LEA Has Gone Silent on Your Application: When an Untätigkeitsklage Actually Makes Sense in Berlin

The Official Rule

If an application to a German authority sits without a decision for months, the law gives you a specific, formal tool, not just patience. Once three months have passed since your application was genuinely complete and in the authority’s hands, without a decision and without sufficient reason for the delay, you can file an Untätigkeitsklage, a lawsuit for failure to act, at the administrative court. Section 75 of the Verwaltungsgerichtsordnung sets this three-month floor directly: the claim generally cannot be filed before three months have elapsed, except when special circumstances of the case require a shorter period, which in practice is rarely invoked.

In Berlin specifically, this tool has moved from a niche legal remedy to something closer to standard practice, because the backdrop is a genuinely overloaded system. Since 1 January 2024, the Landesamt für Einwanderung (LEA) has centralized every naturalization application in the city, a task previously split across Berlin’s twelve district offices, right as a reform of German citizenship law made naturalization available after five years of residence (or three, for exceptional integration), pushing application numbers far past what the office’s staff could absorb quickly. As of 2 June 2026, LEA’s citizenship department (Abteilung S) had 166 of its 177 budgeted positions filled, according to the Senate’s own written answer to the Abgeordnetenhaus.

The scale of the lawsuit response is now large enough that the Berlin Senate tracks it closely, and the numbers are genuinely striking. According to the Senate’s written answers to two separate parliamentary inquiries (Drucksache 19/26176 and 19/26331, both dated June 2026), the number of Untätigkeitsklagen filed over naturalization delays climbed from just 31 in 2022 to 1,662 filed in 2024 alone. The number of these lawsuits actually pending at the Verwaltungsgericht Berlin at any given moment has stayed near that same elevated level ever since:

Figures are the number of lawsuits pending (anhängig) at each cutoff date, as reported by the Verwaltungsgericht Berlin to the Senate, not a cumulative total. This is real money for the city too: the Senate confirmed, in response to a separate freedom-of-information request, that LEA spent 971,129.39 euros in 2024 alone from its court-costs budget line, against a budgeted 200,000 euros, almost five times over.

How long does LEA actually take to decide a citizenship application? This is genuinely disputed, and the honest answer is worth more than a confident-sounding number. Several commercial guidance sites cite seven to nine months. Others describe Berlin as the slowest of Germany’s major-city immigration offices, closer to a year or more, with one estimate around 292 days. The Berlin Senate’s own written answer, dated 8 June 2026, is more revealing than any of these: it states plainly that average processing time for naturalization applications is not statistically tracked, and that the Senate does not plan to introduce such tracking, because so much of a case’s timeline depends on factors the LEA does not control, including mandatory security-agency checks and how promptly applicants themselves supply requested documents. In practice, this means every specific average you read online, including the estimates above, is a private extrapolation, not a government figure. What the Senate’s numbers do confirm directly:

Read this table carefully rather than as a single trend: LEA is genuinely processing far more applications than it did two years ago, both approvals and rejections have climbed sharply as the office works through its backlog in both directions, yet the number of pending lawsuits has not meaningfully fallen. The most likely explanation, based on the Senate’s own commentary, is that new applications keep arriving faster than the backlog clears, so the lawsuit route remains just as relevant for someone facing a stalled file today as it was in 2024.

What Real People Say

A case study published by a Berlin immigration law firm in June 2026 traces one applicant’s path through exactly this situation. The applicant, a US citizen, had submitted a naturalization application to their district office (Bezirksamt) years before LEA existed in its current form. When responsibility for all naturalization cases shifted to LEA on 1 January 2024, the file moved with it, and then sat for months longer inside LEA’s citizenship department, a delay the firm attributes to staffing shortages compounding the effect of the 2024 citizenship law reform. A lawyer’s formal letter setting a deadline went unanswered, as did a follow-up submitted directly through LEA’s own contact form. Only after the Untätigkeitsklage was actually filed at the Verwaltungsgericht Berlin did LEA respond, offering what the firm describes as a standard “Berlin settlement”: complete the naturalization promptly if the applicant covers the court costs. The applicant accepted, received an appointment within a few weeks, and was naturalized shortly after.

Immigration lawyers writing about this route consistently frame it less as a legal gamble and more as a predictable lever: the three-month threshold is fixed by law, understaffing is explicitly not accepted by Berlin’s administrative courts as sufficient justification for delay, and LEA’s own pattern of settling quickly once a lawsuit lands suggests the office would rather resolve a stalled file than defend an indefensible delay in front of a judge.

Step by Step

Compliance Note

This page explains the general legal framework around the Untätigkeitsklage in German administrative law and its specific application to Berlin’s LEA, current as of mid-2026. It is not legal advice, and outcomes depend heavily on the specific facts and documentation of your case. For your own situation, consult a lawyer specializing in Ausländerrecht (immigration law) or Verwaltungsrecht (administrative law).