Paying fees after leaving a club/verein

[Berlin_Insomniac]

I have signed my son out of a gym membership and they are asking i pay 8 months worth of fees. The reason is that the renewal of the 6-month contract takes place within the 3 months of the mandated notice period .- i.e. they are renewing a contract a month after written notice of quitting.

This seems utterly unacceptable and I want to know what my options are... if i go to a lawyer, which kind? Better yet - is there an alternative to a lawyer? maybe some mediator service?

In case it matters, the location is Berlin.

Thanks for any advice

[john_b]

What they’re doing is a very common gym trick in Germany and it often collapses the moment someone competent looks at it. The core problem is that they’re relying on a renewal clause that collides with the statutory notice and consumer-protection rules, especially if your cancellation reached them before the new term was properly locked in. Since 2022 the law is very clear: after the minimum term, gym contracts must be cancellable monthly and cannot auto-extend for long fixed periods anymore. If they renewed a six-month block after your written cancellation was already in their hands, their claim is extremely weak.

You don’t need a lawyer as a first step. The fastest and cheapest pressure point in Berlin is the Verbraucherzentrale, the official consumer-protection service. They deal with exactly this kind of gym dispute every day, can check your contract wording, and for a small fee they’ll write a formal legal letter to the gym that very often ends the matter immediately. It’s not mediation in the soft sense, it’s legal muscle without full legal costs.

If you do end up needing a lawyer, you’d be looking for a Fachanwalt für Vertragsrecht or Verbraucherrecht, not family or criminal law. But realistically most of these cases never get that far, because gyms rely on people paying out of frustration rather than on solid legal footing.

In practical terms, the strongest position is to pay nothing further for now, respond once in writing that the cancellation was issued before renewal and that under §309 BGB and the 2022 contract-law reform no extended fixed term is valid, and say that all further communication should go via the Verbraucherzentrale. That alone usually causes the tone to change very quickly.

[Berlin_Insomniac]

Thank you for your feedback and shortly after writing this i did in fact find out about the verbraucherzentrale and have contacted them for an appointment. Still appreciate the feedback and will keep the verbraucherrecht tip as a final option.
Thx.