Articles · Starting out
Starting out as self-employed in Austria
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Five registrations, in a particular order, with one question that has to be settled before any of them. Here is the whole path on one page — and where to read further once you are on it.
Figures for 2026 · Last updated November 2026
Diese Seite auf Deutsch →Starting out at a glance
- Settle this first
- May you be self-employed here?
- Two routes
- Trade licence, or Neue Selbständige
- Who you register with
- District authority, Finanzamt, SVS
- Deadline
- Tell the Finanzamt within one month
- VAT-free up to
- €55,000 turnover
- Put aside
- About a third of your profit
Estimate your numbers
See roughly what income tax and SVS will take from your revenue in your first year.
May you work here at all?
Before any registration, one question has to be answered — and it is the one people skip, because it does not feel like a business question.
If you are a citizen of the EU, the EEA or Switzerland, you may be self-employed in Austria without any permit. You can go straight to the next section.
If you are a third-country national, you need a residence title that actually allows self-employment. There are several — the Red-White-Red Card for self-employed key workers, the Red-White-Red Card for start-up founders, and a residence permit for self-employed work. Which one fits depends on your plans, and the requirements are substantial.
The mistake that costs the most
A residence permit that allows you to take a job does not automatically allow you to be self-employed. These are different titles with different conditions. Check yours before you register a business, not after.
This is immigration law, not tax law, and it is not what we do. The Austrian Business Agency maintains an English-language overview of the residence permits for self-employed work, opens in a new tab, and that is the right place to start.
Which kind of self-employed are you?
Austria splits the self-employed into two groups, and almost everything downstream follows from which one you are in.
- With a trade licence (Gewerbetreibende) — IT services, photography, most consulting, personal training, the trades. You register a Gewerbe, become a member of the Economic Chamber, and your SVS insurance starts the same day.
- Without a trade licence (Neue Selbständige) — writing, lecturing, translating, certain therapeutic and artistic work. No licence to register, but you have to register yourself with the SVS, and only once your profit passes €6,613.20 in 2026.
Important
This is not a choice. It follows from the activity itself, and getting it wrong is corrected retroactively. If your work sits near the line, have it checked before you register — the Economic Chamber's founder service does this free of charge.
Trade licences also come in two kinds. Most are free trades, which you can register immediately. Some are regulated and require proof of qualification. Which is which is not always obvious from the job title.
What each route means for your social insurance is covered in our full SVS guide.
The registrations, in order
The order matters — each step produces something the next one needs.
- 1
Clarify your route — Trade licence or Neue:r Selbständige:r, free trade or regulated. The Economic Chamber's founder service will confirm it for you and costs nothing.
- 2
Register the trade — or don't — With a licence: at the district authority (Bezirkshauptmannschaft) or city magistrate, or online through the business portal. Registration itself is free. Without a licence: nothing to register here.
- 3
Tell the Finanzamt — Within one month of starting. You complete a questionnaire about your expected income and receive your tax number. This is separate from every other registration — nobody does it for you.
- 4
Sort out the SVS — With a trade licence this happens automatically once you register. As a Neue:r Selbständige:r you register yourself, within one month of starting.
- 5
Decide on VAT — Below €55,000 turnover in 2026 you can stay VAT-exempt as a small business: no VAT on your invoices, but no input VAT back either. Above it, or if you opt in voluntarily, you need a VAT number and file returns.
The discount most founders miss
Austria waives a set of fees and charges for genuinely new businesses under the Neugründungs-Förderungsgesetz, usually shortened to NeuFöG. It covers things like stamp duties and federal administrative fees on the founding paperwork, and — if you hire — certain employer contributions in the first twelve months.
Two conditions matter: it has to be a genuinely new business structure, and you must not have run a comparable business in the previous five years.
Timing, not paperwork, is what people lose it on
The exemption is claimed with an official confirmation (form NeuFö2), and it has to be presented when you claim the exemption — not reconstructed afterwards. Get the confirmation before you file the registrations, not after.
What your first year actually costs
Two bills, from two authorities, on completely different schedules.
The SVS starts immediately if you have a trade licence — €160.81 a month in 2026, even at zero revenue. That feels manageable, and that is the problem: in your first two years those contributions are only provisional, and the real amount is charged years later. Our SVS guide explains how that works, and the year-end check explains what to do about it before it happens.
The Finanzamt starts late. You pay no income tax in your first year at all. The bill for it arrives with your first assessment, typically two years on — together with quarterly prepayments for the year you are then in. See our guide to income tax for the self-employed.Soon
Which leads to the single most useful habit you can start on day one: put roughly a third of your profit aside, in a separate account, and do not touch it. In your first two years you will be setting aside more than you are being billed. That surplus is not spare money — it is the back-payment, waiting.
Do you need a tax advisor?
Honestly: no, not legally. Plenty of self-employed people in Austria file their own returns and manage perfectly well, and if your situation is simple and your German is good, that is a reasonable choice.
It gets harder on three specific counts. Everything — the forms, the online portals, the letters — is in German, and the deadlines run from the day a letter is delivered, not the day you understand it. The terms have no clean English equivalents, so translating them does not tell you what to do. And the expensive mistakes in the first years are not the ones you notice; they are the allowances nobody told you about and the deadlines you did not know were running.
That is the honest case for having someone alongside you — not because the work is impossible, but because in year one you do not yet know what you do not know.
If you are starting from zero in Austria
Setup in Austria
For people who have just moved here and want the whole setup handled in one go, we run a dedicated service together with Miglena Hofer: business registration and tax setup in a single package, from the trade licence and SVS through to your tax office registration, VAT number and first year of filing.
It exists because "which office first" is a genuinely bad first experience of a new country — and because doing it in the wrong order costs time you do not have while you are also finding a flat.
Visit setupinaustria.at, opens in a new tabFrequently asked questions
Can I start before all the registrations are done?
What does it cost to register?
Do I need a business bank account?
Do I have to speak German for any of this?
Official sources
The rules on this page come from official Austrian sources. Most of them are in German.
- Work in Austria — Residence permits for self-employed, opens in a new tab
In English. Which residence titles allow self-employment, and what they require. - WKO — Gewerbeanmeldung, opens in a new tab
Where to register a trade, which documents you need, free versus regulated trades. - WKO — Neugründungs-Förderungsgesetz (NeuFöG), opens in a new tab
What the founder exemption covers, the conditions, and the confirmation you need. - SVS — Sozialversicherungsanstalt der Selbständigen, opens in a new tab
Registration, contribution rules and the insurance threshold for Neue Selbständige.
Not sure which route applies to you?
Book a free 30-minute Tax Check. We work out which registrations you need, in which order, and what your first year will cost. You decide afterwards whether you want to work with us. No obligation.
Fixed annual pricing from €800. 600+ clients in Austria. All correspondence in English or German — your choice.
Reviewed by Pascal Schraml
Austrian certified tax advisor (Steuerberater), founder of PSTax
Pascal has advised self-employed clients in Austria since 2023 and reviews every guide on this site for technical accuracy. PSTax works with 600+ clients, more than half of them non-native German speakers.
About this page. All figures apply to 2026 and change annually. This guide gives general information about becoming self-employed in Austria; it is not individual advice and cannot replace it. Questions of residence and work authorisation are immigration law and outside our professional scope — the sources above are the right starting point for those. Reviewed by Pascal Schraml, Austrian certified tax advisor (Steuerberater), PSTax Steuerberatung FlexCo.
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