ai4abundance.org/germany · Around 25,000 foundations with legal capacity, roughly nine in ten of them charitable, supervised state by state. The federal register everyone is preparing for has moved.
| Feature | Why it changes our advice |
|---|---|
| Landesstiftungsbehörden | Civil-law foundations are supervised by the federal state they sit in, and each state has run its own directory of recognised foundations |
| Stiftungsrechtsreform, in force 1 July 2023 | Foundation civil law is now unified federally in BGB sections 80 to 88, so the old state-by-state divergence in civil law is largely gone |
| Stiftungsregister, deferred to 2028 | The central register at the Bundesamt für Justiz was due to open on 1 January 2026. It has been put back to 1 January 2028 for technical reasons, and the deadline for existing foundations has moved with it. Most English-language summaries still say 2026 |
| Gemeinnützigkeit, AO sections 51 to 68 | Charitable status is a tax question handled by the Finanzamt, and it is separate from whether a foundation has legal capacity |
| The register will not show charitable status | Entry turns on legal form, not on Gemeinnützigkeit. Anyone checking status will still need the Satzung or the Zuwendungsempfängerregister |
| DSGVO | Donor and beneficiary data sits under the GDPR as applied in Germany, which shapes what AI may touch |
If your governance plan assumed a 2026 registration deadline, it is built on a date that has moved. That is a cheap thing to correct now and an expensive thing to discover in a board meeting.
Large balance sheets run by small teams, with governance built for stewarding capital rather than for making grants well. That gap is the work.
German expectations around foundation transparency keep rising. We build the reporting so it is a by-product of running well.
Written for German data protection practice, not translated from a US template.
The statute, the supervisory structure and the register timetable named here were checked against primary and official sources on 12 November 2026, including the deferral of the Stiftungsregister from 2026 to 2028. Nothing here is legal or tax advice.
That is precisely the organisation our foundation products were built for.
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