There is no statutory requirement under German law to include green clauses in lease agreements. However, certain statutory provisions promote the sustainable use of buildings and could be considered green clauses in other jurisdictions. For example, heating and warm water costs must be largely charged to tenants based on actual consumption. Furthermore, tenants of residential premises must tolerate construction works performed by landlords during energy modernization. However, tenants generally do not have any legal means to enforce energy modernization in Germany.

In October 2015, an interdisciplinary working group led by the German Private Institute for Sustainable Building (Deutsches Privates Institut für Nachhaltige Immobilienwirtschaft), which is the German certifying body of BREEAM, announced a new set of guidelines and recommendations for green leases. The working group developed sample provisions for green leases that aim to lay important foundations for sustainable building use while giving the contractual parties considerable leeway in its implementation. Furthermore, in 2018, the Zentraler Immobilien Ausschuss e.V. (ZIA) Central Real Estate Committee published guidelines and sample clauses for green leases. An update of the ZIA brochure on green leases from 2018 is being prepared.

In practice, green clauses are becoming more and more frequent in commercial lease agreements. Landlords are increasingly trying to introduce green clauses when negotiating new lease agreements, and also when negotiating amendments to existing lease agreements. While landlords (and, infrequently, tenants) often try to make the proposed green clauses binding obligations, often only nonbinding, best-effort clauses are agreed on in the end. This is likely largely because there is currently no legal requirement to implement binding clauses in lease agreements. One exception is the tenant's binding obligation to provide the landlord with consumption data, which is frequently agreed on between the parties. The majority of green lease agreements with binding, rather than nonbinding, obligations are requested by landlords to ensure compliance with the requirements of an existing or planned green building certification, such as the DGNB, BREEAM or LEED.