Photo on a German CV: expected or optional?

If you grew up applying for jobs in the UK, the US, Ireland, Canada or Australia, a photo on a CV feels like a mistake, close to writing down your date of birth. Then you move to Germany, open a Lebenslauf (the German CV) template, and there is a frame for your face in the top right corner. Nobody is allowed to demand it. Plenty of employers still expect it. This piece sorts out the law and the practice, and it is the deep dive that goes with the complete guide to the German CV.

01The law: the AGG does not ban photos

The most repeated claim about this topic is wrong. The Allgemeines Gleichbehandlungsgesetz (AGG), the General Act on Equal Treatment, does not forbid a photo. No section bans one and none requires one. What the AGG does is different: it prohibits disadvantaging anyone because of ethnic origin, gender, religion or belief, disability, age or sexual identity, and it says so explicitly for job advertisements and for the selection process.

The interesting part sits in Section 22, on the burden of proof. If a rejected candidate produces indications that they were disadvantaged on one of those grounds, the employer has to prove that no violation occurred, not the other way round. Read that again with a photo in mind. A face hands over several of those protected characteristics unasked, in the first second, in writing, with a timestamp: age, gender, usually origin, sometimes religion or a visible disability. That is why the federal anti-discrimination agency, the Antidiskriminierungsstelle des Bundes, advises employers not to ask for photos or for details of age, gender and place of birth, and publishes its own guide to discrimination-free hiring to that effect.

So the photo is mainly the employer's legal problem, not yours. For you it means three things. You owe nobody a picture. A rejection based purely on a missing photo would be hard to justify and harder to document. And the same logic covers your date of birth, marital status, nationality and religion, all of which German CV templates still offer space for and none of which you have to fill in. This is not legal advice, it is the state of the law in August 2026. If you believe you were actually discriminated against, note that claims under the AGG must be raised in writing within two months, and take the case to a counselling centre or an employment lawyer.

02What German recruiters actually expect

Here is the uncomfortable part: there is very little reliable, current data. The percentages that circulate on career blogs mostly come from surveys run by companies that sell application photos, and they reliably conclude that you need one. That is not a compass.

The signals the employer sends you are. If you apply through a portal such as Personio, Workday or SAP SuccessFactors, look at the form itself: is there a field for an image at all, and is it marked as required? Many systems break your PDF into data fields anyway, and a photo is not one of them. Then read the posting to the end. Some German employers now write explicitly that they do not want a photo, and they mean it literally.

That applications work without one is not theory. Between 2010 and 2012 the Antidiskriminierungsstelle des Bundes ran a pilot in which companies and public authorities used anonymised application procedures, stripping photo, name, age and origin out of the first round. The final report found the approach practical, and women and people with a migration background made it into the next round more often than under the standard process. It never became mandatory in Germany, but it set the direction.

As a rough working assumption: the larger and more international the employer, the less your photo matters. The smaller the company, the more traditional the industry and the closer the role sits to the customer, the more likely a photo is still expected. Treat that as a starting guess, never as a rule.

03When leaving the photo out is the better call

Some situations make the decision for you:

• The portal never asks. No upload field, no photo. Smuggling one in inside the PDF scores nothing.
• You are applying in English or to an international team. There the photo is not neutral, it is a red flag. The article on the English CV goes through the rest of those conventions.
• The employer anonymises. If a standardised application form arrives, fill it in as designed and add nothing.
• You have no professional photo. A bad image damages more than no image. There is no workable middle ground between good and none.
• You suspect your appearance would be used against you. Age, a headscarf, a visible disability, a foreign-sounding name next to a face: if that thought has crossed your mind, take the freedom. You will meet them as a whole person in the interview anyway, just after the qualifications rather than before.

When the picture is gone, the first impression moves to the three lines under your name. A short profile that states your role, your core skill and what you are looking for carries further than any passport photo, and you can retune it for every posting.

04If you include one, make it count

Once you decide in favour, only quality matters. A mediocre photo is worse than none, because it makes a statement about your standards before anyone has read a line of your experience.

It has to be current, so from the last year or two and recognisably you. The background stays plain and calm, no bookshelf, no holiday scenery. Dress one notch above what the role wears daily: a clean shirt for a trade job, a jacket for a legal department. Look into the lens, and aim for friendly rather than frozen. There is no binding format; a portrait crop roughly the size of a passport photo is the convention, placed in the header of the Lebenslauf and embedded in the PDF rather than attached as a loose image file. What separates a usable photo from an unusable one is covered on our page about the application photo.

A holiday snapshot with someone else's shoulder cropped out, a face cut from a group picture, an image from a decade ago, or a portrait retouched so heavily that nobody recognises you at the interview: those are the four cases where leaving it out would have been the better move.

05Applying outside Germany: almost always without

Your instinct from home is right about home. In the US, the UK, Canada, Ireland and Australia a photo on a CV is unusual to unwelcome, and the reason mirrors the AGG with the sign flipped: employers there protect themselves against discrimination claims by never seeing the characteristic in the first place. Some HR departments have the image removed before the documents reach the selection round.

Continental Europe is mixed. France, Spain and Austria treat the photo much as Germany does; the Netherlands and the Nordic countries lean towards leaving it out. And the case that catches most people in Germany: if you apply to the German arm of an American group, the group standard often wins over the local habit, so the German-style template you carefully built may be the wrong instinct after all. When in doubt, the portal decides, not the country.

06Decide on purpose, not out of habit

Both versions are legitimate here, and the choice is yours. Three questions make it easy. Does the posting or the portal say anything about a photo? Then follow it. If it says nothing, ask how customer-facing the role is and how traditional the industry. And finally: do you have a picture you will not cringe at in five years? If not, leave it out and put the energy into your profile section instead.

What you should not have to do is pick between two layouts. A well-built CV works with an image and without one, without a stray empty rectangle or collapsing columns. You can see how that behaves in the CV templates: switch the photo on or off, and the document stays a document.