What Counts as Noise in a Berlin Flat, Hour by Hour
Berlin protects the night between 22:00 and 06:00, and Sundays and public holidays for the whole day. The 13:00 to 15:00 pause posted in your hallway is something else entirely: the building’s own rulebook. Pick what you are about to do in the flat, from a speaker to a suitcase on the stairs, and drag through the week to see which hours are normal, which are restricted, and which a neighbour can act on.
A full week grid of 192 hours drawn from the tool’s own rule set, with a scrubber that moves through Monday to Sunday and a separate public holiday row, plus the exact reason and the practical move for whichever hour you land on.
Most visitors meet these rules the hard way, through a doorbell at half past midnight. The awkward part is that the two layers behind them look identical when they are both printed on the same sheet in the hallway. Berlin state law protects the night from 22:00 to 06:00 and the whole of every Sunday and public holiday, and a neighbour can act on that directly. The house rulebook is a private agreement attached to the flat, so it reaches you through your host instead. This tool keeps the two apart on every cell of the grid, and it treats a shower differently from a vacuum, because German courts do too. Rules checked on 6 September 2026.
What this tool does
It lays the whole week out as a grid of hours, adds a separate row for public holidays, and colours every cell for the one thing you picked: music through a speaker, guests round for drinks, vacuuming, a washing machine, a shower, a suitcase in the stairwell, a conversation on the stairs or in the courtyard, or drilling and moving furniture. Green is normal, yellow is restricted, and red is the state noise law. Drag the scrubber and the tool names the exact hour, the rule that applies, and what to do instead.
Where the two layers come apart
Berlin’s Landes-Immissionsschutzgesetz protects the night from 22:00 to 06:00 and Sundays and public holidays all day, and it uses no decibel number: the question is whether another person is seriously disturbed. A Hausordnung is a private agreement attached to the flat, which is why the 13:00 to 15:00 pause it usually contains cannot be reported to the police the way a 23:00 speaker can. The genuine federal 13:00 to 15:00 rule covers outdoor garden and building machinery, not anything you do in a kitchen.
Why a shower is green and a vacuum is not
Washing at night is ordinary use of a home. German courts have refused to enforce house rules that tried to ban night showering or bathing, treating around half an hour as normal household noise. Vacuuming is the opposite case: it is loud, it travels through the whole staircase, and almost every house rulebook bans it on a Sunday even where state law would only catch it once it becomes seriously disturbing. Those two feel similar from inside a flat and are not the same at all outside it.
What the tool will not tell you
It will not read your building’s specific rulebook, which is the one document that decides your yellow cells. Find the printed sheet in the flat or the frame in the hallway on your first evening. It also will not give you a decibel figure for Zimmerlautstaerke, because no such figure exists in the law. The working test is whether a neighbour can follow the song or the dialogue, and if they can, you are above it.