Trade Licence in Austria (Gewerbeberechtigung)

GewO § 38 defines two. The Gewerbeberechtigung is the right to exercise one trade. The Gewerbelizenz is the right to carry on trades commercially at all: under Abs. 2 it comes into being with the registration of a trade by someone who held no trade licence at that moment, and covers every trade the holder may exercise. Abs. 3 says it is extended by registering further trades; Abs. 4 that it narrows as trades end and ends when the last one does. So the first registration does two things at once, and everything afterwards adds to a right you already hold rather than starting again.

Abs. 1 is the sentence to remember. Both are "persönliche Rechte, die nicht übertragen werden können", personal rights that cannot be transferred. There is no market in Austrian trade licences. What you can buy is a company that holds one, and that has conditions of its own further down this page.

The scope of a licence is not a matter of impression either: under § 29 it is the wording of the registration, read with the relevant rules. Vague wording is a problem you inherit.

A free trade needs no proof of competence. A regulated trade needs a certificate of competence. Inside the regulated trades sits a third class that behaves differently, and it is worth knowing before you file.

GewO § 95 names thirteen numbers in the § 94 list where the authority must check the applicant's reliability, or for a company that of the persons named in § 13 Abs. 7. For those thirteen, Abs. 1 adds a sentence the other regulated trades do not carry: exercise may begin only once the § 340 decision has become final. Abs. 2 adds a second: appointing a managing director for one of them is itself subject to approval. The thirteen are a closed list of numbers pointing into § 94.

§ 16 Abs. 2 defines a Befähigungsnachweis as proof of the technical knowledge, skills and experience, including the commercial ones, needed to carry out that trade's own activities independently. A person who can do the work but has never run anything is not automatically covered.

Abs. 1 gives the alternative: an applicant who cannot furnish the certificate must appoint a managing director under § 39. One trade shuts that door, the chimney sweep (§ 94 Z 55), and one consequence is easy to miss: in these cases a replacement must be appointed within one month, not the usual six.

What can make it up is a closed list of eleven kinds of evidence in § 18 Abs. 2, used alone or in the combination the ordinance for that trade prescribes: the Meisterprüfung or another Befähigungsprüfung, the Unternehmerprüfung, a university degree, a Fachhochschule course, a school, a Lehrgang, the apprenticeship-completion examination, and four certificates of practice, which Abs. 3 defines so that experience can be measured rather than asserted. Under Abs. 4 an ordinance may provide, where danger to life or health requires it, that a certificate stops counting after ten years without the activity.

Founders arriving from outside Austria usually have the ability and not the Austrian paper. There are three answers, and which applies is decided by what you hold.

§ 19 is the domestic one. Where the prescribed certificate cannot be furnished, the authority must find individual competence if the evidence proves the knowledge, skills and experience the trade requires, and must limit that finding to part-activities where the competence reaches only that far. A partial finding is a narrower licence, not a refusal.

§ 373c and § 373d are the European ones, and the Landeshauptmann decides both. Three points in § 373d matter before you apply. The equivalence examination must take place within four months of complete documents (Abs. 8). Where equivalence is missing, recognition is granted on condition of an adaptation course or an aptitude test, and only after the authority has tested whether experience or lifelong learning already covers the difference (Abs. 4). And the applicant chooses between the two, except for trades needing precise knowledge of Austrian law (Abs. 7). Swiss qualifications come in through § 373b, which puts Swiss nationals on the same footing as EU and EEA nationals for establishing here.

One link between paragraphs decides a date. Under § 340 Abs. 1 a recognition pending when you register must be taken into account if it becomes final inside the three-month window, and the day of the trade registration is the day the evidence arrived and that recognition took legal effect.

This is where most foreign-owned Austrian companies get into difficulty. § 9 Abs. 1 is short: legal persons and registered partnerships may exercise trades, but must have appointed a managing director under § 39. A shareholder's own licence does not cover the company: company formation austria covers the entity side.

§ 39 says who that person can be. Abs. 1 makes the appointment compulsory where the holder cannot furnish the certificate of competence or has no domestic residence, then removes the second limb for an EEA national resident in the EEA, for a Swiss national resident in Switzerland or the EEA, and where service and enforcement of administrative penalties are secured by agreement. For most EU founders it never bites.

Abs. 2 is the expensive part. For a trade needing a certificate of competence, a company's managing director must either belong to the organ appointed by law to represent it, or be "ein mindestens zur Hälfte der wöchentlichen Normalarbeitszeit im Betrieb beschäftigter, nach den Bestimmungen des Sozialversicherungsrechtes voll versicherungspflichtiger Arbeitnehmer": an employee working at least half the weekly standard working hours in the business and fully liable to compulsory social insurance. Both halves are conditions. Abs. 2a adds a domestic-residence requirement for the managing director, lifted for an EEA or Swiss national resident in the EEA or Switzerland.

Then comes the part that makes a paper appointment pointless. Abs. 3 requires the holder actually to make use of a managing director who is correspondingly active in the business. Abs. 4 requires the authority to report an employee appointment to the umbrella association of social-insurance institutions, and the carrier to report back when that person's compulsory insurance ends. The loop closes without anybody complaining, and under Abs. 5 the holder is released from responsibility under § 370 only if a compliant appointment was notified. None of this is a nominee arrangement, which is a disclosure question under the beneficial-ownership rules: nominee director service austria deals with that.

§ 13 lists the grounds that exclude a person, and the thresholds are specific enough to read before anybody is put forward as a director.

A natural person is excluded by an unspent conviction for the creditor and social-contribution offences in StGB §§ 153d, 153e and 156 to 159, or for any other offence where the sentence exceeded three months' imprisonment or 180 daily rates. Fiscal offences are separate: a penalty above EUR 726 bars the person for five years. Convictions abroad count: each provision closes by extending it to comparable facts realised outside Austria.

Entities have their own grounds. Abs. 3 excludes an entity where insolvency proceedings were not opened, or were discontinued, for want of cost-covering assets. Abs. 5 and Abs. 7 join the two sides: a natural person with a decisive influence on an excluded entity is excluded, and the reverse. Abs. 8 adds a flat five-year bar after a withdrawal under § 87 Abs. 1 Z 3a, with no dispensation available.

For the other grounds § 26 requires a dispensation where repetition in the trade is not to be feared, or where the present financial position makes it expectable that the payment obligations will be met, and shuts it where any other § 13 ground is present.

Nothing, and there is a paragraph for that rather than a portal page.

§ 333a provides that documents and certificates drawn up and issued on the basis of the Trade Act, and applications directed at drawing them up and issuing them, are exempt from federal stamp duties and administrative charges. It was inserted by BGBl. I Nr. 94/2017 with effect from 18 July 2017, and the same document carries a binding note that for GISA extracts the exemption applies at the earliest from 1 May 2018. So the registration is free, and so is the extract that proves it. What a trade licence does cost is the qualification, any application for recognition, and the employment of a managing director where § 39 Abs. 2 requires an employed one. Our own fees are quoted on request.

There is no published processing time for an Austrian trade registration and this page gives none. What exists is a pair of ceilings on the authority and one rule about when they start running.

Under § 340 Abs. 1, where the conditions are met and the trade is not one of the thirteen, the authority must enter the applicant in GISA within three months at the latest and notify them by sending the extract. Under Abs. 2, for one of the thirteen, it must decide within three months at the latest. Both are obligations on the authority, not estimates of how long a case takes.

The starting date is worth planning around: the day of the trade registration is the day on which all the evidence required by § 339 Abs. 3 reached the authority and any required finding of individual competence, dispensation or recognition took legal effect. One defect also surprises people who cleared the name with the register court: § 340 Abs. 1 treats a company name that would seriously mislead about the content of the trade as a failure of the statutory conditions.

Build note, not copy: the words "at the latest" must survive into any summary card, excerpt or meta rendering of this section. Dropping them converts a statutory ceiling into a processing promise.

GISA, the Gewerbeinformationssystem Austria, is the trade register, and its extract is what you produce when a bank, a customer or a procurement portal asks for evidence of the licence.

§ 365a records two layers: a public one, and a second covering the residential address, nationality, the social-insurance number and notes of any dispensation, § 19 finding or foreign-qualification recognition. § 365e Abs. 4 requires the responsible federal ministry to publish the open layer on the internet, free of charge, and Abs. 3 adds that a request must always be about a single person or business, so the register is a lookup rather than a list to download. Extracts come in five forms under § 365c, each with an official signature, including one covering a whole Gewerbelizenz.

A licence is not a document you file away. Four ordinary business events each have a filing attached, and three of them have a deadline.

Adding an activity. Registering a further trade extends the Gewerbelizenz (§ 38 Abs. 3). Where the addition is a free trade it is not a fresh registration at all: it is notified to the authority under § 345, with § 339 Abs. 2 and Abs. 3 applying to the notification.

Working somewhere else. Under § 46 Abs. 1 the licence already entitles you to exercise the trade at further operating sites, subject to a notification that must reach the authority at the latest on the day exercise starts or stops there. The location named at registration is what the file hangs on, which is why the address is worth settling first: how a registered address in Vienna works for a GmbH.

Pausing. § 93 Abs. 1 requires dormancy and resumption to be notified to the regional chamber of commerce within three weeks. A dormant licence is not a cancelled one.

Reorganising. § 11 Abs. 4 carries the authorisation over to the successor on a merger, conversion, contribution, combination, real division or demerger. The right arises when the reorganisation is entered in the Firmenbuch, if the successor meets the conditions, and the transfer must be notified within six months of that entry, or it ends on that date (§ 11 Abs. 6 with § 85 Z 6).

A new licence also sets filings running that have nothing to do with trade law, among them the beneficial-ownership return within four weeks of the first entry in the source register: the beneficial owner register guide has that one. And it makes you a member of the Austrian economic chamber by operation of law: Wirtschaftskammergesetz 1998 § 2 Abs. 2 makes members of undertakings subject to the Gewerbeordnung in any case, and Abs. 3 reaches holding companies entered in the Firmenbuch above them. Compulsory social insurance follows the same trigger: cover begins on the day the authorisation is obtained (GSVG § 6 Abs. 1 Z 1).

A foreign company with neither a seat nor an establishment in Austria may not exercise a trade here, which sends most foreign parents to a branch or a subsidiary. The exception is real, and it has its own filing.

§ 373a lets a national of an EU or EEA state who is established in another such state, and lawfully exercises the activity there, exercise it in Austria temporarily and occasionally, on the same conditions as an Austrian. No certificate of competence is required where the activity or the training is regulated in the state of establishment, or where neither is and the provider exercised the activity for at least a year in the previous ten. Abs. 3 extends this to companies within Article 34 of the EEA Agreement, adding that a company with only its registered seat there must have an actual and continuous link with an EEA economy.

The filing is in Abs. 4. Where the activity is one of the trades listed in § 94, the provider must notify the federal minister in writing in advance of first taking it up, with details of professional-indemnity cover, and must renew that notification once a year. Breach is punished as unlicensed trading. Swiss providers come in through § 373b on the same terms, with one limit in the paragraph: the services may not exceed 90 working days per calendar year.

Exercising a trade without the required licence is an administrative offence punishable by a fine of up to EUR 3,600 (§ 366 Abs. 1 Z 1), and the same ceiling applies where a free trade is exercised repeatedly outside the Gewerbelizenz (Z 10). § 367 sets a second tier at up to EUR 2,180, and three of its heads are the ones a foreign-owned company runs into: trading without having notified a compliant managing director where one was required (Z 1); exercising one of the thirteen § 95 trades without approval of the appointment (Z 2); and a first exercise of a free trade outside the Gewerbelizenz (Z 8).

There is one cure. Under § 371b, where the authority finds that free-trade activity has grown past what the Gewerbelizenz covers, it must first invite the trader in writing to file the missing notification within three weeks. That invitation counts as a prosecution act under VStG § 32; but if it is answered in time, further prosecution for those excess activities is inadmissible.

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: §§ 9, 11, 13, 16, 18, 19, 26, 29, 38, 39, 46, 85, 93, 94, 95, 333a, 339, 340, 345, 365a, 365c, 365e, 366, 367, 371b and 373a to 373e, in the versions in force on that date, among them § 39 from 1 January 2020, § 340 and § 367 from 1 November 2025 and § 345 from 1 January 2026.
• Wirtschaftskammergesetz 1998 § 2; GSVG § 6 Abs. 1 and § 18 Abs. 1; Directive 2005/36/EC; StGB §§ 153d, 153e and 156 to 159; FinStrG § 37 and § 46; VStG § 32.