Free camping and Stellplätze in Germany

The German word you need is Stellplatz, plural Stellplätze, more precisely Wohnmobilstellplatz. It is a place set aside for motorhomes to park, usually run by a Gemeinde or by a private operator, and it is the nearest German thing to a French aire. That is where the similarity stops. A French aire carries an expectation about what is on it. Stellplatz carries almost none.

Some are what you would hope for: numbered bays on hardstanding, a drinking water tap, a drain for grey and chemical waste, a machine that takes coins or a card. Some are a strip of gravel behind a swimming pool with a sign on a post and nothing else. Many are free to park on and charge separately for water, electricity and the waste dump. Others charge for the night. The variation is the defining feature, so do not plan a trip on the assumption that a Stellplatz is a service point. Plan the service stop separately.

Sleeping in a parked vehicle: what is actually established

Germany does distinguish between parking a vehicle and camping in it, and the distinction is the whole ball game. The concept you will see repeated everywhere in English is Wiederherstellung der Fahrtüchtigkeit, restoring your fitness to drive. One large city has set that position out in writing, and it is the clearest statement of the line you are being asked to stay on.

The Landeshauptstadt München set the position out in writing in a letter from its Berufsmäßiger Stadtrat to city councillors, dated 19 June 2018 and published in the city’s own council information system. On motorhomes it says:

Das Aufstellen von Wohnmobilen zu Wohnzwecken ist kein Gemeingebrauch einer Straße, sondern Sondernutzung. Das Ruhen oder Übernachten in Wohnmobilen im öffentlichem Verkehrsraum auf Reisen zum Zwecke der Wiederherstellung der körperlichen Fahrtüchtigkeit ist erlaubter Gemeingebrauch, darüber hinaus aber genehmigungspflichtige Sondernutzung.

Our summary, and the German is the authority: putting a motorhome up for residential purposes is not ordinary public use of a street, it is Sondernutzung, special use, which needs permission. Resting or spending the night in a motorhome in public traffic space, while traveling, for the purpose of restoring your physical fitness to drive, is permitted ordinary public use. Anything beyond that is special use and needs permission.

The same letter says the parallel thing about caravans and camping trailers, and adds that parking a motorhome is otherwise unrestricted wherever car parking is allowed, provided the vehicle is roadworthy and registered.

Three things follow from that:

• It is one city, not a national rule. Munich is a large municipal authority stating how it applies the law. Sondernutzung is governed by each Land’s road law rather than by one federal text, so another Gemeinde can draw the line somewhere else. Check the local rules where you actually stop.
• Keep everything inside the van. The widely repeated version of this rule says that deploying an awning, putting out chairs and a table, or dropping levelling ramps converts parking into camping. The Munich letter draws its line at “darüber hinaus”, beyond that, without listing what counts. Nothing deployed is the safe side of a line nobody has drawn precisely.
• Do not plan the night around a 10 hour cap. You will read that the rest is capped at ten hours. That figure is folklore rather than law. What the Munich letter permits is a rest while traveling, so arrive late, sleep, and move on in the morning.

The parking rules that are in the federal text

Two things in the Straßenverkehrs-Ordnung do apply directly and are worth knowing if you are in a large vehicle or towing:

• Over 7.5 tonnes. § 12 Abs. 3a StVO bans regular parking between 22:00 and 06:00, and on Sundays and public holidays, for vehicles over 7.5 t permissible total mass and trailers over 2 t, inside built-up areas in purely and generally residential zones, in special zones serving recreation, in spa areas and in clinic areas. It does not apply on parking areas signed for it. Most motorhomes sit well under 7.5 t, but not all do.
• Trailers. § 12 Abs. 3b StVO: a trailer with no towing vehicle attached may not be parked for longer than two weeks, except on parking areas signed for it.

Umweltplakette and Umweltzonen

Some German cities have a signed Umweltzone, a low emission zone. To drive into one your vehicle needs an Umweltplakette, a sticker on the windshield, and you have to have it before you get there. The Umweltbundesamt, the federal environment agency, states the mechanism plainly: only vehicles bearing a sticker for the low emission zone may enter the zone, and the color of the sticker is determined by the tax class and Euro standard recorded in the vehicle registration document.

The sticker itself is set out in the 35. BImSchV, the federal regulation on labelling low-emission vehicles. Red is emission group 2, yellow is group 3, green is group 4. It goes clearly visible on the inside of the windshield. It is issued by registration authorities and by emissions testing bodies recognized under road traffic law. Vehicles registered abroad are covered by the regulation: where the documents do not show compliance with the relevant EU emissions directives, the regulation classifies the vehicle by its date of first registration and engine type.

The practical point for a visiting driver is timing, not policy. This is a sticker you buy in advance, and the zones are signed at the boundary rather than announced on the approach roads out of town. Check the Umweltbundesamt’s own list of zones against the cities you plan to drive into, and buy the sticker before you leave home. Cities are added and boundaries move, and there is nowhere to buy one at the zone edge.

What changes with the season

Germany runs a real winter, and the thing that catches people out is water rather than snow. Water points on open-air stopovers are commonly shut off over the cold months because standing water in an exposed pipe or tap freezes and splits it. That is a general mechanism, not a rule, and it applies to municipal sites and private ones alike.

What follows from it: in winter, assume a Stellplatz is a place to park and nothing more, and fill up where you know you can. Toilet and waste disposal points can close for the same reason. Elevation matters more than latitude for this, so a site in the Schwarzwald or the Bayerischer Wald can be shut down for the season while a similar site on the Rhine is not.

Where a site publishes opening hours, they are on its record. Where a record shows none, check the Gemeinde’s own page or plan a fallback for that night. An empty field is not a promise that the site is open all year.

See the map

Everything described above is plotted on the Germany map. German place data comes from OpenStreetMap contributors under the ODbL 1.0.

Seven states have their stopovers written up one by one, each page carrying the link to whatever the Gemeinde, the Stadt or the local tourism board publishes about that site: Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg, North Rhine-Westphalia, Hesse, Lower Saxony, Rhineland-Palatinate and Schleswig-Holstein. Germany has no national register of Stellplätze the way France has one of its aires, so those links go to 270-odd separate municipal sites rather than to one database. That is the reason a Stellplatz page here tells you less than a French aire page does, and the reason the entrance board matters more.

The sign wins

The posted sign at the entrance and the Gemeinde’s current guidance beat this page, every time. Signs get added, height barriers get fitted, a free site starts charging, a municipality decides overnight stays are no longer welcome and puts up a board saying so. None of that reaches us the day it happens. Read the sign, and if the sign and this page disagree, the sign is right.

Where the numbers here come from: 358 German Stellplätze, spread across seven states, each with a full page written from the Gemeinde’s or the operator’s own listing and that listing linked so you can check it yourself. The map shows those and nothing else, so every pin on it has a page behind it. A further 682 places carrying a free label in OpenStreetMap are logged and not yet checked against their operator, which is why a blank stretch of map means unwritten rather than empty. What the data covers, and what it does not