The project examines individual and fiscal returns to education. The project has two sections. Section one analyses the relationship between educational background and unemployment, employment, and hours of work, as well as between educational background and wages and pre-tax income. This is done by utilizing microeconometric methods and data from the German Socio-economic Panel (SOEP). Section two assesses individual and fiscal net returns from vocational and university education using the ZEW-Microsimulation model. The data base is the 2016 wave of the SOEP. The assessment is based on German tax and social laws. Besides fiscal returns, the section analyses individual returns to education for pre-tax income and simulated after-tax disposable income; taking into account the German tax and transfer law, and utilizing different assumptions for income over the life cycle.