Taxi Operators Under Pressure: Why Even Good Businesses Can't Find a Successor Anymore.

Six employees lose their jobs, even though the company is doing well. That sounds at first like a contradiction. In the taxi trade it has, however, become a scenario that at least deserves a closer look. A longtime reader of taxi heute describes in a letter to the editors why he has shut down his operation. After 35 years as a taxi entrepreneur and a total of 49 years of work, he is retiring. For more than five years he had been looking for a successor. In vain. Even an employee who had initially shown interest backed out at short notice.

„Despite the very good revenues“ there was no one who wanted to take over the operation, writes the entrepreneur. In the end he had to lay off his six employees.

It is only a single case. But it leads fairly precisely to a question that the industry must address: Why would someone not want to take over an apparently functioning taxi operation?

Good revenues are not yet good business

The answer begins with a distinction that entrepreneurs know very well: revenue is not profit. On the cost side of a taxi operation there is now a long list. Vehicles have become more expensive, as have insurance, repairs, spare parts and energy. Above all, personnel costs have grown. Since January 2026 the statutory minimum wage is 13.90 euros per hour. On January 1, 2027 it will rise to 14.60 euros. Compared with the 12.82 euros of 2025, this represents an increase of almost 14 percent within two years. For a labor-intensive industry like the taxi trade, this is substantial.

The problem lies less in the fact that drivers earn higher wages. The crucial question is whether a business can also generate these higher wage costs. It is precisely here that the taxi differs from many other services. A baker can generally set the price for his bread himself. A taxi operator cannot arbitrarily raise the fare in the mandatory service area. The Passenger Transport Act ties taxis to tariff, operating and transportation obligations. The entrepreneur must maintain his approved operation and, within the mandatory service area, must generally transport passengers.

The Federal Association of Taxi and Rental Cars (BVTM) frames the problem as if higher wages would also have to be earned. At the same time taxi tariffs cannot rise arbitrarily if the taxi is to remain affordable as part of public mobility. The entrepreneur is precisely caught in this squeeze.

Being an entrepreneur today also means being a manager

There is also a factor that hardly appears in balance sheets: time. Whoever takes over a taxi fleet operation buys not only vehicles and a customer base. They also take on shift schedules, driver issues, sick notes, permits, timekeeping records, invoicing, tax questions, data protection, insurance and an increasing number of digital systems. Medical trips bring their own billing rules, school and disability transports, in turn, have different rules. Who electrifies vehicles suddenly deals with charging capacity, grid connections and funding conditions. Those seeking drivers not only compete with other taxi operators, but also with logistics, delivery services, bus companies or platform providers.

The traditional image of the taxi operator who in the morning takes the key, drives his car, and counts the takings in the evening has little to do with a modern multi-vehicle operation. Whoever takes over such a business takes on responsibility above all. And that is precisely where part of the succession problem may lie.

Official figures lag behind reality

How strongly the number of taxi companies is actually decreasing is surprisingly difficult to answer at the moment. The federal government still referred in 2024 in parliamentary questions to the latest nationwide special survey on taxi and rental-car traffic, as of the end of 2020. At that time, in Germany 18,824 operators were licensed with a total of 50,445 taxis. For rental cars, 8,525 companies with 44,968 vehicles were listed. Newer nationwide comparable concession data were not available to the government at that time.

This is itself a remarkable finding. An industry whose regulation is regularly the subject of political debate is statistically recorded only with considerable delay. Other statistics do confirm the economic importance of the sector, but cannot be compared one-to-one with the concession figures. Destatis shows more than 20,000 companies in its corporate statistics for the economic sector “Taxi operation,” for example. However, the delimitation and methodology differ from the licensing statistics of the passenger transport law.

Therefore, the blanket assertion that the number of taxi companies is dramatically falling nationwide would be premature without current, robust licensing data. That some operators are disappearing and entrepreneurs report succession problems, however, cannot be dismissed.