Kassel at the top: Germany's happiest city 2025!

Kassel at the top: Germany's happiest city 2025!

Kassel is at the top of the list of the happiest major cities in Germany. According to the current lucky atlas of the southern German class lottery (SKL), which has carried out a comprehensive survey of 23,468 citizens, the Kasselers achieve a proud 7.44 points on a scale from 0 to 10. This is the second year in a row that Kassel takes up the top position, like Welt reports.

In places two and three, Krefeld follow with 7.39 points and Düsseldorf with 7.36 points. However, the ranking has changed compared to the previous year, since Erfurt and Aachen fell to places five and six from the ranks two and three. After all, Rostock still has the lowest life satisfaction with only 6.08 points and is thus 1.36 points behind the happy Kassel.

life satisfaction and city size

An interesting aspect of the survey is the clear tendency that life satisfaction in larger cities tends to decrease. The survey shows that only two of the largest German cities, namely Düsseldorf and Hamburg, are represented among the ten happiest cities. Munich, Frankfurt am Main and Berlin only come to places 27, 35 and 37. SKL emphasizes that cities like Kassel that offer a young, student-shaped environment and much green, in fact a higher quality of life.

The difference between subjective life satisfaction and objective quality of life is remarkable. In this way, Karlsruhe takes first place in relation to the external living conditions, but only achieved 38th place in subjective life satisfaction. It is positive that the general level of satisfaction in Germany has increased compared to the previous year, which is due to the consideration of data from Corona year 2021.

The top ten of the happiness cities

• Kassel - 7.44 points
• Krefeld - 7.39 points
• Düsseldorf - 7.36 points
• Augsburg - 7.33 points
• aachen - 7.33 points
• Münster - 7.24 points
• Hamburg - 7.21 points
• Erfurt - 7.27 points
• Mönchengladbach - 7.22 points
• Duisburg - 7.20 points

such as the [ZEIT] (https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/2025-06/gluecksatlas-lebenspreffungen-kassel-rostock survey) explains from the survey that smaller cities are often attributed to unexpected advantages, such as an attractive range of leisure activities and smaller, family-friendly structures. These framework conditions that give people the feeling of being really happy in their city, even if the objective data identifies something else.

Overall, it should be noted that life satisfaction is still an indispensable benchmark for the attractiveness of the cities. Kassel has apparently proven a good hand in terms of quality of life, which also makes it an interesting place of residence in the long term.