The Max Planck Institutes in Germany house cutting-edge equipment, such as this ultra-high vacuum facility at The Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics in Halle. Credit: Hendrik Schmidt/dpa/ALAMY
In 2019, shortly after finishing her master’s at Nanjing University in China, Xinyi Zhao opened an e-mail to learn that she had been offered a PhD position at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany. “When I told my parents, they asked me to double-check whether the offer was real, as they weren’t familiar with the institute.” But Zhao knew of its glowing scientific reputation. “I felt very excited but also quite surprised,” says Zhao. “I heard they do amazing research.” Six years on, she’s still happily employed in Germany, now as a postdoc at the Berlin-based Max Planck Institute for Human Development.
Nature Career Guide: Germany
Between 2012 and 2022, the number of international scientists at the country’s four largest non-university research organizations doubled, from 8,115 to 16,6251. These institutes — the Max Planck Society, the Leibniz Association, the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres and the Fraunhofer Society — all ranked among the world's top 20 non-profit organizations for research output in 2025, according to the Nature Index Research Leaders. The country’s universities also maintain a strong international profile, with 8 included in the world’s top 100, as reported in the Times Higher Education’s 2026 World University Rankings.
Xinyi Zhao, a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, likes the research environment in Germany. Credit: Sarah Otterstetter / Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Germany’s success in academic-excellence rankings lies partly in the structure of its scientific ecosystem — in which each research organization specializes in a particular kind of science — alongside the remarkably stable flow of public research funding. “Germany is a country without natural resources,” says Otmar Wiestler, former president of the Helmholtz Association. “We don’t have cheap labour. All we have is the brains of our people.” As a result, he adds, “the German government is really committed to promoting research and innovation”.
Streamlined systems
In 2023, around 3.1% of Germany’s gross domestic product (GDP) — roughly €132 billion (US$152 billion) — was spent on research and development, a lower percentage than those of Israel (6%) and the United States (3.4%), but higher than the relative research spending of the United Kingdom (2.6%) and China (2.7%). Around one-third of this spending was from the public sector and the rest came from private industry. German governmental support for science has remained stable throughout various political leaderships. In the past 20 years, “we have never had a year where federal spending has decreased”, says Max Voegler, the vice-president of Global Strategic Networks for Germany, Austria and Switzerland at the Amsterdam-based academic publisher Elsevier, who co-wrote a report on Germany’s research system earlier this year2.
Although the bulk of the funding for research and teaching in countries such as France and the United Kingdom comes from the central governments, in Germany, the task of supporting academic activities falls to both federal and state governments. These jointly provide the majority of the institutional funding for most of the country’s non-university research organizations. And in contrast to the United States and the United Kingdom, where universities draw much of their income from tuition fees, German states are responsible for providing the base funding for universities.
Otmar Wiestler, former president of the Helmholtz Association, says that the German government is committed to promoting research and innovation.Phil Dera/Helmholtz
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