This paper investigates the cost and profit efficiency of German hospitals and their variation with ownership type. It is motivated by the empirical finding that private (for-profit) hospitals - having been shown to be less cost efficient in the past - on average earn higher profits than public hospitals. We conduct a Stochastic Frontier Analysis on a multifaceted administrative German data set combined with the balance sheets of 541 hospitals of the years 2002-2006. The results show no significant differences in cost efficiency but higher profit efficiency of private than of publicly owned hospitals.