Is it permitted to work as a freelancer on upwork or another freelancer website if you live on Germany or not ?
1 Answer
While seperated earlier, a permission to live in Germany nowadays automatically includes the permission to take up work.
Please note that you may live in Germany without a permission, but without threat of immediate deportation, which is called "Duldung" (engl. "tolerance") and which indeed requires you to ask for permission to work. This is mainly used for temporary reasons where a person is not eligable for asylum or any other legal means of staying, but will not be sent back to their home country immediately due to human rights concerns. Permission to work will most likely be granted, as there is no point in denying anybody from being self-sufficient instead of being dependent on government money.
As a long as you register as a freelancer (Selbstständigkeit) with your local Finanzamt and declare your taxes properly, you are allowed to make money with any legal work you want and freelancing services like upwork are certainly legal.
Your type of permission to live in Germany might limit how much work you are allowed to do. For example, on a student visa, you are not allowed to work full time. This seems a common sense restriction, since the purpose is to study, with maybe some part-time work as a means to finance it.
Being self-employed in comparison to being unemployed or employed by someone else is a lot of paperwork in Germany. You may want to get help with that from a tax accountant or lawyer.
Whether the service in question has a clause in their terms of service that disallows Germans or persons residing in Germany from using it is something you will have to find out on a case-by-case-basis, but I have not yet encountered one that actually did.
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I don't think the right to work in Germany extends to everybody who hasn't been forcibly removed. People may be allowed a temporary stay without the right to work. So residence status does matter.– o.m.Commented Jul 14, 2022 at 6:43
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1@o.m. You are right. I assumed that "live in Germany" meant legally live in Germany. That is why my first sentence read "a permission to live in Germany". "Duldung" is not a permission to live here, it's just the acceptance of the fact that despite not having persmission, the person won't be removed by force at the current date and time because of temporary reasons. And even "Duldung" has a good chance to get you a permit to work if you ask nicely, because nobody wins if the person just lives of benefits if they could work and pay taxes instead.– nvoigtCommented Jul 14, 2022 at 9:20