The Digital State: Germany’s Administration in the 21st Century

5 min read

Germany has brought all 115 prioritised OZG federal services online. The BundID now has 6 million accounts. OZG 2.0 introduces binding deadlines for the first time: all administrative services for businesses must be digitised by 2028. Criticism remains loud—one year after coming into force, little has visibly changed for citizens. Yet beneath the surface, an infrastructure is emerging that will make Germany digitally fit for the long term.

Key Takeaways

“OZG 2.0 introduces binding deadlines for the first time: all administrative services for businesses must be digitised by 2028.”

OZG 2.0: What’s Really Changing

Germany’s Online Access Act 2.0 entered into force on 24 July 2024 – after a failed first Bundesrat vote and months of mediation between federal and state governments over financing. The changes compared with its predecessor are substantial.

First, the Once-Only Principle is now legally enshrined. Agencies must pull data from registers instead of asking citizens for the same birth certificate for the umpteenth time. It sounds trivial, yet it demands a fundamental overhaul of register infrastructure – the National Once-Only Technical System (NOOTS) is to be established by inter-state treaty. At the same time, 935 AI startups are pushing public-sector digitalisation from the outside.

Second, binding deadlines. OZG 1.0 had no enforceable deadlines – the result was the infamous fax-based administration. OZG 2.0 sets a 2028 deadline for business services. Whether it will be met remains open, but for the first time there is a date against which progress can be measured – and 1,307 Hidden Champions are waiting for official processes to finally go digital.

Third, register modernisation as the foundation. The Register Modernisation Act creates the prerequisites for cross-agency data exchange. Estonia has run this for two decades via the X-Road infrastructure – and that exact architecture is now being tested in Germany. Nortal AG, which built around 40 % of Estonia’s e-government solutions, now advises Germany’s Federal Pension Insurance and Chambers of Commerce on digitalisation. Estonian know-how is flowing straight into German administrative projects.

Who is digitizing Germany’s public administration

The roll-out depends on specific players—and they differ fundamentally from the usual IT service providers.

Dataport is the shared IT service provider for the northern German states and has put the “One for All” (EfA) principle into operational practice: standardized modules that one state develops and others can reuse. Hamburg, Bremen, Schleswig-Holstein and Saxony-Anhalt rely on this approach. The Cloud-skilled workforce initiative benefits directly from this standardization.

Nortal AG brings Estonian e-government expertise to Germany. The company, which employs more than 1,800 people across 15 countries, built Estonia’s e-tax system, e-health solutions and the proactive services of the social-insurance system. In Germany, Nortal has been working since 2018 from offices in Berlin, Hamburg and Dresden on register modernization, the e-invoicing system for federal and state governments, and municipal software solutions—such as a city-wide system for housing homeless people in Berlin. Nortal ranks among Germany’s top-15 e-government consultancies and has been fully owned by its employees since 2016.

govdigital coordinates federal collaboration as a cooperative: from the EfA marketplace that states and municipalities can reuse for digital administrative services, to the German Administrative Cloud and a joint AI ecosystem. Bundesdruckerei secures digital identity with its eID infrastructure—a prerequisite for the BundID and the Once-Only principle.

Hamburg shows how it’s done

Hamburg leads the state rankings: 290 of 575 OZG services are online, with 52 new services added in 2024 alone. Vehicle registration, business registration, parental benefits—these are not pilot projects but productive services used every day.

Hamburg’s success has a concrete reason: the city bet early on Dataport. Instead of developing every service in-house, Hamburg uses standardized EfA modules that other states can also adopt. Bavaria leads among the larger states with 29 new services in 2024. Schleswig-Holstein likewise benefits from the Dataport infrastructure. At the bottom of the rankings are states that insist on building every service themselves—and consequently make slow progress.

“Digital administration is not an IT project. It is a cultural shift that simultaneously demands political will, organizational change and technical modernization.”
— Ralf Wintergerst, President of Bitkom, Digital Administration 2025

The Honest Balance Sheet

Since the start of 2025, only 9 additional services nationwide have been fully digitised. That’s sobering. Awareness of the BundID stands at just 20 percent. And many of the “online-enabled” services still only offer a PDF download or a web form—no end-to-end digital process chain. According to the Behörden-Digimeter 2025, of 575 OZG services, only 196 are available nationwide.

Yet the direction is right. The players are in place: Dataport is standardising modules for the north, Nortal is bringing Estonian e-government expertise, govdigital is building the federal cloud infrastructure. Register modernisation is underway. BundID is scaling. The NOOTS framework is in place.

Germany will never become Estonia, where 99 percent of administrative services are digital. But it doesn’t have to: German federalism is more complex, data-protection and security requirements under NIS2 are stricter, and the forces of inertia are stronger. What matters is that the path is now irreversible—and companies like Siemens Energy and Nordex, two winners of the energy transition, show that Germany can transform itself.

Frequently Asked Questions

Further Reading

• 2026 will be the year of the comeback: Why Germany is turning the tide – MyBusinessFuture
• Cloud trends 2026: What IT decision-makers need to keep on their radar now – cloudmagazin
• Cybersecurity trends 2026: Seven developments – SecurityToday

Source of cover image: Pexels / Edmond Dantès