The Austrian beneficial owner register (WiEReG)
who files, what is reported, and who may look

Two Austrian registers answer questions about a company and are constantly confused. The Firmenbuch says who the company legally is, and anyone may read it: the company register guide covers it. The WiEReG register says who is behind it, and almost nobody may read it.

That distinction is the point of the act. A Firmenbuch entry names the registered shareholder, which may be a company in another country, a fiduciary holder or someone acting on instructions. The WiEReG register names the natural person at the end of the chain.

There is no public beneficial owner search in Austria. Inspection is granted by an extract bearing the register authority's Amtssignatur, and only to someone who proves a legitimate interest (WiEReG § 10, in force from 1 December 2025). The authority is the Federal Minister of Finance (§ 14 Abs. 1), Bundesanstalt Statistik Österreich runs it as processor, and filings arrive only through the Unternehmensserviceportal, the USP.

§ 1 Abs. 2 lists nineteen categories of Rechtsträger, and the short answer is: if it is entered in the Firmenbuch, it is in scope. The categories worth reading twice sit at the bottom of the list, because they catch entities with no Austrian company at all.

A beneficial owner is a natural person in whose ownership or under whose control the entity ultimately stands (WiEReG § 2, in force from 10 December 2024). Four tests, applied in order.

Direct. More than 25 percent of the shares, the voting rights or the participation, held by a natural person (§ 2 Z 1 lit. a sublit. aa).

Indirect. An entity holds more than 25 percent and a natural person controls it (sublit. bb). Holdings are added together where several entities sit under the same person's control, and a directly held stake is added to them.

Control. 50 percent of the shares plus one share, or more than 50 percent participation, or the UGB § 244 Abs. 2 criteria, or ultimate control in any other way. A Treugeber, the settlor of a fiduciary arrangement, has control through that relationship alone.

The fallback. Only where nobody can be identified after exhausting all possibilities, and there are no grounds for suspicion, do senior management count (lit. b).

Trusts and foundations are mapped by function: settlor, trustee, protector, the beneficiaries or their class, and anyone else in ultimate control (§ 2 Z 2 and Z 3). A class member receiving more than EUR 2,000 in a year is a beneficiary for that year.

Most small Austrian companies never file anything, by design: Statistik Austria takes the people already in the source register over as beneficial owners. The exemption is not a permanent status, though. It ends the moment either of two things is true, and the entity is expected to notice and file within four weeks.

A filing is not a name and a percentage. § 5 Abs. 1 fixes four blocks of data, and the fourth only exists because of the nominee rules.

A Compliance-Package is the evidence behind a filing, uploaded to the register rather than kept in a drawer. Only a berufsmäßiger Parteienvertreter, a professional party representative who has established and verified the beneficial owners, may transmit one (WiEReG § 5a, in force from 1 October 2025). It matters to a foreign group because it lets an Austrian bank see the chain above the Austrian company without asking for the same documents a fourth time.

• An organigram is compulsory for companies, partnerships, EEIGs and SEs (§ 5a Abs. 1 Z 1).
• The constitutional documents, by legal form: the partnership agreement, articles creating voting or control rights that differ from the shareholdings, the FlexCo's Anteilsbuch, a Privatstiftung's deed and its supplementary deed, a trust deed.
• Evidence and declarations about any fiduciary relationship and any nominee arrangement under § 2a.
• Freshness is fixed by statute. Foreign register extracts and the management's confirmation may not be older than six weeks at filing (§ 5a Abs. 4), and anything not in German or English needs a certified translation.
• The management signs for it, confirming the documents are complete and that no voting, control or fiduciary relationship diverges from the filing (§ 5a Abs. 5).
• It expires. Valid twelve months from the last filing that transmitted one, extended by twelve more on a change filing (§ 5a Abs. 6 and Abs. 7). The documents are deleted after five years.

Four routes, and none of them is a search box. Which one is yours turns on whether you are an obliged entity under anti-money-laundering law, and whether you can prove a legitimate interest.

A legitimate interest is presumed for journalists, academics and civil-society organisations working against money laundering, terrorist financing or sanctions circumvention. It also exists, and this is the route most commercial readers need, where the applicant wishes to enter into a business relationship with the entity and the economic or personal elements of that relationship can ground a sufficient interest in the person of the beneficial owner (§ 10 Abs. 2). An approved applicant is emailed a link to pay and retrieve the extract, valid four weeks; a refusal is appealable to the Bundesverwaltungsgericht.

One sentence changes how an extract should be used: it may be used to identify a beneficial owner and not to verify one (§ 11 Abs. 1). An obliged entity may never rely on the register alone.

Sometimes, and the bar is high. A beneficial owner may apply in writing for inspection to be restricted, naming the entities it should cover; the extract then shows a note in place of the data (WiEReG § 10a, in force from 10 December 2024).

The test is a disproportionate risk of becoming the victim of a listed offence: fraud (StGB §§ 146 to 148), kidnapping for ransom or extortion (§§ 102, 144 and 145), an offence against life or limb (§§ 75, 76 and 83 to 87), or coercion, dangerous threat or stalking (§§ 105 to 107a). The risk must be markedly higher than for an average beneficial owner in a comparable position, typically because offences have already been committed or threatened against the person or a close relative. Minors and persons lacking legal capacity always qualify.

Two sentences in the same paragraph decide most applications. The first: the mere fact that beneficial ownership becomes known is in general not a disproportionate danger. The second: there is no protectable interest where the data already appear in other public registers. For an Austrian GmbH shareholder, whose name and date of birth are a Firmenbuch entry, the second is usually the end of it.

Applied before a filing, inspection can be suspended for at most 14 days, and the authority decides within 14 days unless the application is manifestly unfounded (§ 10a Abs. 3).

The penalties are set out exactly as the statute sets them out, with nothing added. All of them are Finanzvergehen or Finanzordnungswidrigkeiten, and none is ever tried by a court (§ 15 Abs. 7): they are decided by the tax-penal authority under the Finanzstrafgesetz, and the register authority must report a reasonable suspicion to it.

Separately, there is the machinery that makes a filing happen. Where no filing is made at all, Finanzamt Österreich may compel one by coercive penalty under BAO § 111, after a warning setting a six-week period (§ 16 Abs. 1). A single coercive penalty may not exceed EUR 5,000, and no separate appeal lies against the warning (BAO § 111 Abs. 3 and Abs. 4, BGBl. Nr. 194/1961 as amended by BGBl. I Nr. 97/2025, version in force from 1 January 2027). It is treated as a tax and collected like one.

The register authority looks rather than waits. It risk-scores filings automatically, samples them, and monitors the discrepancy notes obliged entities set: an entity that does not replace such a note with a new filing within six weeks is sampled (§ 14 Abs. 3). It may demand documents at any time and enforce its orders with a ceiling of EUR 30,000 against a legal person and EUR 15,000 against a natural person (§ 14 Abs. 4 and 5).

The newest part of the act arrived on four dates rather than one, all of it enacted by BGBl. I Nr. 151/2024 and each date set out in § 19 Abs. 11: the definitions in § 2a and the nominee's own disclosure duty in § 4a from 1 January 2025 (Z 1); the closing part of § 5 Abs. 1 Z 1 and § 7 Abs. 2 from 3 June 2025 (Z 2); the diligence duty in § 3 Abs. 1, the nominee fields in the filing itself, § 5 Abs. 1 Z 3a and Z 3b, the exemption rule, supervision and the penalties in § 15 from 1 October 2025 (Z 3), with Z 3b applying to filings transmitted after 30 September 2025; and § 5 Abs. 1 Z 3c with the two access provisions from 1 December 2025 (Z 4). The December date is often quoted for the nominee filing and that is wrong: Z 3c is about function-holding entities and Substiftungen. The consolidated § 5 document is the December version, which is how the mistake travels. What the arrangement is, and what it lawfully may be, belongs to what a nominee director may lawfully do in Austria, and what a nominee owes personally develops the duty itself.

1. The definitions are deliberately wide. A Nominator instructs; a Nominee acts as owner or in a function for them; a Nominee-Direktor routinely manages in their own name on the nominator's instructions. A Nominee-Vereinbarung is any formal or informal arrangement under which a nominee undertakes to act for the nominator (WiEReG § 2a, in force from 1 January 2025). In a Treuhand the trustee is the nominee and the settlor the nominator.

2. Being a nominee is not the same as being a beneficial owner. The act says so expressly (§ 2a Abs. 2). The arrangement is reported because it is an arrangement, not because it makes anyone an owner.

3. It is the fastest way to lose an exemption. A GmbH whose shareholders are all natural persons files nothing. Sign one fiduciary agreement over one share and the exemption is gone, a full filing is due, and it must carry the agreement's designation and date and full personal data for everyone involved (§ 6 Abs. 2 and § 5 Abs. 1 Z 3b). A nominee who does not disclose their own status commits the offence in § 15 Abs. 1 Z 7.

• Your passport goes into the filing and a copy goes with it, and your address in the register is your residence, wherever that is (§ 5 Abs. 1 Z 1 lit. b and § 5 Abs. 2). The registered seat is a different question: the virtual office guide covers the seat and the address for service.
• A foreign parent does not stay out of it. A foreign top-level entity is reported with its name, seat, legal form and register identifiers (§ 5 Abs. 1 Z 2).
• Buying Austrian property can pull a foreign company in on its own, with no Austrian subsidiary at all, if it is seated outside the EEA (§ 1 Abs. 2 Z 19). A notary checks the filing was made before recording the deed.
• Looking someone up from abroad needs an E-ID or a letter. A citizen of a state without an E-ID scheme may apply in writing (§ 10 Abs. 3), and an Austrian party representative may query for you where you have the business-relationship interest (§ 9 Abs. 2a).
• The annual confirmation is the duty foreign owners miss. Nothing arrives to remind you and the shareholding has not changed, and it is still due four weeks after the review falls due.

Everything above was read from the statute itself on 17 September 2026, through the Federal Chancellery's open-data service.

• The act, paragraph by paragraph, as RIS open data: each provision above links to its own document.
• The register authority's own English overview: bmf.gv.at, The Register of Beneficial Owners, with its companion pages Reports to the Register and Inspection of the Beneficial Owner Register.
• The filing channel, the Unternehmensserviceportal service page. Named and not linked: the portal answers the English URL for this service with an untranslated page, checked 17 September 2026.
• The fee ordinance, WiEReG-Nutzungsentgelteverordnung, BGBl. II Nr. 77/2018, linked at the fee table.
• Not used: the unofficial English translation of the act, which is not the operative text. Every English rendering of a provision here is ours, made from the German.

Where a figure is not published officially this page says so rather than estimating: no processing times beyond the periods the act fixes, no count of entities registered or in default, and no advice on whether a particular structure creates a beneficial owner.

The register that is public, and how to read it. The Firmenbuch names the registered shareholder, not the person behind them: the company register guide.

The arrangement this register now reports. Before you sign anything fiduciary, read what a nominee director may lawfully do in Austria.