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Germany has no retirement visa. Not a hard one — none at all.

The Residence Act lists every purpose for which Germany grants a residence permit, from paragraph 16 to paragraph 38a. We read all of them. Not one covers retirement, pensioners, passive income, private means or living on savings. The nearest provision is self-employment, which requires you to work — the opposite of what you are asking for. There is one clause under which something unusual can in principle be granted: a permit may be issued in justified cases for a purpose the Act does not otherwise provide for. It is discretionary, it carries no published income figure, it can be shortened after the fact, and it expressly forbids employment. Whether any authority actually uses it as a retirement route, and on what terms, we could not establish from any official source — so we will not tell you it works, and we will never print an income threshold for it. If you find a site quoting you a monthly figure for a German retirement visa, that figure was invented. If retiring in Europe is the actual goal, two countries publish a real route with a real number, and we have sourced both.