German tenants need better heat protection

German tenants need better heat protection July 16, 2026Darya* was very happy with her holiday plans: Her short trip to Turkey coincided with the start of a heat wave in Germany. But when she returned to her flat in the northwestern city of Bochum on June 26, she was in for an unpleasant surprise. The temperature inside her apartment reached 31°C (87.8°F) - higher than the 29°C she had experienced at the Turkish seaside. Outside, temperatures were soaring to a scorching 39°C. "This flat turns into a thermos over the summer," said Darya, describing the attic apartment where she lives with her husband and one-year-old daughter. Her south-facing flat has no external blinds or air conditioning. Last year, Darya had to buy her own blackout curtains, and now on hot days she relies on a fan. "We tried putting frozen bottles of ice in front of the fan, but it didn't help much - it was just moving the hot air around," she says, adding that her bedroom, with its dark walls, turned into the hottest spot in the flat. During the winter months, Darya appreciates how well the flat is shielded from the cold, thanks to its triple-glazed windows and an insulated facade. But when extreme heat occurs, these perks become liabilities. Heat and health issues The EU's climate monitor 'Copernicus' said that June 2026 was the hottest June on record in western Europe and the second hottest globally. The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) has recorded an estimated 5,120 heat-related deaths in Germany so far in 2026, most of them during the late June heat wave. In comparison, over the whole of 2025, the RKI estimated 2,600 heat-related deaths. In this context, protecting people from extreme heat "should be seen also as a health measure," said Trinidad Fernandez, head of the Climate Transition Strategies Unit at the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering (IAO). "We need to treat heat resilience as a core requirement of good housing and also good urban planning," she added. Tenants are protected from cold, but not heat More than half of all people living in Germany rent their homes, the highest proportion in the EU. Darya's tenancy agreement explicitly sets clear rules for winter, quoting a minimum daytime indoor temperature of 21°C. Yet, there is no mention of any summer temperature targets. "Under the Federal Court of Justice's rulings, residential tenants do have a right to sufficiently warm rooms (20–24°C, depending on the room), but no right to cooling," Michael Selk, a lawyer who specializes in rental law, told DW in an email. That, he added, is likely due to the temperatures that Germany has been used to historically. Nowadays, buildings in Germany must be designed to limit overheating in summer under the Building Energy Act (GEG). Yet, according to a study published by the Working Group for Contemporary Building e.V. in 2023, 75% of Germany's housing stock was built before 1990, so many renters live in buildings that do not meet today's heat protection requirements. In most cases, landlords are under no obligation to meet those standards either. "The landlord is only required to provide the standard that applied at the time the building was constructed," explained Selk, citing case law rulings from the Federal Court of Justice regarding property defects. "The tenant has no right to modernization," he adds. In practice, that means that for a building constructed in 1990, the corresponding standards would apply in a court hearing. Tenants in Germany can sometimes win property defect cases in lower courts if their apartments regularly become overheated. This has mainly applied to buildings that failed to meet the heat protection standards applicable at the time of construction, or in truly extreme cases of general uninhabitability. From emergency response to prevention Selk doesn't believe that German tenancy law will change anytime soon to properly address the issue of summer overheating. "The key factor is whether a case ever reaches the Federal Court of Justice and whether the court, citing health protection, creates an exception to the rule," he explains. Such an exception, like those made for PCP (pentachlorophenol) toxins or lead pipes by the Federal Constitutional Court in 1998, would mean that landlords would have to comply with modern-day standards rather than those dating back to the time of construction. Selk points out that, in commercial leases, courts sometimes draw on occupational health and safety rules that generally treat 26°C as a threshold for workplaces, above which steps to limit heat exposure should be considered. "In my personal opinion, there is certainly a right to have a temperature limit upheld. What applies to commercial leases, must apply even more so to residential tenancies," he says, adding that German Basic Law explicitly guarantees every person's right to physical integrity. But even if it happens, it should still be up to a landlord to decide how they could ensure cooling, he adds. Climate researcher Fernandez believes that summer overheating should be addressed systematically. "We need to move from the typical emergency response into prevention by design", she says, adding that the focus should be on how the design of buildings and neighborhoods incorporates active and passive cooling depending on their respective needs. A matter of financing Fernandez also argues that the government should establish clearer temperature standards to protect both future and existing buildings from overheating, as well as provide the financial means to make that possible. Financing is also the main matter of concern for Haus & Grund, Germany's largest real estate association that represents the interests of owners and landlords. "Reliable economic conditions are crucial," Inka-Marie Storm, the chief legal counsel representing the association, told DW in an email. "In particular, investment-friendly subsidy programs, tax incentives and tenancy laws that make it reasonably feasible to finance necessary modernizations," Storm says, pointing out that summer heat protection is usually included as part of larger modernization plans. "If such investments are supported by reliable subsidy conditions and practical tenancy laws, both landlords and tenants will benefit." Chancellor Friedrich Merz seems to have heard the message. "We cannot stop climate change from within Europe, and that is why a second major challenge will be to live with climate change — and this must be reflected in building codes, in healthcare and in the protection of particularly vulnerable groups," he said in his summer press conference in Berlin on July 15. Temporary escape is the way out – for now As a new mom, Darya admits that this summer she particularly struggles to deal with the heat. She worries less about herself than about her one-year-old daughter. Small children "have it the worst," Darya says, because they "don't really understand what's happening." The day when the family returned from Turkey, the heat kept the girl awake for much of the night. The next morning, the family decided to go to a hotel with air conditioning - a decision that many others in Germany have also made, as dozens of videos on social media and local reports show. But relying on hotels is hardly a long-term answer - as heat waves become more frequent and last longer, such temporary escapes are likely to become less affordable and less accessible. *DW withheld the full name to protect anonymity. Edited by Rina Goldenberg