Tuition is free for both EU and non-EU students, for Bachelor's and consecutive Master's programmes, because Saxony funds its public universities. Saxon law allows individual universities to charge non-EU students a separate fee — one Saxony institution, the Dresden music academy HMT, already does — but TU Dresden has not introduced any such fee.

What every student pays is the semester contribution, which is not a fee for teaching. Most of it is the semester ticket, covering public transport across Saxony and connecting regions. The amount is set each semester: 361.00 EUR for winter 2026/27, of which 234.18 EUR is the semester ticket.

No tuition doesn't 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 for applicants from outside the EU. For most TU Dresden Bachelor's and Master's programmes, non-EU applicants apply through uni-assist between 1 April and 31 May for the winter semester intake, more than six weeks earlier than the 15 July deadline for EU and German applicants; for the smaller summer intake, the non-EU window runs from 1 October to 30 November.

Deadlines are final; late or incomplete applications are not considered. Some programmes and faculties may set their own dates through the Study Information System (SINS).

Applications go through uni-assist, the shared application service used by most German universities. Applicants with a foreign school-leaving certificate or a foreign first degree must apply via uni-assist rather than TU Dresden's own portal, and pay uni-assist's processing fee of about 75 EUR for the first application and 30 EUR for each further one in the same cycle. Uni-assist checks the documents for completeness and forwards eligible applications to TU Dresden for the final admission decision.

Open the international applicants page at tu-dresden.de.

TU Dresden offers 51 degree programmes fully taught in English, concentrated in engineering, computer science, the natural sciences and environmental sciences. Almost all of them are Master's programmes, so a Bachelor's applicant will need German for nearly the entire catalogue. The English-taught programmes can be studied without German, though everyday German still helps with housing, part-time work and the authorities.

IELTS Academic and TOEFL iBT are the standard, and the exact score is set per faculty rather than centrally: the Master's in Computer Science asks for IELTS 7.0 or TOEFL iBT 100, while other Master's programmes accept IELTS 6.0 or TOEFL iBT 80. Certificates must usually not be older than two years at enrolment, and no single weak section can be offset by a stronger one. 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 pause over the Christmas and New Year break, resuming in early January. Plan to be in Dresden a few weeks before lectures start for city registration, a bank account and a room.

Saxony's largest university and one of Germany's ten largest, TU Dresden is a public research university founded in 1828, a member of the TU9 alliance of German technical universities, and a University of Excellence since 2012. Its strengths are engineering, computer science, materials science, and biomedicine and bioengineering, and it sits at the centre of Silicon Saxony, the country's largest microelectronics and semiconductor cluster, which puts internships and working-student jobs within reach in Dresden itself. About a fifth of its 29,000 students come from abroad, from more than 125 countries, and the city lies close to the Czech and Polish borders.