German Earthquake Trends: Small but Frequent

What the numbers show

Germany has no single national count of earthquakes. Each federal state (Land) runs its own earthquake service, and the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam and the federal geological survey BGR monitor the country as a whole. The clearest long series comes from the Baden-Württemberg earthquake service (Landeserdbebendienst, LED), which lists every quake people reported feeling. Its list of felt earthquakes has 13 entries for 2026 up to 3 October, 17 for 2025 and 16 for 2024. These include quakes just across the borders in France and Switzerland. The strongest recent quakes in the south-west were near Schopfheim (local magnitude ML 4.2, June 2024), the strongest in the state since Steinen (ML 4.5) in 2009, and near Hechingen in the Swabian Jura (ML 4.1, July 2022). After the Worms quake, LED seismologist Martin Hensch told Tagesschau that quakes are recorded in the Upper Rhine Graben practically every day, that one is lightly felt in south-west Germany about once a month, and that a tremor like the one at Worms happens one to three times a year.

The other active areas tell a similar story of small, frequent quakes. The Saxon environment agency LfULG reported that the swarm near Klingenthal began on 18 March 2024. The GFZ later counted more than 8,000 earthquakes in it, the first major swarm in the Klingenthal-Kraslice area since 1897. In Lower Saxony, the state earthquake service NED lists recent quakes, almost all of them in the gas-producing districts between Bremen and Cloppenburg. The strongest since 2020 were ML 3.6 near Syke (March 2024) and ML 3.2 near Wardenburg (April 2025). The Lower Rhine Embayment near Cologne and Aachen has the highest earthquake hazard in the country. According to the Geological Survey of North Rhine-Westphalia, the magnitude 5.9 Roermond earthquake of 13 April 1992 injured more than 30 people in North Rhine-Westphalia and caused about 150 million Deutschmarks of damage on the German side. The survey estimates that a quake of that size happens there about once every 150 years on average.

What is driving it

Most German earthquakes are natural. In the Upper Rhine Graben, between Basel and Frankfurt, stresses from the collision of the African and Eurasian plates are released along old faults. In the Swabian Jura, the quake-prone Albstadt shear zone produced the severe 1978 earthquake near Albstadt and still produces regular small quakes, including the ML 4.1 quake near Hechingen in 2022. In the Lower Rhine Embayment, blocks of crust move along faults such as the Peelrand fault that ruptured at Roermond. The Vogtland swarms are different again: the GFZ found that the 2024 swarm was set off by carbon dioxide and magmatic fluids rising into an existing fault zone. Researchers are now studying the region with nearly 300 temporary seismic stations in the ELISE experiment.

Human activity adds a smaller share. In 2015 the federal government told the Bundestag that the BGR had detected 56 quakes in north German gas-field areas since 1993, with the link to production judged “probable” or “very probable” in recent cases. The state mining authority LBEG says the 2024 Syke quake was likely connected to gas production. Deep geothermal energy can also trigger quakes. As SWR notes, a geothermal project in Basel caused quakes that were felt in Germany and cracked houses, which helped end the project. Buildings are protected through the seismic building code. In 2018 the GFZ published new hazard maps for the German national annex to the European standard DIN EN 1998-1. Monitoring is also changing: Baden-Württemberg added two stations in June and July 2026, one of them near the Albstadt shear zone, and Rhineland-Palatinate is widening the protective zones around its stations because signals from wind turbines increasingly interfere with its measurements.

Recent cases

• 10 September 2026: a quake with local magnitude 3.5 and a depth of 8 km strikes south of Worms. It is felt as far away as Mannheim and produces almost 3,000 reports from the public and 11 aftershocks, but no damage or injuries are reported (LGRB; Tagesschau).
• 14 April 2026: a magnitude 3.2 quake about 25 km south of Leipzig is felt as far away as the Ore Mountains. It is the third quake of this size in the Halle-Leipzig area in eleven years (LfULG Saxony).
• 1 January 2026: five clearly felt quakes, the strongest of magnitude 3.2 and 3.1, shake the Vogtland during the third active phase of a swarm near Luby in the Czech Republic. A magnitude of 3.2 was last exceeded in the region in 2018 (LfULG Saxony).

Press releases and official reports, 2023–2026

Five key releases a year for the last four years, newest first. Most come from German federal and state government agencies, regulators, accident investigators and national statistics; a few news reports are included where they are the clearest public record of an event. Many official releases are published only in German; for those we give an English translation of the title and mark the link (in German). Releases from 2007–2022 are in the expandable list after 2023.

2026

• 14 Sep 2026LGRB Baden-WürttembergEarthquake south of Worms (in German)
• 10 Sep 2026TagesschauEarthquake in the Palatinate: epicentre near Worms (in German)
• 15 Apr 2026LfULG SaxonyLatest information on the earthquake near Leipzig (in German)
• 16 Jan 2026GFZ PotsdamMassive earthquake swarm near Klingenthal/Eger in 2024 was triggered by rising magmatic fluids
• 2 Jan 2026LfULG SaxonySwarm earthquakes in the Vogtland still active (in German)

2025

• 18 Dec 2025GFZ PotsdamSurprising findings on the structure of the Eifel volcanoes
• 10 Dec 2025LfULG SaxonyLight earthquakes registered again in the Vogtland (in German)
• Dec 2025LGRB Baden-WürttembergEarthquake near Dettingen unter Teck (in German)
• 31 Jul 2025GFZ PotsdamEger Large Seismic Experiment: ELISE
• 1 Feb 2025LfULG SaxonyThe earth shook south of Dresden (in German)

2024

• 27 Jun 2024LGRB Baden-WürttembergEarthquake near Schopfheim in the district of Lörrach (in German)
• 16 Apr 2024GFZ PotsdamUnusual swarm earthquake in the Vogtland region
• 11 Apr 2024LfULG SaxonyLight earthquake in the Vogtland (in German)
• 26 Mar 2024GFZ PotsdamEarthquake in northern Germany
• 25 Mar 2024LBEG Lower SaxonyDiepholz district: LBEG registers magnitude 3.6 earthquake (in German)

2023

• 18 Dec 2023Geological Survey NRWEarthquake alert system report: magnitude 2.9 earthquake near Nassau (in German)
• 3 Nov 2023LfULG SaxonyLight earthquakes in the Vogtland (in German)
• 25 Aug 2023LGRB Baden-WürttembergEarthquake near Singen (Hohentwiel), district of Konstanz, magnitude 3.2 (in German)
• 22 Mar 2023LGRB Baden-WürttembergDamvant (Switzerland) earthquake, ML 4.3: map of reports felt in Baden-Württemberg (in German)
• 6 Mar 2023GFZ PotsdamCrowdsourced reports via app can quickly identify an earthquake’s impact as high or low

Photo list

How this page is built. Figures come from the official statistical releases linked above; where agencies publish provisional numbers we say so, because they are revised. German statistics are often published separately by each federal state (Land) and some only in German, so we say which area and period each figure covers and translate titles. Photos are public-domain or Creative Commons images credited in each caption; file photos are illustrative and are not from the events described unless the caption says so. This page tracks trends and is not personal safety, medical, legal or financial advice.