Extended presumption of receipt for tax assessments from 2025

Due to longer mail delivery times, tax assessments will only be deemed to have been received on the fourth day after posting from 2025.

The Ministry of Economics has initiated a reform of postal legislation, not least at the urging of Deutsche Post AG. In order to be able to reduce costs in the face of falling letter volumes, Deutsche Post wanted to push through an extension of the delivery times for letters. This extension was implemented with the Postal Law Modernization Act, which was passed by the Bundestag and Bundesrat in the summer.

On an annual average, 95 % of letters must now be delivered on the third working day and 99 % on the fourth working day following the day of posting. Due to this extended delivery time requirement, the presumption of receipt for tax assessments and other administrative acts has also been extended by one day to four days. Previously, these were deemed to have been delivered on the third day after posting, and the objection or appeal period runs from then on.

The extended presumption of receipt applies to all administrative acts that are posted, electronically transmitted or made available after December 31, 2024. As before, administrative acts will not be published on Saturdays. This means that if the end of the three-day or, in future, four-day period falls on a Saturday, Sunday or public holiday, the notification or administrative act is only deemed to have been published on the following Monday or working day. The government draft still envisaged that the deadline for the presumption of receipt could in future also expire on a Saturday, but tax advisors in particular raised considerable objections to this and were heard by the Bundestag.

Another important change brought about by the Postal Law Modernization Act applies if a letter cannot be delivered. In such a case, the letter must in future be handed over to a substitute recipient if possible, unless otherwise instructed by the sender or recipient. A "substitute recipient" is a person present on the recipient's premises or an immediate neighbor of the recipient.

An incomplete or incorrectly addressed letter can therefore regularly end up with a neighbor in future if the sender has not added the words "Do not hand over to a substitute recipient" on the letter and there is also no instruction on the recipient's letterbox not to hand over the letter to a substitute recipient. With this change, the legislator has accepted that letters may be lost as a result or that the neighbor may open the letter by mistake.