EU releases 2025 Schengen visa statistics: German missions issue 1.32 million short-stay visas

The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Migration and Home Affairs published its annual Schengen visa statistics on 28 May 2026. Consulates across the Schengen Area processed almost 12 million applications in 2025, a 1.8 percent increase on 2024. Germany remained the bloc’s busiest issuer, recording 1.32 million applications—up 4 percent year-on-year—and granting 1.15 million visas. Although volumes are recovering, demand is still well below the record 17 million applications lodged in 2019, and German officials warn that staffing levels at large missions such as Beijing, Istanbul and Mumbai are “still calibrated for pandemic-era traffic”. The refusal rate at German posts averaged 9.4 percent, compared with a Schengen-wide average of 14.8 percent. Beijing (3 percent) and Shanghai (4 percent) had the lowest refusal rates, while Lagos (38 percent) and Islamabad (31 percent) remained the most challenging for applicants. For corporate mobility managers the data confirm two trends. First, Germany is once again the dominant destination for Chinese and Indian business travellers, with those nationalities accounting for more than 40 percent of all German Schengen visas. Second, the proportion of multiple-entry visas (MEVs) issued by German consulates slipped from 63 percent in 2024 to 59 percent in 2025—an early sign that Berlin is tightening risk controls as the EU’s biometric Entry/Exit System (EES) beds in. Practical implications: companies sending frequent travellers to Germany should check that staff still have at least two blank pages and 12 months’ validity remaining in their passports; the share of single-entry visas is growing, increasing the administrative burden of repeat trips. Where possible, mobility teams should request MEVs in the cover letter and supply evidence of past compliant travel to strengthen the case.



For organisations that would rather outsource the paperwork, VisaHQ can act as an extension of your mobility team—handling German Schengen visa applications end-to-end, scheduling appointments, pre-checking documents and tracking passports in real time. You can learn more about these services or start an order at https://www.visahq.com/germany/

Looking ahead, the Commission confirmed that it will release the 2025 consular workload benchmarks—used to allocate extra visa officers to heavy-demand posts—at the end of June. German industry lobbies are already pushing the foreign ministry to prioritise extra staff for India, Nigeria and Türkiye, where appointment backlogs have lengthened since EES went fully live in April.