Study crowns Dortmund the best city to start a business

A current ranking by the Weltsparen platform lists the cities in Germany according to their attractiveness for start-ups and is surprising: Munich and Berlin are not in first place.

Anyone starting a business must also ask themselves where the best location for their concept is. A new study comes to the conclusion that the best city in Germany for this is Dortmund, followed by Hanover and Karlsruhe. Among the countries of the European Union, Germany is in first place as a start-up location, with Romania in second place and Slovakia in third. The study was carried out by Weltsparen, an investment platform that belongs to fintech Raisin DS, which has just become a unicorn.

For the results, Weltsparen analyzed factors such as the population of cities in Germany, office rents, average salary and Google searches. It is striking: The other leaders of such rankings do not do so well at all. Munich is in ninth place, but Berlin is only in 21st place. Both cities are the outliers in terms of office rents, the only ones where the average salary for a workplace is over 1,000 euros per month. Münster is the cheapest place to rent, coming fourth overall in the study.

In Munich, there is at least one consolation for founders: although they have to pay a lot for rent, they also receive the highest salary. The average is 4,200 euros, no other city cracks the 4,000 euro mark. Second place here is surprising: in Braunschweig in Lower Saxony, founders receive an average of 3,349 euros per month.

However, the search queries analyzed on Google show that interest in the usual start-up cities such as Berlin, Munich and Cologne or Stuttgart. Overall, four of the top ten cities are in North Rhine-Westphalia, making it the most attractive federal state for start-ups: In addition to Cologne (seventh place), there is also first place Dortmund, as well as Münster (fourth place) and Duisburg (sixth place).