The digitalization of public administration in Germany is progressing slowly, and most citizens have never used digital government services. In a survey published on Monday by the comparison portal Verivox, 59% of respondents said they had never used an administrative service online. According to the survey, only 37% of government services are currently available in digital form, at least in part.
When asked why they had not completed administrative procedures online, 39% said the required service was not available digitally. Just over one in five respondents said they value personal contact at government offices. Around one in ten cited fears of technical problems or said they had deliberately avoided using online procedures.
However, 40% of respondents have already had some digital experience with government services. For 25%, the administrative process was handled partly online. Only 15% said the process was carried out entirely digitally. Germany has been working on the digitalization of its public administration since 2017. According to Verivox, 364 of the total 576 administrative services are still offline.
“The experiences of consumers highlight the main problem behind the slow pace of digitalization,” said Jörg Schamberg, a telecommunications expert at Verivox. “Often, only parts of a service are available digitally, and at some point the process still requires a visit to the authority. A complete administrative process from start to finish in the digital space is still far too rare.”
The Online Access Act, passed in 2017, required the federal government, states, and municipalities to offer their administrative services electronically by the end of 2022, in order to provide citizens and businesses with easy digital access to government services.
Verivox’s analysis of the implementation of the law found that only 110 of the services covered by the legislation are currently fully available online. In December 2024, the figure stood at 101, meaning that only nine additional services have been fully digitalized within a year. According to Verivox, 102 government services are currently available partly online, compared with 105 in the previous year.
“The digitalization project is entering its tenth year, and the mountain of unresolved tasks remains enormous,” Schamberg said. “Only nine services were newly digitalized last year. That is far too little.”
For the survey commissioned by Verivox, the polling institute Innofact conducted an online survey of 1,023 adults in December 2025. According to the organizers, the survey is representative of the population in terms of age, gender, and federal state.
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