Financing and Insurances
Financing your doctorate
Find out about the most common funding models for a doctorate; find out more about the external funding opportunities offered by the Begabtenförderungswerke; get to know the external offers for printing and travel costs, or click through the overview of databases and search engines to find the right funding for you.
Detailed information on the various funding options during your doctorate is available on the Graduate Academy website.
Health, accident and liability insurance
Depending on how you finance yourself during your doctorate, there are different insurance consequences. For example, scholarship holders are subject to compulsory insurance under German social security regulations because they are not considered employees. This means that they generally have to insure themselves.
Everyone who has statutory health insurance in an EU Member State, an EEA State (with the addition of Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway) or Switzerland is entitled to a European Health Insurance Card. This serves as proof of entitlement to necessary medical care during a temporary stay in EU and EEA countries as well as in Switzerland, i.e. in a country other than the country of residence.
Scholarship holders can apply for membership in the statutory health insurance. The health insurance providers (Krankenkassen) will then check on a case by case basis whether conditions for membership are met. The following options and conditions are available:
- Student health insurance
- Voluntary membership in the statutory health insurance
- Mandatory membership in the statutory health insurance
- Family insurance within the statutory health insurance system
Additional information is available from the statutory health insurance providers (Krankenkassen).
If scholarship holders cannot become members of statutory health insurance providers, they will have to insure themselves privately. Private health insurance companies have many different tariffs on offer and can provide detailed individual information on the topic.
In principle, matriculated doctoral candidates and those with an employment contract have full statutory accident insurance. Events covered by statutory accident insurance are work and commuting accidents (including official travel) as well as occupational illnesses (basis: insurance cover in accordance with Article 2, Para.1, No.1, No. 2 and No. 8 c of the Social Security Statute Book (SGB) VII).
By contrast, scholarship holders are not insured in the statutory accident insurance, as they are not employees. Unregistered doctoral candidates only enjoy insurance cover according to the statutes of the accident insurance of Saxony (Unfallkasse Sachsen, UKS), pursuant to Section VII, Article 36, No.1. Insurance cover extends solely to the work premises, i.e. – by virtue of the statutes of the UKS – there is no accident insurance cover in the event of an accident of a scholarship holder on the way to or from the institution or within the scope of “official travel”.
For doctoral candidates who have the status of members of staff, the University will cover damage caused to others or to the property of others during working hours, as long as gross negligence cannot be proved. For doctoral candidates who are not employees of TU Dresden, TU Dresden does not provide any employer’s liability insurance, not even if TU Dresden itself is the scholarship provider. Therefore, it is recommended that scholarship holders take out personal private third-party liability insurance. With regard to the specific provision of insurance cover, it is important to ensure that the risk of damage to property belonging to TU Dresden is explicitly covered by the insurance.