Country profile - DEU

Corruption in Germany

16 sub-national regions - 1995-2022. Latest country-level SCI: 83.5 (2022).

Grand: 76.7 Petty: 86.6 Latest observed: 2022

Germany: key corruption facts

The most corrupt region of Germany is Berlin (81.5/100), and the least corrupt is Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (84.9/100), on a 0-100 scale where 0 is most corrupt and 100 is least. All 16 regions are ranked below.

  • In 2022, Germany's national Subnational Corruption Index (SCI) was 83.5/100, on a scale where 0 is the most corrupt and 100 the least corrupt.
  • Most corrupt region: Berlin (SCI 81.5/100, 2022).
  • Least corrupt region: Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (SCI 84.9/100, 2022).
  • Grand corruption (SGCI): 76.7/100; petty corruption (SPCI): 86.6/100 (last directly observed in 2022).
  • Trend: Germany's SCI moved from 72.6/100 (1995) to 83.5/100 (2022).
  • Coverage: 16 regions, 1995–2022. Source: Subnational Corruption Database (Crombach & Smits, 2024, Nature Scientific Data), CC BY 4.0.

How Germany compares: SCD vs. the CPI and World Bank

The Subnational Corruption Index is scored 0–100 on the same orientation as Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index (higher = cleaner). The difference: the CPI and the World Bank measure the perceptions of experts and business executives and report one national number, while the SCI is built from what ordinary households perceive and experience — and it breaks Germany into 16 regions.

Index Latest Scale Based on
Subnational Corruption Index (SCI) 83.5 0–100 (100 = cleanest) Households — perception & experience
Transparency International CPI 79 0–100 (100 = cleanest) Experts & business surveys
World Bank Control of Corruption 1.8 ≈ −2.5 to 2.5 Aggregated expert sources

Most recent year — SCI 2022, CPI 2022, CCI 2022. The SCD also publishes region-anchored SUB-CPI and SUB-CCI series so the CPI and World Bank measures can be read at the regional level.

SCI trajectory - 1995-2022

Country-level mean of the Subnational Corruption Index, averaged across all 16 regions. Higher values mean cleaner governance (0 = most corrupt, 100 = least corrupt).

85 71 1995 2022

Source: SCD v1.0 (Comprehensive Dataset). Years where the panel was filled by inter/extrapolation are included in the country mean.

Regions (16)

Each row is a sub-national region with its latest SCI score. Click into any row for the region's full time series.

# Region GDL code Years Latest SCI
1 Berlin DEUr103 1995-2022 81.5
2 Bremen DEUr105 1995-2022 81.6
3 Sachsen-Anhalt DEUr114 1995-2022 82.3
4 Saarland DEUr112 1995-2022 82.4
5 Niedersachsen DEUr109 1995-2022 82.9
6 Hessen DEUr107 1995-2022 83.1
7 Sachsen DEUr113 1995-2022 83.1
8 Brandenburg DEUr104 1995-2022 83.5
9 Baden-Wurttemberg DEUr101 1995-2022 83.8
10 Schleswig-Holstein DEUr115 1995-2022 84.1
11 Thuringen DEUr116 1995-2022 84.1
12 Nordrhein-Westfalen DEUr110 1995-2022 84.2
13 Rheinland-Pfalz DEUr111 1995-2022 84.5
14 Bayern DEUr102 1995-2022 84.6
15 Hamburg DEUr106 1995-2022 84.8
16 Mecklenburg-Vorpommern DEUr108 1995-2022 84.9

Download Germany

Per-country panel slice in CSV format. Columns: iso, country, gdl, region, year, sci. Direct dataset citations should reference the Figshare deposit (see How to cite).

Download DEU.csv