Children’s income and Grundsicherung im Alter#

Receipt of Grundsicherung im Alter may depend on the income of the claimant’s children. The legal mechanism changed fundamentally on 2020-01-01; GETTSIM applies the pre-2020 mechanism as the default (see below for the reasoning and how to turn it off).

2005–2019: Exclusion from the benefit (§ 43 SGB XII)#

Until the end of 2019, § 43 SGB XII (originally Abs. 2, later Abs. 5; BGBl. I 2003 S. 3022) excluded persons from Grundsicherung im Alter altogether if any of their children had an annual Gesamteinkommen (§ 16 SGB IV) of 100,000 Euro or more. Excluded persons could claim Hilfe zum Lebensunterhalt (3. Kapitel SGB XII) instead, where the Sozialhilfeträger could take recourse against the children (Unterhaltsrückgriff, § 94 SGB XII).

GETTSIM sets grundsicherung__im_alter__betrag_m to zero for persons for whom grundsicherung__im_alter__hat_kind_mit_einkommen_über_einkommensgrenze is true. A child’s income is compared against the threshold parameter grundsicherung__im_alter__einkommensgrenze_kinder (100,000 Euro per year). Children are linked to their parents via familie__p_id_elternteil_1 and familie__p_id_elternteil_2; the threshold applies to each child individually, not to the sum of all children’s incomes.

Note

Caveats of the GETTSIM implementation:

  • The law contains a Vermutungsregelung: the Sozialhilfeträger presumes that the children’s income is below the threshold unless there are sufficient indications to the contrary (hinreichende Anhaltspunkte) like the individual’s job. GETTSIM abstracts from this procedural rule and applies the cutoff to observed incomes (full-enforcement assumption).

  • The exclusion also covered the claimant’s parents’ income, which is mainly relevant for Grundsicherung bei Erwerbsminderung. This is not implemented (see #1145).

  • The fallback to Hilfe zum Lebensunterhalt of excluded persons and the Unterhaltsrückgriff against their children are currently not implemented.

Since 2020: Recourse limit only (Angehörigen-Entlastungsgesetz)#

The Angehörigen-Entlastungsgesetz (BGBl. I 2019 S. 2135) repealed § 43 Abs. 5 SGB XII as of 2020-01-01. Since then, children’s income no longer affects the legal claim to Grundsicherung im Alter. The 100,000 Euro threshold lives on in § 94 Abs. 1a SGB XII, where it limits the recourse of the Sozialhilfeträger against the children: maintenance claims are only transferred to the Träger if a child’s annual Gesamteinkommen exceeds 100,000 Euro.

In practice, the Sozialhilfeträger typically pursue this recourse. Modeling it properly is involved (Unterhaltsverpflichtung according to the Düsseldorfer Tabelle, caps on the transferred claim, distribution across several children, see #1197) and not implemented yet. GETTSIM therefore keeps the pre-2020 exclusion as the default also for policy dates from 2020-01-01 onwards: with the recourse in place, a high-income child’s household effectively ends up paying for the parent’s needs, so treating the parent as not receiving the benefit is the better default approximation than ignoring children’s incomes altogether — and it is straightforward to turn off, whereas the recourse could not be turned on if we did not model it.

To compute the benefit according to the post-2019 legal claim (no dependence on children’s income), set the input column grundsicherung__im_alter__hat_kind_mit_einkommen_über_einkommensgrenze to False for everybody.

See also