Germany heating law repealed: what the new rules mean

What Germany’s heating law actually is — and what just changed

Germany’s heating rules have been set for years by the Gebäudeenergiegesetz, or GEG — the Building Energy Act. The version most readers will remember is the 2023 amendment, drafted under Economy Minister Robert Habeck of the Greens and often nicknamed “Habeck’s heat hammer” in tabloid coverage. Its central provision, known as the 65-percent rule, required every newly installed heating system to source at least 65 percent of its energy from renewables. In practice, that meant a heat pump, a connection to a district-heating network running on green energy, or a biomass-based system; installing a brand-new oil or gas boiler was, in most cases, no longer permitted.

According to Der Spiegel, citing Reuters, the Bundestag has now repealed those core provisions. In a roll-call vote on the new Building Modernisation Act (Gebäudemodernisierungsgesetz), 322 MPs voted in favour and 272 against. The governing coalition of CDU/CSU and SPD backed the bill, while the Greens, the Left Party and the AfD voted against. The Union and SPD had committed in their coalition agreement to dismantle the previous GEG framework.

What the new rules actually require

The most consequential change is structural: the obligation to use renewables no longer sits with the building owner choosing a boiler, but with fuel suppliers. Under the new law, newly installed oil and gas heating systems can continue to be fitted and operated indefinitely. From 2029, however, any newly installed fossil boiler must run on at least 10 percent renewable fuels — biomethane, biofuels or, in time, hydrogen-derived gases. The minimum share rises to 15 percent in January 2030, 30 percent in January 2035 and 60 percent in January 2040. Fuel suppliers themselves must transition fully to alternative materials by 2045. The so-called Biotreppe, or “bio staircase,” is the timetable driving that shift.

The previous law’s hard cutoff, under which boilers could no longer run on fossil fuels from 2045, has been dropped. Instead, the federal government must present a separate draft law by early December 2025 to ensure that heating fuels are fully climate-neutral from 2045 onwards. For the existing stock of heating systems, a so-called green-gas quota is to be introduced from 2028, starting at up to one percent, though Der Spiegel notes the details remain unclear. Economy Minister Katherina Reiche (CDU) framed the approach as replacing “heating mandates” with “technological openness,” and CDU parliamentary vice-chair Sepp Müller said the reform ended “paternalism” in German heating cellars.

Where the reporting and the politics diverge

The two Spiegel pieces describe the same vote but emphasise different framings. The news report treats the repeal as a procedural parliamentary event with named stakeholders and specific vote counts. The accompanying commentary column is sharper: it mocks the term “technological openness,” a phrase long associated with conservative and liberal climate sceptics, and calls it a euphemism for “wishful thinking on climate policy.” That tension — a procedural headline vote versus a contested ideological narrative — runs through the entire German debate and is worth naming explicitly.

The Greens’ parliamentary leader, Katharina Dröge, called the reform “an accelerant for the climate crisis,” arguing that CDU and SPD are locking Germany back into fossil imports. The BUND environment association’s Tina Löffelsend warned that the law “prolongs dependency on fossil imports” and pushes up heating bills. WWF Germany dismissed hydrogen and biomethane as “pseudo-solutions.” The Deutsche Umwelthilfe (DUH) went furthest, announcing a constitutional complaint on the grounds that the law conflicts with Germany’s statutory climate goals. The Left Party had attempted, unsuccessfully, to halt the vote via the Federal Constitutional Court.

Industry voices were split. The German construction industry welcomed the predictability the new law supposedly brings for investment planning. The federal association of housing and real estate companies (GdW) was more cautious: it called the law a missed opportunity to make climate protection in existing buildings more efficient and affordable, and criticised the short-notice, steep cuts to federal subsidies for efficient buildings announced the same week — a separate but connected decision that disproportionately hits middle- and higher-income households.

Why it matters: who wins, who loses, what shifts

For households, the immediate effect is symbolic and political: a new oil or gas boiler can once again be installed without violating federal law. That does not mean it is the cheapest option — heat-pump running costs, gas-price trajectories and the still-evolving subsidy framework will all shape the real-life decision — but it removes a binding legal ceiling on fossil choices. Lower-income households initially retain somewhat higher subsidy rates for heating replacement, but Der Spiegel notes those rates fall rapidly. Combined with the cut to the federal building-efficiency programme, this is, in practice, a contraction of state support at exactly the moment the technology mandate is being relaxed.

For the heating industry, boiler makers and heating installers, the change reopens a domestic market that had been written off under the 65-percent rule. For climate-policy advocates, it shifts the burden of decarbonisation from building owners, who can be controlled through permit and replacement decisions, to fuel suppliers, who must now prove that biomethane, biofuels and eventually hydrogen gases can scale to cover the building-heating sector by 2045. That is a much harder delivery problem and one where the law’s own timetable — the 2029, 2030, 2035 and 2040 milestones — is still aspirational rather than technical.

For Germany’s 2045 climate target, the question the law implicitly raises is whether the Biotreppe and the green-gas quota can deliver the same emissions reductions as the 65-percent rule. The DUH and WWF are publicly sceptical; the federal government has so far declined to publish a full impact assessment in advance. That uncertainty is itself a story: the new law promises legal certainty for consumers and industry, but the climate certainty is being deferred to a December draft and to future regulation.

The bigger picture: from Habeck’s heat hammer to Merz’s technology openness

The repeal completes a political arc that began with the GEG’s contentious passage in 2023, when the then-traffic-light coalition (SPD, Greens, FDP) bundled its climate package through parliament under significant public pressure. The “heat hammer” framing — used by critics including parts of the CDU/CSU and FDP — became a rallying point in the 2024 federal election campaign. The new Merz-led government’s coalition agreement explicitly committed to scrapping the GEG core, and the Building Modernisation Act delivers on that promise. The renaming matters too: by calling the successor a Modernisation law rather than an Energy law, the coalition reframes building decarbonisation as a renovation and investment story rather than a climate-regulation story.

What to watch next

Three near-term milestones will determine whether the new framework actually delivers. First, the federal government must table a draft law by early December 2025 to guarantee climate-neutral heating fuels from 2045; the substance of that draft will test how serious the Biotreppe really is. Second, the DUH’s threatened constitutional complaint could put the law back before the Federal Constitutional Court, the same court that has twice forced Germany to sharpen its climate framework. Third, the federal subsidy programme for efficient buildings is being cut in parallel, which may blunt the practical climate impact of the new rules even if the legal text survives. Industry will also be watching whether the 2028 green-gas quota is set at the upper bound of one percent or lower, and whether the December draft clarifies the role of hydrogen in domestic heating — a sector where infrastructure does not yet exist at scale.

The repeal, in short, is not a single event but the start of a second legislative phase in which the climate obligations the 65-percent rule once imposed on households are redistributed — partly to fuel suppliers, partly to a future law, and partly to the constitutional courts.