Opening a German bank account without Schufa
Which German banks accept you with no credit history, your legal right to a basic account, and what you genuinely cannot get until Schufa builds.
Schufa is Germany's credit reference agency, and almost every financial decision in the country touches it. Arriving with no Schufa file is different from having a bad score, but some systems treat the two similarly, because an empty file gives them nothing to assess.
The good news is that this rarely stops you opening a current account. What it does block is credit, and knowing which is which saves a lot of wasted applications.
What you can and cannot get
A current account: almost always yes
Digital banks generally run a Schufa check but do not refuse a standard account over a thin file.
A basic account: a legal right
Anyone legally resident in Germany can demand a Basiskonto, and a bank cannot refuse over Schufa.
Credit: not yet
Overdrafts, credit cards, phone contracts and mainstream rental applications all want a record you do not have.
Building a Schufa record deliberately
You can speed this up. Register your address promptly, since Schufa is keyed to it. Open a current account early and use it for regular outgoings rather than leaving it dormant. Pay rent and utilities by direct debit from that account rather than by transfer, because scheduled payments read better than ad hoc ones.
Request your own free Schufa report once a year to check what is on it. Errors are not unusual, and a mistake sitting uncorrected for a year is worse than a thin file.
Avoid opening several accounts in quick succession. Multiple credit enquiries in a short window is one of the few things that actively harms a new file rather than simply leaving it empty.
The account you might still want anyway
There is one gap digital banks leave. Several visa, tenancy and registration processes ask for a formal letter from your bank confirming your balance, stamped or on headed paper. App-only banks frequently cannot produce this, and an app-generated PDF is sometimes refused.
If you expect to need proof of funds, keeping a traditional bank account open alongside costs almost nothing and removes a whole category of problem at short notice. Traditional banks do want an Anmeldung and often a Steuer-ID, so this is a second-month task rather than a first-week one.