German Driving Licence (Führerschein) OCR API

What Makes the German Führerschein Hard to Parse

The German Führerschein is issued by the local driving licence authority (Fahrerlaubnisbehörde) of the holder's district or city. The German Führerschein uses the EU credit-card format, so the data sits behind numbered fields rather than labels: 1 is the surname, 2 the first names, 3 the date and place of birth, 4a and 4b the issue and expiry dates, 4c the issuing authority, 5 the licence number and 9 the licence classes. Unlike the UK licence, the German card has no address field. Older paper licences are still in circulation until the exchange deadline (all must be replaced by 19 January 2033), and newer cards are valid for 15 years.

One API Call, Named Fields

The StructOCR Driver License OCR API returns the licence number (field 5), surname and first names (fields 1 and 2), date and place of birth (field 3), issue and expiry dates (4a, 4b), issuing authority (4c) and classes (field 9, for example AM, A1, A2, A, B, BE, C1, C or L). German cards print dates as DD.MM.YYYY; the API returns them as YYYY-MM-DD. Send a JPG, PNG, WebP or PDF as Base64 JSON or as a multipart upload; there is no SDK to embed in your app, although official Python and Node.js SDKs are available. Step-by-step code is in the Python guide. Usage is billed per successful scan with pay-as-you-go pricing.

Where Teams Use It in Germany

Integration & AI Prompts

Install the official SDK and pass a photo of the licence. Full request and response details are in the driver license API reference.

# pip install structocr
import os
from structocr import StructOCR

client = StructOCR(api_key=os.environ["STRUCTOCR_API_KEY"])
result = client.scan_driver_license("licence.jpg")

if result.get("success"):
    data = result["data"]
    print(data["document_number"], data["surname"], data["date_of_expiry"])

{
  "success": true,
  "data": {
    "type": "drivers_license",
    "country_code": "DEU",
    "region": null,
    "document_number": "B072RRE2I55",
    "personal_number": null,
    "surname": "MUSTERMANN",
    "given_names": "ERIKA",
    "sex": null,
    "date_of_birth": "1984-08-12",
    "place_of_birth": "BERLIN",
    "date_of_issue": "2022-05-20",
    "date_of_expiry": "2037-05-19",
    "date_of_first_issue": null,
    "issuing_authority": "STADT KÖLN",
    "address": null,
    "vehicle_class": "AM, B, L"
  }
}