EconomyNews Explained

German exports fall 0.8% in August, missing a forecast rise

German goods exports fell 0.8% in August, the Federal Statistical Office said on Thursday, October 8, 2026, and the trade surplus narrowed to 19.5 billion euros.

Oct 8, 2026 · 2 min read · By ETF.net Research

A large cargo ship loaded with shipping containers is docked beneath towering cranes at a port terminal in Hamburg, Germany.

Key takeaways

Exports fell again, missing the rise forecasters had penciled in.
Most of what went missing was bound for America.
August only partly undid July's jump in U.S. shipments.
Britain was the one large market that climbed.

German goods exports fell 0.8% in August from July, to 137.6 billion euros, on provisional figures adjusted for the calendar and the usual seasonal pattern, the Federal Statistical Office said on Thursday. It was the second drop in a row, after a revised 0.5% fall in July, and it missed a 0.6% rise expected in a Reuters poll. Exports were 6.2% higher than in August 2025.

Imports rose 0.9%. The trade surplus narrowed to 19.5 billion euros from 21.6 billion euros in July.

The largest single customer was the United States. Shipments there fell 6.3% from July, from 14.4 billion euros to 13.5 billion. That drop of 0.9 billion euros was most of the 1.1 billion euro decline in total exports from July's revised level of 138.7 billion euros.

In July, exports to the United States had jumped 19.1% from June. August gave back part of that jump, not all of it.

Shipments were 22.6% higher than in August 2025, a much larger gain than the 1.1% rise over the first eight months. In the first half, the office had reported exports to the United States down 6.1% from a year earlier.

Shipments to the United Kingdom rose 16.7%, to 7.9 billion euros, the one large increase.

"The current decline shows that the export recovery was only a faint breeze," said Volker Treier, head of foreign trade at the German Chamber of Commerce and Industry.