Berlin Drops €50 Cash Limit on Asylum Seekers' Payment Card After Just Two Months

Berlin introduced the SocialCard — a Visa debit card for newly arriving asylum seekers — in August, making it the last German state to implement such a system. Under the original rules, card holders could withdraw at most €50 in cash per month, plus €50 for each child, with all remaining benefits restricted to card payments. Social Senator Cansel Kiziltepe (SPD) announced on Tuesday that the cash limit has been suspended, citing the Berlin Anti-Discrimination Act: the restriction, she told the Evangelischer Pressedienst (epd), had a "discriminatory character" incompatible with the law. The card itself remains in operation. The original rationale for the payment card was to prevent money from being transferred abroad — cashless card payments being harder to redirect than cash — and to reduce the administrative burden on staff who previously had to manage cash disbursements in person, according to Steffen Weickert, president of the city's refugee affairs office. The card functions as a standard Visa debit card accepted at participating merchants across Germany and applies only to newly arriving asylum seekers; existing benefit recipients were not issued cards retroactively. Exceptions already existed for people with disabilities for whom barrier-free use was not possible. The introduction of the card had long been a source of dispute within Berlin's CDU-SPD coalition senate, with the Senatssozialverwaltung having raised concerns about IT security and data protection as recently as spring.