Leuphana charges no tuition for Bachelor's programmes or for the standard, consecutive Master's programmes at the Graduate School, because Lower Saxony funds the university as a public institution. The exception is the Professional School, which runs career-integrated and continuing-education courses that do carry fees, and a small number of joint or double-degree Master's programmes completed partly at a partner university abroad, such as the Erasmus Mundus Master in International Law of Global Security, Peace and Development at around 12,000 EUR per year.

What every other student pays is the semester contribution, and it is not a fee for teaching. For winter 2026/27 it is 484.24 EUR, made up of a Studierendenwerk contribution, an administrative fee, and a student-union fee that itself bundles the Deutschlandticket nationwide transport pass, a culture ticket, and a small self-administration share, so the headline figure is mostly transport rather than a hidden tuition charge.

These are the deadlines for applicants from outside the EU/EEA, and for Master's programmes they depend on where your Bachelor's degree was earned rather than on your nationality, which catches out applicants who assume the rule follows citizenship. Non-EU/EEA Bachelor applicants have the same 15 July deadline as EU applicants for the winter intake, since first-semester places are winter-only at Leuphana College. Master's applicants with a Bachelor's degree from outside the EU/EEA must apply via uni-assist by 1 May; those with a Bachelor's degree from the EU/EEA can apply directly via myCampus until 1 June.

Applications for winter 2026/27 Master's programmes run via myCampus or uni-assist. A handful of programmes extend the EU/EEA-degree deadline further (to end of August or September); the non-EU/EEA-degree deadline is not extended for most of them.

Bachelor applicants from outside the EU/EEA apply through uni-assist, which charges around 75 EUR for the first application and 30 EUR for each further one. Master's applicants use one of two routes depending on where their Bachelor's degree was earned: myCampus directly, at no extra cost, for an EU/EEA-earned degree, or uni-assist for a degree earned elsewhere. Either way, the application is fully online, and for uni-assist applications the date that counts for the deadline is the day you submit to uni-assist, not the day uni-assist finishes checking it.

Leuphana runs around 27 degree programmes fully in English, mostly at Master's level, spanning cultural studies, management, sustainability science, psychology and law at the Graduate School, plus a smaller number of English-taught Bachelor's majors at the College such as Global Environmental and Sustainability Studies, Digital Media, Cultural Studies, Psychology, International Business Administration & Entrepreneurship and the interdisciplinary Studium Individuale. You can study the English-taught programmes without German, though everyday German still helps with housing, part-time work and the authorities.

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 start on 12 October 2026, and you want to be in Lüneburg a few weeks before that for city registration, a bank account and a room.

Lüneburg is a small city of around 80,000 residents with more than 9,000 Leuphana students living in and around it, so competition for rooms is real at the start of the winter semester even though rents are lower than in Hamburg, half an hour away by train. Apply to the Studierendenwerk OstNiedersachsen halls as soon as you are admitted and search the private market in parallel.

Founded in 1946 as a teacher-training college and granted university status in 1989, Leuphana became a foundation under public law and merged with the University of Applied Sciences North-East Lower Saxony in 2005. It is known for its distinctive interdisciplinary model, the Leuphana Semester, and for research strengths in sustainability science, management, culture and education, and law, organised across five research-oriented schools.

The central campus building, designed by Daniel Libeskind and opened in 2017, anchors a compact site in a small city about 30 minutes by train from Hamburg, which puts a major labour market for internships and working-student jobs within easy reach while keeping living costs lower than in Hamburg itself.