Starting a Business in Austria as a Foreigner

Austria regulates business through the Gewerbeordnung 1994, which reaches every activity carried on gewerbsmäßig and not prohibited by law, unless its own §§ 2 to 4 take it out (§ 1 Abs. 1). An activity is gewerbsmäßig where it is carried on independently, regularly and with the intention of a return or other economic advantage (§ 1 Abs. 2), independence meaning on your own account and at your own risk (§ 1 Abs. 3). No turnover floor, no minimum size.

Two parts of § 1 Abs. 4 surprise people. A single act counts as regular where an intention to repeat can be inferred, or where it takes a longer time. And offering a service that is the subject of a trade to a larger circle of persons, or in a tender, is treated as exercising it. Advertising is not preparation for the trade. It is the trade.

The exceptions matter as much as the rule, because whole categories of work never reach the trade code: farming and forestry (§ 2 Abs. 1 Z 1); literary work, the fine arts and self-publishing (Z 7); the professional work of lawyers, notaries, Ziviltechniker, patent attorneys and the accounting and audit professions (Z 10); and medicine, psychotherapy and the psychological profession in health care (Z 11). If your work is there, you do not register a trade at all.

If it is not, the next question is which kind. § 5 Abs. 2 defines a free trade negatively: anything within § 1 Abs. 1 not expressly listed as regulated in § 94 or as a part-trade in § 31, and no certificate of competence is needed for it. The § 94 list is finite and published, its numbering running to Z 82 with seven numbers repealed, so 75 heads stand. What a regulated trade demands is on the business license austria guide.

Two halves: one about you, one about any company you already own.

You. GewO § 14 Abs. 1 lets foreign natural persons exercise trades like Austrian nationals where a treaty so provides, and lets nationals of states with no such treaty, people granted asylum and stateless people do so where they may already stay in Austria for a gainful activity. Then comes the sentence that sets the order: "Für Drittstaatsangehörige, die noch nicht rechtmäßig aufhältig sind (Erstantragsteller) und in Österreich ein Gewerbe ausüben wollen, ist die Erteilung eines Aufenthaltstitels, der die Ausübung einer selbstständigen Erwerbstätigkeit zulässt, zur rechtmäßigen Ausübung dieses Gewerbes erforderlich." A third-country national not yet lawfully resident needs a residence title permitting self-employed activity before the trade can lawfully be exercised.

That reads like a circle: the residence procedure wants to see a business, the trade authority wants to see a title. The statute breaks it. Where the applicant must prove the required authorisation before the title is granted, and every condition apart from the title is met, § 14 Abs. 2 obliges the trade authority to certify exactly that, and the residence file then has the certificate in front of it. Which title, on what terms, is a separate procedure before a separate authority: red white red plus card.

One group sits outside the problem. Under § 14 Abs. 3, family members of an EU or EEA national who enjoys a right of residence in an EU or EEA state may exercise trades like Austrian nationals whatever their own nationality: the spouse or registered partner, descendants of either under 21 or dependent, and dependent ascendants.

Your existing company. § 14 Abs. 4 is one sentence and decides a great deal: "Juristische Personen und sonstige ausländische Rechtsträger, die weder ihren Sitz noch eine Niederlassung im Inland haben, dürfen, soweit Staatsverträge nicht anderes vorsehen, Gewerbe nicht ausüben." A foreign legal person with neither its seat nor an establishment in Austria may not exercise a trade here. So a foreign parent that wants to trade in Austria has to put something on the ground: a branch, with no separate legal personality, or an Austrian subsidiary austria, which has one. Both have a page of their own.

Once a company holds the licence, trade law asks who answers for it. A legal person may exercise a trade only with a trade-law managing director under GewO § 39, and if he leaves the trade runs six months at most while a replacement is found (§ 9 Abs. 1 and Abs. 2). § 39 Abs. 1 requires one where the holder cannot furnish the certificate of competence or has no domestic residence, and releases an EEA national resident in an EEA contracting state from the second limb.

The Firmenbuch is not a general business register that everyone joins, and on one whole route it is optional.

UGB § 8 Abs. 1 says it in two sentences: natural persons acting as entrepreneurs who are subject to the accounting duty under § 189 are obliged to have themselves entered, and other sole traders are entitled to. A voluntary entry is deleted again on application. Below the threshold, register entry is a right you may take up and give back, not a duty you are in breach of.

The threshold is in UGB § 189, in the version in force from 19 February 2026: the accounting duty reaches capital companies with no threshold at all (Abs. 1 Z 1), and all other entrepreneurs above EUR 700,000 of turnover per uniform business in a financial year (Z 3). It does not reach the liberal professions, farmers and foresters, or entrepreneurs whose income is a surplus of receipts over expenses within EStG 1988 § 2 Abs. 4 Z 2 (Abs. 4).

It does not bite the moment you cross it: under § 189 Abs. 2 the consequences arise from the second following financial year where the threshold is exceeded in two consecutive years, but from the following year where it is exceeded by at least EUR 300,000.

Two people running a business together should note § 8 Abs. 3: an informal civil-law partnership that crosses the § 189 threshold must be registered as an OG or a KG. A corporation never gets the choice at all, because a GmbH, a FlexCo or an AG exists only from its entry.

Three gates, two outcomes: either you are a natural person trading in your own name, or there is an entity between you and the business. Most of what follows is the same on both routes; it starts in a different place.

The comparison across all eight Austrian forms is on the company types guide, and the GmbH has a page of its own, linked at the foot of this one.

"Register your business" is not one act. Six authorities are involved, they are not interchangeable, and each produces a different document.

These are fees fixed by Austrian law, not our fees; what we charge is quoted on request. Each row names the instrument and the date the amount took effect.

The NeuFöG relief has conditions worth reading before you rely on it. § 4 Abs. 1 makes it depend on producing an official declaration form at each authority concerned, and § 4 Abs. 3 requires that form to confirm the declaration was drawn up with the advice of the statutory professional representation the founder belongs to. Where the new business is a free trade, that body must also confirm that the founder has basic entrepreneurial knowledge. Under § 4 Abs. 4 the declaration may instead be made electronically through the business service portal.

Three deadlines bind you, two bind the authority, and the one everybody asks about does not exist.

One date decides when the trade-authority clock starts: the day of the trade registration is the day all the required evidence under § 339 Abs. 3 reached the authority, and any required determination of individual competence, dispensation, recognition or equivalence took legal effect (§ 340 Abs. 1).

No Austrian instrument sets a processing time for the Firmenbuch entry and no official average is published, so this page states none, for the register or for anything else in the sequence.

The two three-month figures above are a different kind of number: ceilings the trade authority is bound by under GewO § 340, not observations of how long a case takes. A defective register file comes back as a Verbesserungsauftrag, an order to remedy, and where the trade conditions are not met the trade authority prohibits the exercise of the trade by decision (§ 340 Abs. 3).

If you are shown a number of days or weeks for any of this, the useful question is which instrument it comes from.

Four failures come from sequence rather than substance, and each has a paragraph behind it.

Trading before the trade is registered. A landing page and a price list are an offer to a larger circle of persons, which GewO § 1 Abs. 4 treats as exercising the trade.

Assuming the GISA entry is the permission. For a free trade and an ordinary regulated trade the right arises from the registration and the entry confirms it; for a § 95 trade the applicant waits for a final decision (§ 340 Abs. 2).

Treating § 340 Abs. 1 as paperwork. Two of its sentences bite: a name the register court accepted is still a defect if it would seriously mislead about the content of the trade, and an incomplete file does not start the clock at all.

Leaving the trade-law managing director unfilled. Six months is the maximum, and the authority must shorten even that where the trade has already run without one for more than six months in the preceding two years (GewO § 9 Abs. 2).

Every provision below was read on 17 September 2026 in the consolidated text published by the Bundeskanzleramt through its open-data service.

• Gewerbeordnung 1994, BGBl. Nr. 194/1994 as amended: §§ 1, 2, 5, 9, 14, 39, 94, 95, 333 Abs. 2, 339 and 340, the last in force from 1 November 2025.
• Unternehmensgesetzbuch § 8 and § 189, the latter in force from 19 February 2026.
• Bundesabgabenordnung § 120 Abs. 2 and § 121.
• Gerichtsgebührengesetz Tarifpost 10 Z I, in the amounts raised by BGBl. II Nr. 227/2026 from 1 August 2026. Neugründungs-Förderungsgesetz § 1 Z 3 and § 4.
• KStG 1988 § 22 Abs. 1 and § 24 Abs. 4 Z 1; GmbHG § 6 Abs. 1 and § 10 Abs. 1; UStG 1994 § 10 Abs. 1; GSVG § 18 Abs. 1; WiEReG § 5 Abs. 1.
• Business service portal (USP), Trade registration, English, for the trade registration carrying no stamp duties and no federal administrative charges.