Getting from Hamburg to Berlin
· Updated · BootsnAll
Hamburg is Germany's gateway to the world, built around the country's biggest port, and it has the harbour front, the warehouse district and the Reeperbahn to show for it. Berlin is the capital, and you already know what it is for. The two are 288 km apart, which in German terms is nothing.
This route spent most of a year in pieces, so what you may have read about it is probably wrong.
What happened to the line
Deutsche Bahn closed the Hamburg to Berlin line completely on 1 August 2025 and rebuilt it. Not patched: rebuilt. More than 180 km of track and around 200 sets of points were replaced, 19 signal boxes were modernised, and 28 stations along the way were reworked for step-free access. It was meant to reopen at the start of May 2026. A long frost stopped work on the cable ducts and overhead lines, and it finally reopened on 14 June 2026, six weeks late.
During the closure ICE trains still ran, but the long way round, and the trip took about 45 minutes longer. If you are reading an older account of this journey that talks about replacement buses or diversions, that is what it is describing, and it no longer applies.
Trains from Hamburg to Berlin
Since the reopening there is an ICE roughly every half hour, and the journey is a little under two hours city centre to city centre. This is the way to do it. Nothing else on this list gets close.
Fares work on availability, not distance. Deutsche Bahn sells Super Sparpreis and Sparpreis tickets in limited numbers from somewhere around 13 to 20 euros, and they go up as the train fills. The Flexpreis is the full walk-up fare, several times that, and buys you the right to take any train that day. Booking opens twelve months ahead. If your dates are fixed, book the moment you know them.
FlixTrain also runs the route, roughly every two hours, slower and usually cheaper. It is a real alternative if you are not in a hurry, with the caveat that there are far fewer departures, so a missed connection hurts more.
Buses from Hamburg to Berlin
Ignore any guide that sends you to Berlin Linien Bus. That company stopped running on 31 October 2016 and nothing under that name exists today. FlixBus took over the market after buying MeinFernbus in 2015 and now runs most of what moves by road between German cities. Hamburg to Berlin takes a bit over three hours and can be had for less than the cheapest train if you book ahead.
Three hours on a coach to save ten euros on a ninety minute train is a bad trade unless you are counting every euro. Take the train.
What about the Deutschlandticket
Germany's flat-rate transport pass costs 63 euros a month as of January 2026, up from 49 when it launched. It covers regional trains, S-Bahn, trams and buses across the whole country, and it does not cover ICE, IC, EC, FlixTrain or FlixBus. So it does not help you on this route. It is a monthly subscription that renews on its own, and you have to cancel by the 10th.
It is worth buying if you are spending a month in Germany and moving around on regional trains. For one fast trip between two big cities, it is the wrong product.
Flying
Don't. There is no direct flight worth having, the connecting ones route you through another city entirely, and by the time you have reached an airport, cleared security and got back out of one at the other end, the ICE has already delivered you to the middle of Berlin.