Germany’s General Equal Treatment Act (AGG) lists eight protected characteristics: race, ethnic origin, sex, religion, disability, age, sexual identity, and belief. Body weight is not one of them. Someone who is passed over for a job, denied a promotion, or fired because of their weight generally has no claim under German anti-discrimination law.
There is one route in anyway, and it runs through the characteristic of disability. It is real, but it is narrow, and it opens only at a point most people who experience weight discrimination never reach: a documented medical file.
The case that opened the door
Karsten Kaltoft worked for about 15 years as a childminder for the municipality of Billund, Denmark. He was obese throughout his employment. In 2010, the municipality laid him off as part of a staff reduction in which he was the only one of 94 childminders dismissed. The exact reasons for the dismissal were disputed; what was undisputed was that his weight had come up repeatedly during his employment, including during an unannounced home visit. Kaltoft, represented by his union FOA, sued the municipal employers’ association Kommunernes Landsforening (KL), arguing the dismissal amounted to discrimination on the basis of his obesity. The Danish court referred two questions to the European Court of Justice: whether obesity is itself a prohibited ground of discrimination under EU law, and whether it can fall under the disability protections of Directive 2000/78/EC.
The CJEU ruled on 18 December 2014 (Case C-354/13) with a two-part answer. There is no general EU-law prohibition on discrimination based on obesity as such. But obesity can fall within the concept of disability where it “entails a limitation which results in particular from long-term physical, mental or psychological impairments which, in interaction with various barriers, may hinder the full and effective participation of the person concerned in professional life on an equal basis with other workers.” Whether that threshold was met in Kaltoft’s own case was left to the national court to decide, not the CJEU itself. The Danish court later found that his obesity did not meet it, and dismissed his claim.
What a German court did with that test
Two years later, a German court had to answer the same question. The Regional Labour Court of Lower Saxony (LAG Niedersachsen) ruled on 29 November 2016 (case 10 Sa 216/16) on a fixed-term truck driver with grade III obesity, a BMI above 40. His employer had declined to renew his fixed-term contract after two years, despite good performance and unremarkable occupational health checks, citing possible medium-term health risks. The driver argued this was disability discrimination.
The court applied the CJEU’s test word for word, and still ruled against him. Severe obesity as such, it held, does not constitute a disability under sections 1 and 7(1) of the AGG and the underlying EU law. Each case requires a separate, individual assessment of whether the person actually has restricted mobility or a condition that impedes the job in question, and the burden of proving that lies with the person claiming discrimination. A mere prediction of future health risk is not enough, however plausible it sounds. In this case, the driver could not point to a documented mobility restriction or a diagnosed condition that had actually interfered with his work as a driver.
What this means in practice
Read together, the two rulings draw a clear, if inconvenient, line. The disability category does not protect fat bodies; it protects the documented, lasting functional limitation that a fat body may or may not come with. Someone treated worse because they are fat, without a doctor having established and being able to prove such a limitation, has no access to the AGG through this route. The bar is not “obese.” It is “obese, and provably restricted in a way that meets the AGG’s disability standard.” That is a considerably narrower door than the public debate about “obesity as a disability” often implies.
That also explains why this legal route is barely visible in German practice. Using it means producing a medical certificate for a functional limitation and proving it in court, while the discrimination people actually experience day to day usually looks nothing like that: the dismissive comment, the passed-over application, the office chair that doesn’t fit. None of that has a foothold in the AGG as it currently stands, certificate or not.
The Gesellschaft gegen Gewichtsdiskriminierung e.V. (Society Against Weight Discrimination), Germany’s advocacy group on this issue, has long called for adding body weight directly to Section 1 of the AGG, rather than routing it through disability. Until that happens, the path through Kaltoft and its German application remains the only judicially confirmed option, and it is open only to people who can prove an impairment, not to people who are simply discriminated against.
What this piece is not
This is a report on the state of the law, not legal advice. Whether a claim exists in any individual case depends on the specific facts and is a question for a lawyer, not an article. Both rulings cited here explicitly require an individual, case-by-case assessment; nothing here substitutes for one.
Sources: CJEU, judgment of 18 December 2014, Case C-354/13 (FOA v Kommunernes Landsforening); LAG Niedersachsen, judgment of 29 November 2016, case 10 Sa 216/16; Gesellschaft gegen Gewichtsdiskriminierung e.V.. Read 26 September 2026.