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The public sector lenders, who do not pass on negative interest rates to the majority of their clients, made their calculation based only on certain types of deposits and volumes larger than 10,000 euros, one of the sources said.
This would imply overall costs of well over 500 million euros to public sector lenders as a whole.
"We're talking about a rough analysis, not something authoritative," a spokesman for the DSGV association of savings banks said.
The ECB began charging banks to deposit excess funds with it in 2014 as part of its effort to spur higher bank lending and economic growth but demand for credit in Germany has remained subdued. The deposit rate is currently -0.4 percent.