RUB charges no tuition fees for Bachelor's or consecutive Master's programmes, for EU and non-EU students alike, because it is a publicly funded university in North Rhine-Westphalia, a state that does not currently charge tuition to non-EU students.

What every student pays is the social contribution (Sozialbeitrag), and it is not a fee for teaching. For winter 2026/27 it is 380.00 EUR, and the largest part of it, 226.80 EUR, is the Deutschlandsemesterticket for public transport nationwide; the rest funds the AKAFÖ student support body (130.00 EUR) and the AStA student representation (23.20 EUR).

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 non-EU deadlines. Unlike many German universities, RUB does not give non-EU applicants an earlier date than EU applicants: both groups apply by the same deadline.

Some individual programmes set their own, earlier deadlines: for example the Computer Science M.Sc. lists 30 April/15 December rather than 15 July, and Materials Science and Simulation lists 15 March/15 September. Always check the specific programme page.

Through the university's own online application portal, not uni-assist. Applicants upload documents in the portal and track decisions there; the International Office does not process a separate uni-assist pre-check or its roughly 75 EUR fee, because that stage does not exist at RUB.

Open the international applicants page at studium.ruhr-uni-bochum.de

RUB offers 44 degree programmes fully in English, out of 175 in total, mostly at Master's level and concentrated in engineering, natural sciences, computer science and economics. A Bachelor applicant will need German for the large majority of the catalogue, since most English-taught programmes are Master's. You can study the English-taught programmes without German, though everyday German still helps with housing, part-time work and the authorities.

Requirements are set per programme rather than centrally, and the range is wide: some Bachelor's programmes ask for IELTS 6.0 or TOEFL iBT around 79-85, while competitive Master's programmes such as English and American Studies ask for IELTS 7.0, TOEFL iBT 100 or CEFR C1. Cambridge Advanced (CAE) is accepted for several programmes.

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 runs from 1 October to 31 March, but lectures begin partway into October, so budget a few weeks before that for city registration, a bank account and a room.

Exact lecture dates for 2026/27 are not yet published. As a guide, Winter 2025/26 lectures ran from 13 October 2025 to 6 February 2026, and Summer 2026 lectures ran from 13 April to 24 July 2026.

Founded in 1962 as the first entirely new public university built in West Germany after the war, RUB was also the first German university to bring all its faculties onto one compact, centralised campus, an unusual layout compared with older universities scattered across a historic city centre. Its strengths span mechanical and materials engineering, chemistry, IT security (Bochum is a recognised national centre for cybersecurity research) and medicine through its affiliated hospital network.

The university sits inside the wider Ruhr metropolitan area, Germany's largest urban region and a former coal-and-steel heartland now dense with research institutes, industry partners and neighbouring universities in Dortmund, Essen and Duisburg, all a short train ride away on the regional network the semester ticket covers.