Bürgergeld and the French RSA do a similar job — a minimum income for people with little or no earnings. But they are not built the same way. Germany bundles cash, rent and heating into one programme. France splits them across RSA, housing aid (APL) and an in-work top-up. Even after you account for that, the gap is large.
What’s inside: Only €29.15bn is the cash Regelsatz. Most of the rest is rent and heating paid for claimants — which is why the German total looks so much bigger.
What’s not inside: APL housing aid is a separate system. Add Prime d’activité (€10.7bn, ~4.5m households) and France still spends about half of Germany’s payments total.
Same story whichever lens you use. Switch to “Full system” to include admin and integration in Germany, and the in-work top-up in France.
Payments only: what was actually paid out in benefits. Germany’s figure already includes rent & heating; France’s RSA figure does not include APL.
Households are a similar size in both countries (~1.9 people in Germany, ~2.0 in France), so this gap is not a counting trick.
2.4× more in Germany. German figure is the average total claim per Bedarfsgemeinschaft (€16,007/year) — it includes rent/heating and health-insurance contributions paid on the household’s behalf, not just cash in hand. French figure is the CAF average for Q4 2024, RSA only.
2.6× more in Germany. €8,530/year per eligible person in Germany (5.50m people) vs €3,266/year in France (3.64m people covered, including partners and children).
Not everyone gets the full rate. Many recipients work part-time and have earnings deducted, and children get lower rates. In France, a typical RSA household that also receives APL gets roughly €200–€225/month extra in housing aid — taking its total transfers to about €760–€780/month, still well below the German household average.
The composition explains a lot of the difference.
Add admin, integration services and the full municipal housing share and the Sozialbudget puts the all-in cost at ~€58bn — €694 per resident, 1.34% of GDP.
Even combined, RSA + Prime d’activité is 0.77% of GDP and €330 per resident — and APL housing aid is still counted elsewhere.
No income, living alone — the cleanest like-for-like.
France advertises a higher single cash rate (€636 vs €563), but Germany pays the rent on top inside the same benefit. Once housing is in, a German single household’s average claim is roughly €300/month above a comparable French household with RSA + APL.
A single person on RSA alone cannot reach €1,500 — the ceiling is €635.71. A figure around €1,500 is entirely plausible for a disabled claimant, but it comes from a different benefit: the Allocation aux adultes handicapés (AAH).
Cash subtotal: €1,120.82/month — AAH (€1,016.05) + the autonomy supplement (€104.77). Add a few hundred euros of APL — €330 to €380 is typical in this profile — and the total lands at roughly €1,450 to €1,500/month.
The €104.77 supplement is automatic only at an incapacity rate of 80%+, with independent housing, housing aid, and no work income. At 50–79% there is no supplement, so the same claimant lands nearer €1,300/month with APL — unless they are an older claimant still keeping the old complément de ressources (€179.31/month, closed to new claims since December 2019).
Bottom line: €1,500 as “RSA” for a single person is not possible under the rates. €1,500 as AAH + autonomy supplement + APL is.
Moldova’s minimum-income scheme is Ajutor social: a top-up that lifts a poor family’s income to a state-guaranteed floor. It does the same job as Bürgergeld and RSA, but it is an order of magnitude smaller — and unlike Bürgergeld, it contains no housing costs at all. GDP 2024 — MD €16.8bn (323.9bn lei) · Population — 2.40m (2024 census).
What’s inside: Only the top-up itself — the payment is simply the gap between a family’s actual income and its guaranteed floor. No rent, no heating, no health contributions are bundled in. The caseload is also far tighter than in Germany or France: about 35% of recipient families include an elderly person and about 46% a person with a disability.
Bottom line: Moldova guarantees a single adult roughly one seventh of the French RSA rate and about one twelfth of what a German single household actually receives — and spends, per resident, about €16 a year on its minimum-income scheme against Germany’s €561.