Official base geodata in Germany: which licence applies where?

Germany’s federal states now publish their official base geodata almost everywhere free of charge — parcel boundaries, building footprints, elevation models, aerial imagery. But “free of charge” is not “without conditions”. Each state applies a different licence, and each licence demands a different attribution. Anyone putting that data into a published drawing should know which.

What base geodata is — and isn’t

Base geodata (Geobasisdaten) is the official groundwork: state surveying and the land cadastre. That includes parcels and boundaries, building footprints, the elevation model, administrative boundaries, topographic maps and aerial imagery. It describes the surface of the earth without interpreting it.

Distinct from that is thematic geodata (Geofachdaten): development plans, protected areas, noise maps, land value indices. These sit with the responsible specialist authorities, follow their own rules and are less often open. And finally there is community data — OpenStreetMap above all — which is not official but works the same way everywhere.

The three licences

dl-de/zero-2-0 — Data Licence Germany Zero

The most permissive variant. The data may be copied, modified, used commercially and redistributed without any required attribution. For a drawing headed to print, that is the least complicated basis. Crediting the source anyway never hurts — it makes the provenance of a geometry traceable.

dl-de/by-2-0 — Data Licence Germany Attribution

Same freedoms, but attribution is mandatory — in exactly the form the data provider specifies, including a year where one is required. Writing “Source: state survey office” where “© GeoBasis-DE/LVermGeoRP (2026), dl-de/by-2-0, www.lvermgeo.rlp.de” is demanded does not satisfy the licence.

CC BY 4.0 — Creative Commons Attribution

Internationally familiar and close in substance to dl-de/by. It requires attribution, a licence notice and an indication if the material was modified. That last point is the one most often missed: deriving contour lines from an elevation model is a modification.

Which state requires what

The attributions below are the ones we carry for each state’s parcel data in our cadastral map. They come from the terms of use of the respective state services and are shown alongside every parcel. They are reproduced here in the original German, because that is the form the licences require.

The year in some attributions refers to the year the data was obtained, not the current year. Using data from 2024 means writing 2024.

The gap: Bavaria

Bavaria is opening its base geodata step by step, but parcel geometries are not yet part of that. The state therefore appears without boundaries on our cadastral map — not because we skipped it, but because there is no open service to draw the geometries from. Looking up a parcel there still means going through BayernAtlas or the responsible state office.

Where the attribution belongs

Both attribution licences want the notice with the data. In practice:

• On the drawing — in the legend or as a footer along the sheet edge, like a scale bar.
• In the publication — in the figure credit, not in the website imprint.
• In the file — in the metadata of a GeoJSON or shapefile, or in an accompanying text file.

The imprint is the wrong place: anyone who passes the figure on does not pass the imprint on with it.

Frequently asked

If it needs to be quicker

Sixteen portals, three licences and one state without open data is manageable for a single project and much less so for the tenth competition of the year. Our free outlines cover cities, countries and continents, and the finished figure-ground and site plans deliver the built context as PDF, DXF and DWG — separated layers, licensing settled.

How to look up a single parcel is covered in finding a parcel and reading the cadastral map.