyour place of residence at the Citizens' Office.
office. As it is sent by post a few weeks after registration, please make sure that your name is on the letterbox. As soon as you have your tax ID, please let your contact person in the HR department know. You may initially receive a lower first salary than expected. This is usually the case if the State Office for Salaries and Pensions (LBV) does not yet have all the relevant information and classifies you in tax class VI, which is associated with many deductions. However, as soon as this is corrected, you should receive your full salary and an additional payment.

If you are initially working from abroad, you will need to apply for a tax ID. We will be happy to assist you with this.

The LBV,
or Landesamt für Besoldung und Versorgung NRW, is responsible for calculating and paying the salaries of all employees of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The University of Siegen is one of Germany's public universities, which make up around 90% of the German higher education landscape. As public universities are financed by the state, employees are paid by the respective state office for salaries and pensions. For the University of Siegen, this is the LBV NRW. For this reason, you must fill out a number of forms for the LBV when you are employed at the university and you will also receive your payslips (see below) from the LBV.

In Germany, there is a social insurance system
which includes health insurance, pension insurance, unemployment insurance, accident insurance and long-term care insurance. The contributions to these five social insurance schemes are deducted from your salary each month. The amount of the contribution depends on your gross salary. The university, as your employer, also pays an additional amount into the respective funds.

After registering your address, you will receive a so-called social securitycard from the German Pension Insurance
a so-called social security card by post. This number is valid for the rest of your life, so please keep this document. Even if the word "ID card" suggests a card or something similar, the piece of paper is all you need. If you lose the document, please contact the pension insurance company to apply for a replacement. This number is particularly important with regard to later pension entitlements. Please note that although health insurance is part of social insurance, you will receive your own number and also a health insurance card from your health insurance fund.

Pension insurance
is part of the social insurance system in Germany. All employees subject to social insurance contributions automatically pay contributions to the pension insurance scheme. Exemption from pension insurance is not possible. Information on the VBL supplementary pension insurance can be found below.

Information on your pension entitlements in various EU countries can be found here.
For individual questions, you can contact anfragen-international@vbl.de


British citizens can find additional information on pension entitlements in the United Kingdom here.

The VBL,
or Versorgungsanstalt des Bundes und der Länder, is an insurance company for company pension schemes for the public sector, which includes the university. As a rule, you are automatically registered for the VBL klassik
automatically. The contributions for employees are 1.81% of taxable income, the employer pays an additional 6.45%. As eligibility is only achieved after a total of 5 years (or 60 months) of employment, the VBL allows academics with fixed-term contracts to opt for the VBL extra modelwithin the first two months of employment.
model within the first two months of employment. You can find a good overview and further differences between the systems in the video
for "Scientists" or on the website
of the VBL. You also have the opportunity to obtain information via the webcasts
of the VBL.

Receiving your first payslip can be very confusing as you may not know where to find what information on the document. Fortunately, we can offer you a cheat sheetfor this
in English.

As most positions at the university are financed by third-party funds and are therefore temporary, it may be that your position is coming to an end and you are waiting for further funding before your project comes to an end, for example, or you are not yet sure how to proceed. If you have worked for at least one full year (within the last 30 months) subject to social insurance contributions, you can apply for unemployment benefit I for the transitional period. To do this, you must register with the Employment Agency as a "job seeker" at least three months before your contract expires. You can do this in person at the employment agency, online or by telephone.
You must register as "unemployed" at the end of your employment, but at the latest on the first day of unemployment. This can also be done in person, online or by telephone. You can then apply for unemployment benefit. The contact details and opening hours of the Employment Agency in Siegen can be found here.

If you encounter difficulties when registering because a different residence permit is required, insist that your details are still recorded so that it can be verified that you were there on the specific date. You can then contact the Welcome Center and we will look for solutions together.

We recommend that you deal with this issue at an early stage so that you can present the unemployment benefit notification to the immigration authority to extend/change your residence title (depending on the requirements).

Good to know: Unemployment benefit is approx. 60% of your previous net salary. However, you canalso calculate this
for a more precise calculation.