The German Job Reference (Arbeitszeugnis): How to Read the Code

When an employment relationship in Germany ends, the departing employee does not simply walk away with a handshake. German law gives every employee a right to a written job reference, the Arbeitszeugnis, and in practice that document gets read by the next employer as carefully as a credit report.

The catch is that the document is written in a code. A German reference can sound warm and complimentary to a reader who does not know the convention, while actually communicating, to anyone who does, that performance was mediocre or conduct was a problem. The statute that governs the reference expressly bans hidden signals, yet the entire hiring market runs on a grading vocabulary that only makes sense once you have the key.

That gap between what the law says and what employers actually do is the reason this page exists. It matters as much to an English-speaking employee trying to read their own reference as it does to a foreign manager who has to sign one.

Information last verified on 19 July 2026. This page provides general legal information and does not constitute legal advice in an individual case.

What § 109 GewO actually requires

Most private-sector employment relationships in Germany fall under § 109 of the Gewerbeordnung (GewO), the trade regulation act. As with most of German employment law, the rule is federal and identical across all 16 Bundesländer; see German law explained for how the wider legal system fits together.

The statute splits the reference into two tiers. The einfaches Zeugnis, the simple reference, covers only the nature and duration of the work. The qualifiziertes Zeugnis, the qualified reference, adds an assessment of performance and conduct, but only if the employee actually asks for it.

For employment relationships that sit outside the GewO's scope, a near-identical right exists under § 630 BGB, the general civil-code provision on references at the end of a lasting service relationship.

The statute's substantive requirement is narrow. § 109 Abs. 2 GewO says the reference must be clear and comprehensible, klar und verständlich formuliert, and it expressly bans any feature or wording whose purpose is to convey a message about the employee different from what the form or the words themselves show. In plain terms, the law forbids exactly the kind of hidden signal the rest of this page explains how to spot.

Nowhere in § 109 GewO do the words benevolent, wohlwollend, or true, wahr, actually appear. That pairing, central to how German references work in practice, comes entirely from case law, not from the statute's text.

The irony: a banned code everyone uses

The Bundesarbeitsgericht has restated the underlying principle plainly: a reference can only be benevolent within the limits of truth (Bundesarbeitsgericht, 14 June 2016, 9 AZR 8/15). In that case the court refused to let an employee shift a documented end date to a later, better-looking one. Truthfulness comes first, and the employer's duty of goodwill toward a departing employee operates only inside that boundary. Both duties are judge-made, sitting on top of § 109 GewO rather than inside its text.

At the same time, the labor courts have never treated the well-known grading vocabulary built around the word Zufriedenheit, satisfaction, as the forbidden hidden code that § 109 Abs. 2 GewO targets. The reasoning is that this vocabulary is public, decades old and understood by essentially everyone who hires in Germany, which is close to the opposite of a covert signal known only to insiders.

So the statutory ban on hidden codes coexists with an open code that both sides of the hiring market read the same way. That is the paradox anyone dealing with a German reference has to get comfortable with, and it is the single most useful thing to understand before reading one.

Decoding the grade: the Zufriedenheitsformel

The most consistent part of the convention is the overall performance grade, built around escalating uses of the word Zufriedenheit. The Bundesarbeitsgericht has confirmed two points on this scale directly: zu unserer vollen Zufriedenheit sits at the average grade, and stets zu unserer vollen Zufriedenheit sits one grade above it (Bundesarbeitsgericht, 18 November 2014, 9 AZR 584/13). The rungs below that are long-standing market convention rather than something a court has pinned down phrase by phrase, and exact wording at the bottom of the scale varies by employer.

Two sentences that look almost identical to a quick reader can carry very different messages once decoded. Frau Musterfrau hat die ihr übertragenen Aufgaben stets zu unserer vollsten Zufriedenheit erledigt reads as a top grade, a 1. Drop just one word, to Frau Musterfrau hat die ihr übertragenen Aufgaben zu unserer Zufriedenheit erledigt, and the same sentence structure now reads as a 4, a weak pass. A reader unfamiliar with the convention could easily read both as equally positive, which is exactly the trap this page is meant to close.

Decoding the conduct assessment: the Führungsbeurteilung

The conduct section, the Führungsbeurteilung, typically addresses how the employee behaved toward superiors, colleagues and, where the role involved contact with them, customers or business partners. Convention holds that the order in which these groups are named carries meaning: naming colleagues ahead of superiors is widely read as signaling friction with management, and leaving customers out of a client-facing role's conduct assessment altogether is read as a comment on that relationship.

This is genuinely contested ground, not settled law. At least one regional labor court expressly rejected the idea that a reversed naming order is a recognized rule at all, finding no established interpretive principle that would support reading a disadvantage into it. Treat the ordering convention as widely believed industry practice rather than something a court can be relied on to enforce or correct.

The missing sentence: closing thanks and good wishes

Many qualified references end with a sentence expressing regret at the employee's departure and good wishes for the future. Convention reads the absence of that sentence as a sign the employer was not sorry to see the person go.

The Bundesarbeitsgericht cut this convention off at the legal level in 2012. An employee has no right to demand that such a sentence be added, because it expresses the employer's personal sentiment rather than the substantive content § 109 GewO actually requires (Bundesarbeitsgericht, 11 December 2012, 9 AZR 227/11). If an employer includes a negatively coded closing line, an employee can ask for that specific sentence to be removed, but cannot compel the employer to substitute wording of the employee's own choosing.

Who must prove what if the grade is disputed

German civil law's default expectation for an unspecified obligation is average quality, mittlere Art und Güte, under § 243 Abs. 1 BGB, and the Bundesarbeitsgericht has applied that default directly to the reference grade. An employee who wants a better than average grade carries the burden of showing the performance that justifies it. An employer who wants to hand down a below average grade carries the opposite burden and must be able to point to facts supporting that lower assessment (Bundesarbeitsgericht, 18 November 2014, 9 AZR 584/13). Where neither side can make its case, the reference defaults to the average grade, zu unserer vollen Zufriedenheit.

Consider an employee whose final reference reads zu unserer vollen Zufriedenheit, the average grade, while the employee believes the work was consistently excellent. Pushing the wording up to stets zu unserer vollen Zufriedenheit or higher takes concrete evidence: performance reviews, bonus or commission records, project outcomes, comparisons with peers in the same role, because the burden sits with the person asking for better than average. If an employer instead tried to hand down zu unserer Zufriedenheit, the weaker grade, without documented shortcomings to point to, the employer would be the one at risk in a challenge.

What the document itself must look like

The code ban in § 109 Abs. 2 GewO is not limited to words. Labor courts have long treated the physical presentation of a reference as capable of carrying the same kind of hidden signal, so a reference is expected to be clean, free of stains, tears, correction marks and unusual emphasis or spacing, and issued on the company's own letterhead as a serious business document.

A reference should be signed by someone senior enough in the company hierarchy to be credible, someone who plainly had authority over the employee or is authorized to sign personnel documents on the employer's behalf, rather than a colleague of equal or lower rank.

Form also matters at the level of structure. The Bundesarbeitsgericht struck down a reference built as a table of ticked competencies and school-style grades, holding that a qualified reference has to be written in ordinary flowing prose, Fließtext, because only continuous prose lets an employer draw the genuine distinctions a third-party reader needs (Bundesarbeitsgericht, 27 April 2021, 9 AZR 262/20).

Asking for a reference before you leave: the Zwischenzeugnis

The statutory right in § 109 GewO is tied to the end of the employment relationship, and nothing in the text creates a general right to a reference while still employed. The labor courts have nonetheless built one, grounding it in the good-faith duties every employment relationship carries under §§ 241 Abs. 2 and 242 BGB.

That right depends on showing a triftiger Grund, a legitimate reason a reasonable observer would recognize as justifying the request. Recognized examples include a change of direct supervisor, a restructuring or department transfer, an extended absence such as parental leave or a long secondment, enrolling in further training, or applying for another position even where leaving is not imminent.

A Zwischenzeugnis obtained this way fixes the wording at that point in time. If an employer later ends the relationship, the final reference, the Endzeugnis, should ordinarily track the assessment already given unless something genuinely changed in between, and an unexplained downgrade is one of the more common grounds for a correction dispute.

What to do about a damaging reference

The first step is direct and informal: write to the employer identifying the specific line in dispute and the wording sought, rather than asking for a wholesale rewrite. Many disagreements are resolved this way without ever reaching a court.

If the employer refuses, the next step is a Berichtigungsklage, a correction claim, at the local Arbeitsgericht. The claim can seek either a specific corrected wording or an entirely reissued Zeugnis, and the burden-of-proof rules described above apply directly to what the court will actually order.

Time matters more than the general limitation period suggests. The ordinary civil limitation period is three years under § 195 BGB, but a delay of only a few months without objecting has repeatedly allowed employers to argue successfully that the claim was forfeited, Verwirkung, because the employee's silence let the employer reasonably assume the wording had been accepted. Many employment contracts and collective agreements also set a much shorter Ausschlussfrist, often around three months, that can extinguish the claim well before the statutory period would. The safer course is to raise a written objection promptly, ideally within weeks rather than months of receiving the reference.

Where a reference is being negotiated as part of an exit rather than fought over afterward, for example inside a termination agreement, the exact wording is frequently settled as one of the negotiated terms itself, which avoids the correction process entirely.