| Name in English | Number of staff | Ministry responsible | Is there any political interference possible by the responsible Minister with the decision making in individual cases by the first instance authority? |
| Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) | 9,471 | Federal Ministry of the Interior and Community | No |
Source: Information provided by the BAMF to the authors in April 2026
The BAMF is responsible for examining applications for international protection and competent to take decisions at first instance.
The BAMF has branch offices in all Federal States. As of February 2026, the BAMF website lists a total of 61 branch offices (Außenstelle) and one Head Office in Nuremberg.[1] The branch offices process the asylum procedures, but also carry out additional tasks (for instance, they function as contact points for authorities and organisations active in the integration of foreign nationals, while some branch offices work exclusively on Dublin cases). Branch offices are assigned specific countries of origin, whereas the main countries of origin are processed in the majority of branch offices.[2] In cooperation with the Federal States, the BAMF manages a distribution system for asylum seekers known as Initial Distribution of Asylum Seekers (Erstverteilung der Asylbegehrenden, EASY) system, which allocates places according to a quota system known as “Königsteiner Schlüssel” (see Asylum Act). The quota is based on the size and the economic strength of the Federal States in which the centres are located. Furthermore, the system takes into account which branch office of the BAMF deals with an asylum applicant’s country of origin.
As of 1 January 2026, the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees employed 9,471 individuals (excluding temporary staff).[3] Of these, 6,283 worked full-time, 2,759 part-time, and 430 were on long-term leave.[4] This represents an increase from 2023 and 2024, when the BAMF had approximately 8,100 employees and 9,1241 respectively.[5]
In 2025, the BAMF received a total budget of €879.108 million. The planned allocation for 2026 foresees a slight increase to €999.372 million.[6] In 2024, the budget allocated to BAMF amounted to €1,021.394.
Budget allocations include[7]:
- Personnel expenditure constitutes the largest share of the budget, amounting to €486.77 million in 2025, with a planned increase to €539.77 million in 2026, reflecting continued recruitment and staffing expansion.
- Administrative and operational expenditure totals €385.88 million in 2025 and is projected to rise to €410.04 million in 2026, covering the core running costs of asylum procedures, accommodation-related administration, and operational management.
- Grants and transfers remain unchanged at €56,000 for both 2025 and 2026.
- Construction investment remains at €4.084 million.
- Equipment and capital investment amounts to €29.32 million in 2025 and is expected to increase substantially to €45.43 million in 2026,
In 2024, the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees received a significant budget increase to address the rising number of asylum applications.
Budget allocations include:
- Personnel expenses for officers at BAMF have risen by €16.8 million to a total of € 250.91 million.
- Funding for temporary asylum decision-makers and support staff has increased by € 64.96 million, reaching €121.16 million.
- Employee wages at BAMF rose by €6.88 million to €196.58 million, while operational expenses increased by €27.24 million to €65.59 million.
- Training expenses grew by €3.4 million to €7.53 million, and IT infrastructure funding has been boosted by €80 million, totalling €117.75 million.
The BAMF also has special representatives for Security in the Asylum Procedure (Sonderbeauftragte für Sicherheit im Asylverfahren). According to the BAMF, they provide the interface to the Operative Security Division and the Policy Division on Security, coordinate security-related asylum proceedings and are points of contact within their divisions for questions and problems relating to proceedings with a potentially security-related background. In relevant cases, they check the determined facts for security-relevant criteria and process all asylum proceedings in which exclusion grounds have to be considered. In special cases, they also conduct the asylum interview. In addition, there are special representatives for various groups of vulnerable persons in the asylum procedure. All special representatives are asylum case officers who, after an additional qualification, perform additional tasks in the asylum procedure.[8]
Quality
The Federal Office for Migration and Refugees stresses that the quality assurance in asylum procedures is based on various instruments and objectives. Core elements include quality checks of individual procedural steps using the four-eye principle and set quotas and criteria. This occurs both decentralised in branch offices, where key steps like file creation, interviews, decisions, and revocation/withdrawal procedures are reviewed using standardised checklists, and centrally through representative sample checks of randomly selected cases. According to the BAMF, this approach aims at identifying systemic errors and implement corrective measures. Additionally, topic-specific sample checks focus on certain case types or countries of origin, offering deeper insights into areas needing improvement.[9]
Randomly selected cases are subject to a more thorough quality control by the BAMF’s quality assurance division. In addition, the BAMF also has a division for ‘Operative management of asylum procedures and integration’ which ‘analyses developments and trends so that it is possible to recognise and react to a need to act for management at an early date’, according to the BAMF.[10] In particular, the decision-making practices of the different branch offices are monitored and branch offices with significant deviations from the overall protection rates are asked to provide further information on the treated cases to the BAMF headquarters.[11] The results of this monitoring and the case outcomes are not made public by the BAMF automatically, but are regularly requested and published through parliamentary inquiries.[12]
According to information provided by the BAMF in February 2026, since 2020, the BAMF has deployed various AI and digital technologies in asylum processes. The Dialect Identification Assistant (DIAS) has been in productive use at the BAMF, followed by the Security Reporting Assistance System (ASM) in 2022. In detail[13]:
- DIAS – Dialect Identification Assistant:
DIAS supports BAMF staff in verifying the origin of applicants without identity documents. Based on a 2–3 minute speech sample provided by the applicant, DIAS estimates the likelihood that the sample belongs to one of the five major Arabic dialects or to Dari or Farsi.
- ASM – Security Reporting Assistance System:
BAMF is required to identify and report security-relevant information during asylum interviews. ASM assists asylum officers and staff of the central unit responsible for coordination with security authorities in this reporting process. ASM has been in productive use since 2022 and, as of early 2024, is deployed in all BAMF branch offices. The BAMF stresses that at no point are applicants’ personal data entered into the system, and the responsibility for reporting relevant findings remains solely with human staff.
Nevertheless, these technologies were criticized for being costly, error-prone, unfair and legally questionable.[14] The automated systems include phone scraping that extracts applicants’ personal data, dialect identification software, and security analysis tools, which led to debates on the quality of asylum procedures in which these tools were used. Critics argue that these technologie may violate fundamental rights and privacy while producing limited useful results despite high costs.[15] Since its introduction, phone scraping has cost 22 million euros and disproved identity in only about three percent of cases, while the dialect recognition software DIAS (Sprach- und Dialekterkennung) costs nearly one million euros annually and the security alert system (ASM) has cost over 33 million euros.[16]
[1] BAMF, Locations, available at: https://bit.ly/3dFTd8w. Confirmed by the BAMF in February 2026 in information provided to the authors.
[2] A list of all countries of origin and the allocated branch offices is available on the website of the Refugee Council of Lower Saxony (up to date as of March 20221): https://bit.ly/3WJ0eg1.
[3] Information provided by the BAMF to the authors, up to date as of 1 January 2026.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Federal Ministry of the Interior and Community, ‘Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge’, available in German at: https://bit.ly/3qTH0qt. Information provided by the BAMF, up to date as of 26 February 2025.
[6] Information provided by the BAMF on 13 February 2026
[7] Information provided by the BAMF on 13 February 2026.
[8] Information provided by the BAMF on 28 May 2025.
[9] Information provided by the BAMF on 28 May 2025.
[10] BAMF, Procedure management and quality assurance, 28 November 2018, available at: http://bit.ly/3DxsTgJ.
[11] Federal Government, Response to information request by The Left, 20/12228, 08 June 2024, available in German here.
[12] See for the second half of 2022: Federal Government, Response to parliamentary question by The Left 20/8222, 5 September 2023, available in German at: https://bit.ly/3SklJCR, 12-13.
[13] Information provided by the BAMF on 13 February 2026.
[14] Deana Mrkaja, KI-Einsatz beim BAMF: Teuer, fehleranfällig und selten hilfreich, Tagesspiegel, 16 January 2025, available in German here. See also, Petra Molnar, Artificial Intelligence in Migration Management Opportunities, Challenges, and Risks, Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 04 September 2025, available or Karoline Tanck, KI in Asylverfahren birgt erhebliche Risiken, Netzpolitik.org, 11 July 2025, available in German here.
[15] Deana Mrkaja, KI-Einsatz beim BAMF: Teuer, fehleranfällig und selten hilfreich, Tagesspiegel, 16 January 2025, available in German here.
[16] Ibid.