Kassel remains the happiest city in Germany - new survey shows it!

Kassel remains the happiest city in Germany - new survey shows it!

Kassel, Deutschland - What makes people in Kassel so satisfied? Obviously a lot - this is shown by the current "lucky atlas" of the southern German class lottery (SKL). Kassel leads the ranking of the 40 largest German cities with more than 200,000 inhabitants and is thus crowned again as the happiest city of Germany. The life satisfaction of the Kasseler is 7.44 on a scale from 0 to 10 and thus trumps Krefeld (7.39) and Düsseldorf (7.36), which are in places two and three. Erfurt, once in the top three, deteriorated in sixth place, as well as Aachen, which now has fifth place. The bottom of the survey is again Rostock with only 6.08 points. [Welt] reports that Kassel took this top position last year.

According to the survey of the Institute for Demoscopy Allensbach, who interviewed a total of 23,468 citizens between the ages of 16 and 78 between January 2022 and April 2025, a positive trend can be seen. Life satisfaction increased by 0.15 points compared to the previous year. This evaluation also takes into account the quality of life in various aspects such as living situation, education and environmental quality, whereby Kassel is classified in 15th place in the ranking of the quality of life and is considered a "overperformer". This means that Kassel offers higher life satisfaction in relation to the objective conditions, while Karlsruhe does not perform well with 38th place in life satisfaction despite the best quality of life. [SKL-Glücksatlas] emphasizes that smaller cities in particular are often validly evaluated with a young, student population and plenty of green areas.

Kassel above, Rostock below

A look at the city clerk shows that the distance between cities with high life satisfaction and those with problems continue to grow. Rostock has hardly recovered in recent years and is now 1.36 points behind Kassel. This illustrates the trend that smaller, well -networked cities tend to win more, while larger cities such as Munich (27th place), Frankfurt am Main (38th place) and Berlin (39) are more in the lower half of the table. [ZEIT] describes that among the ten largest cities in Germany, only Düsseldorf and Hamburg have come into the top ten of life satisfaction. The loss of quality of life in cities such as Rostock and Frankfurt am Main is particularly critical, since they also bring high living costs.

What makes Kassel so special? Bernd Raffelhüschen from the University of Freiburg explains that the distribution of satisfaction in Kassel is crucial for the happiness of life. Living factors such as good medical care, plenty of green space and a young, dynamic environment seem to be decisive for the positive evaluation. And this is also reflected in the living conditions, where cities like Lübeck and Bonn have an increase in life satisfaction, while Rostock, Kiel and Frankfurt even had to insert losses.

For everyone who wants to keep an eye on the rankings and surveys in the future, the question remains: Which factors really lead to well -being in urban habitats? One thing is certain: Kassel has a good hand for life satisfaction, while other cities have to improve their status to escape from the lowest half of the table.