Leipzig University charges no tuition fees for Bachelor's or consecutive Master's programmes, for EU and non-EU students alike, because Saxony funds the university like every other public university outside Baden-Württemberg. The one exception is the university's small group of non-consecutive ("weiterbildend") Master's programmes, aimed at applicants who already hold a first degree and want a further professional qualification, such as Small Enterprise Promotion and Training, International Sports Development, and the Erasmus Mundus and joint international Master's programmes; these charge tuition set per programme, up to 1,800 EUR per semester.

What every student pays is the semester contribution, and it is not a fee for teaching. The largest part of it, 226.80 EUR per semester, is the Deutschland-Semesterticket, which covers public transport across the whole country. The rest funds the Studentenwerk's social services and catering, a mobility fund, and the Student_innenschaft's own budget and services.

No tuition does not mean no proof of funds. For the student visa you still need to show about 11,904 EUR for the year, usually in a blocked account, and that money has to be transferred months before the semester starts.

These are the deadlines that apply to applicants from outside the EU. For Master's programmes without local admission restrictions, that deadline falls a full three months earlier than the one published for EU and EEA applicants; for Bachelor's programmes, by contrast, Leipzig does not split deadlines by nationality at all, but by whether your qualification was earned in Germany or abroad, so the same date applies whether you are an EU or a non-EU citizen with a foreign qualification.

Several Master's programmes run their own cycle outside this table, for example Small Enterprise Promotion and Training and the joint international programmes, each with its own deadline around 31 May or 1 September/15 September depending on the programme. Restricted-admission Bachelor's and Master's programmes with national quotas (Medicine, Dentistry, Pharmacy, Veterinary Medicine) go through the Stiftung für Hochschulzulassung (DoSV) instead, on its own timetable.

Applicants who hold a foreign qualification apply through uni-assist, the shared portal used by most German universities, and pay uni-assist's standard processing fee (about 75 EUR for the first application). Applicants who already hold a degree earned in Germany apply directly through Leipzig's own AlmaWeb portal instead, without going through uni-assist.

Leipzig University offers 44 degree programmes fully in English, out of about 234 in total, concentrated in the natural sciences, humanities and social sciences, with a growing cluster in economics. Almost all of them are Master's programmes; the International Physics Studies Programme is the only English-taught Bachelor's degree, so a Bachelor applicant will otherwise need German for virtually the whole catalogue. You can study the English-taught programmes without German, though everyday German still helps with housing, part-time work and the authorities.

IELTS Academic and TOEFL iBT are the standard, alongside Cambridge English exams, and the exact score is set per programme rather than centrally. Several Master's programmes accept a higher education degree earned in a programme taught solely in English as a substitute for a separate test, but the exact list of qualifying countries is set on a per-programme basis rather than centrally at Leipzig, unlike some other German universities.

The exact score is set per programme, so check your programme page before booking a test.

Work backwards from the lecture start rather than the semester start. The winter semester formally begins on 1 October, but lectures begin about two weeks later, and you want to be in Leipzig a few weeks before that for city registration, a bank account and a room.

Exact lecture dates are set by the university each semester; check the academic calendar before booking travel.

Leipzig is one of Germany's more affordable university cities, with around 31,000 students in a city of roughly 600,000 people, so rents are generally lower than in Munich or Frankfurt. Even so, Studentenwerk Leipzig's roughly 5,200 hall places are in high demand at the start of the winter semester, and recent years have seen waiting lists of several hundred students, so apply for a place as soon as you are admitted.

The monthly payout from your blocked account is transferred to a German current account, which you open after you arrive. See our bank account comparison for the options that work before city registration.

Founded in 1409, Leipzig University is Germany's second-oldest university and one of the oldest in Europe, with around 31,000 students across 14 faculties and a member of the German U15 network of major research universities. Its strengths span the humanities and social sciences, where its historic reputation was built, alongside growing research in biodiversity, evolutionary anthropology and the life sciences, aided by nearby Max Planck institutes. Leipzig itself is a relatively affordable, compact eastern German city with strong rail links to Berlin, Dresden and Halle, and a long musical and publishing history that still shapes its cultural life today.