Maps of the small business market in Berlin: where firms open and close, which industries are growing, what role foreigners play, where the risk is higher and how much trade tax you will pay. Official statistics only, explained in plain words.
The bigger the tile, the more business registrations there.
You pick a question above the map. Green – “yes, better”, red – “no, worse”, grey – about average.
Every tile opens a card with figures and a takeaway in plain words.
Like a population, businesses are born and die. The monitor shows the heartbeat of the whole city, and the carpet below it shows where it beats stronger and where it is weakening.
The rhythm is real, just sped up 1,000 times: in 2025, a new business was founded in Berlin on average every 13 minutes and one closed every 19 minutes. That is why the upper line beats faster. “Today” is an estimate based on this pace, not a live counter. Latest signal: in the first half of 2026, Berlin had 22,306 trade registrations, 0.5% fewer than a year earlier, while closures fell by 8.3% (AfS Berlin-Brandenburg).
Every quarter is a tremor on the tape. The higher the amplitude, the more firms filed for insolvency. In 2025, Berlin saw 1,916 corporate insolvencies, 8.4% fewer than in 2024.
AfS Berlin-Brandenburg does not publish insolvency rates per 10,000 firms by industry, so this shows the number of filings: large industries have more simply because they have more firms.
In 2025, more than two fifths of new sole proprietorships in Berlin were founded by people without German citizenship – 43.9%. If you are starting a business in Germany as a foreigner, you are in good company.
The AfS Berlin-Brandenburg report lists only selected nationalities, so the list is incomplete: Ukraine and Syria, for example, are not in it.
Dashed line – the Berlin average, 39.6%. This counts people who started a new business (Gewerbetreibende bei Neugründungen), so the share differs slightly from the share among sole-proprietorship registrations above.
Berlin is one city with one trade tax (Gewerbesteuer) multiplier for all districts: 410% as of October 2026. The receipt shows it in euros next to the average multipliers of its neighbours and of Germany. Choose a legal form and enter your profit, and the receipt will show all taxes on your profit.
The credit cannot exceed your income tax: with a small income it is smaller. A UG or GmbH gets neither the 24,500 € allowance nor the credit. This is a demo calculation, not tax advice: it does not take into account your tax class and family status, other income, expenses, church tax, additions to the base (Hinzurechnungen), prepayments and much more that depends on the specific business.
A “weather forecast” for business: where companies are looking for people and services right now. Every vacancy is an employer who is short of hands. For a freelancer or a service business, these are future clients.
Ecologists call this carrying capacity: how many members of one species a territory can feed. Here the species is a café, a barbershop or a bakery, and the territory is a city.
The atlas figures come from the statistical offices of Germany and its states, the chambers of commerce and the Federal Employment Agency. Before each update we check the totals: if the district figures do not add up to the city total, the map is not updated.
The tables are downloaded on a schedule, right after the office has published them.
The sum of the districts must equal the city total, and so must the sum of the industries. Any discrepancy stops the update.
The maps are updated after the offices publish new data. The date of the last update is shown at the top of the page.
Love Act Grow asks about your activity and address in your language, works out whether you need to register a trade (Gewerbe) or only notify the tax office, and prepares the documents in German. You register where you actually run your business – the service takes your city into account.
A digest of Atlas© updates — a monthly e-mail of infographics built on current statistics. On the site, new editions appear within 2 hours of official releases from trusted statistics agencies.