telc, Goethe or ÖSD: Which Certificate Is Accepted?

For the great majority of readers the answer is boring: all three are accepted for immigration purposes in Germany, so take whichever one has a test date you can reach. telc, Goethe-Institut and ÖSD are all ALTE members, all three appear on the Foreign Office's list for spouse-visa A1 proof, and a B1 certificate from any of them satisfies the Ausländerbehörde for naturalisation or a Niederlassungserlaubnis. If your goal is a residence permit or a passport, stop optimising and book the nearest exam.

The differences start to matter in three cases. If you need the certificate outside Germany - an employer in Brazil, a scholarship board, a consulate that has never heard of a Volkshochschule - Goethe is the name that travels. If you are dealing with Austria, ÖSD is the default and Goethe may not be enough for integration requirements. If you need a specialist exam - medicine, nursing, university admission, care work - the provider is usually chosen for you: telc dominates the professional exams, and universities want DSH, TestDaF, telc C1 Hochschule or the Goethe C2. Everything below is the detail behind those three exceptions.

The short answer by situation

Who actually accepts what

Immigration authorities

The Ausländerbehörde does not care about brands, it cares about the CEFR level and that the provider is on an approved list. telc, Goethe-Institut, ÖSD and the TestDaF-Institut are all on it. A B1 certificate from any of the four is proof of language for naturalisation; for naturalisation you also need the Einbürgerungstest, which is a separate, cheap (around 25 euro) civics test, not a language exam.

One quiet detail: for naturalisation, the language proof does not expire, but some authorities balk at certificates that only cover part of the skills. That matters for modular exams - see below.

Universities

This is where a certificate can be rejected. Most German universities accept DSH-2 or TestDaF 4x4 as standard. Beyond that, the commonly accepted alternatives are the Goethe-Zertifikat C2 (GDS) and telc Deutsch C1 Hochschule, which was designed for exactly this purpose and is accepted by a large number of universities - but not all, and not always for every programme. The Goethe-Zertifikat C1 and ÖSD Zertifikat C1 are accepted less consistently; ÖSD's C1 Hochschule is well recognised in Austria and patchily in Germany.

Do not reason by CEFR level here. Open your programme's admission page, find the list, and take an exam that is on it by name.

Employers and professional bodies

Medical chambers, nursing recognition offices and many care employers built their processes around telc's professional exams (telc Deutsch B2-C1 Medizin, telc Deutsch B2 Pflege). If you are on that track, take telc - a Goethe B2 is a fine certificate that will still leave you needing the telc one.

Ordinary employers are the opposite case. Recruiters outside Germany recognise "Goethe-Institut" instantly and "telc" rarely. If the certificate is a line on a CV rather than a legal requirement, Goethe buys you recognition that telc does not, and the extra 60 to 100 euro is defensible.

Price, dates and results

Prices below are typical for Germany in 2025 and vary a lot: telc and ÖSD license their exams to local schools that set their own fees, and Goethe prices differ by country - a Goethe B1 can cost half as much in Cairo as in Munich. Always check the specific centre.

The practical consequence: if you have a visa deadline in eight weeks, telc's density of centres is worth more than any other factor on this page. If you have six months, choose on recognition instead.

Modules, retakes and failing one part

This is the most under-researched difference and the one that costs people the most money.

• Goethe is modular at B1, B2 and C2. You can sit Lesen, Hören, Schreiben and Sprechen as separate exams, pay per module, and retake only the one you failed. A1, A2 and C1 are single exams.
• ÖSD splits its exams into a written and an oral part and lets you repeat the failed part alone, usually within a year at the same centre. Less granular than Goethe, but far better than starting over.
• telc is generally all-or-nothing: fail, and you repeat the whole exam and pay the whole fee again. The written and oral parts are marked together.

If your writing is solid but your speaking is shaky, or the reverse, the modular option can be cheaper than the headline price suggests - and dramatically cheaper if you fail. Weigh that against telc's lower sticker price before booking.

One warning for naturalisation: if you take Goethe B1 module by module, keep all four module certificates. Some authorities want the full set and will not accept two modules plus a promise.

The DTZ is its own thing

The Deutsch-Test für Zuwanderer is administered by telc and by g.a.s.t. on behalf of the BAMF, and it is not the same as telc Deutsch B1. It is a scaled test: you sit one exam and your certificate reports A2 or B1 per skill. It is normally only open to integration course participants and people referred by the BAMF, and it is free or heavily subsidised for them - which makes it, by a wide margin, the cheapest route to a B1 language proof if you qualify.

A DTZ with B1 in all parts is accepted for naturalisation and for a Niederlassungserlaubnis. A DTZ that comes out at A2 in one skill is not a B1 certificate, and that is the usual reason people end up paying for a telc or Goethe B1 afterwards. If you are in an integration course, treat the DTZ as your first attempt and the commercial exam as the fallback, not the plan.

Choosing the exam is the easy part

Every provider on this page tests the same thing: whether you can read, hear, write and say German under time pressure. The certificate you choose changes the fee and the date; it does not change whether you pass. What changes that is having several thousand words available without hesitation, the grammar patterns automatic rather than reconstructed, and the collocations that make written parts sound like German instead of translated English.

That is the part you can start today, before you have picked a centre. merke.me runs the A1-C2 vocabulary, grammar and expressions on a spaced-repetition schedule, so the words you met three weeks ago come back exactly when you were about to forget them - with native audio and example sentences, which is what the listening and speaking parts actually reward. Pick a level deck, check the pricing, and look up anything you meet in the wild in vocab. Book the exam when the vocabulary stops being the bottleneck.