Austria minimum wage

What this value means

STRUCTURAL NULL — CONFIRMED, NOT ASSUMED. Austria has NO statutory national minimum wage and never has had one. The responsible ministry states this in terms on its own page (loaded 2026-07-22): 'In Austria, there is no statutory minimum wage that applies to all employees. Minimum wages or minimum salaries for the respective occupational group or sector are mainly regulated in collective agreements WITHOUT THE INVOLVEMENT OF THE STATE.' Any single number published elsewhere for 'the Austrian minimum wage' is either one sector's collective-agreement rate, a social-partner aspiration, or a statistical average — none of them is law, and none may be substituted here. HOW PAY FLOORS ACTUALLY WORK. Minimum pay is fixed by Kollektivverträge (KV), sector-level agreements concluded under the Arbeitsverfassungsgesetz between collective-bargaining-capable bodies — on the employer side overwhelmingly the Wirtschaftskammer Österreich and its sectoral divisions (membership of which is compulsory for Austrian businesses, which is precisely why coverage is so high), on the employee side the ÖGB unions. The ministry states there are OVER 800 collective agreements in force. Each sets its own Mindestgrundlohn/Mindestgehalt by occupational or function group, with seniority and previous-service steps, so the floor for a metalworker, a hotel worker and a retail cashier are three different numbers with no common statutory basement. A KV binds directly and cannot be undercut by employment contract or works agreement, and underpayment is an administrative offence as well as a civil claim (three-year limitation, subject to much shorter KV forfeiture clauses, commonly two or three months). COVERAGE — TWO DIFFERENT FIGURES CIRCULATE AND THE LEAD FIGURE IS NOT THE OFFICIAL ONE. The Sozialministerium's own page says 'Around 95 percent of employees throughout Austria are covered by collective agreements.' The widely quoted 98% figure comes from comparative datasets (OECD/ICTWSS-type collections) rather than from the Austrian government, and is not cited here. Neither figure is served as a value; both are recorded so a reader knows why sources disagree. STATUTORY SUBSTITUTES THAT ARE STILL NOT A NATIONAL MINIMUM WAGE. Where no KV can exist, three instruments fill the gap and are legally binding, but each is sectoral: (a) SATZUNG (§ 18 ArbVG) — the Bundeseinigungsamt declares an existing KV generally binding for a comparable uncovered group; (b) MINDESTLOHNTARIF (§ 22 ArbVG, verified today) — the Bundeseinigungsamt fixes minimum pay on application by a collective-bargaining-capable employee body, but ONLY for groups for whom a KV cannot be concluded because no collective-bargaining-capable employer body exists AND no Satzung has been made; the classic case is domestic and household staff; (c) HEIMARBEITSTARIFE for homeworkers, and separately fixed Lehrlingseinkommen for apprentices. NONE of these is national in scope and none may be promoted into this field. THERE ARE GENUINE GAPS. The ministry's own page confirms that in the few cases with neither a KV nor any other collective instrument, the employer owes only 'appropriate or customary remuneration' (angemessenes bzw. ortsübliches Entgelt), and gives fitness-centre employees as a live example. That residual standard is a judicial benchmark under § 1152 ABGB, not a rate — further proof that no universal floor exists. WHAT THE MINISTRY DOES SAY ABOUT LEVELS, AND WHY IT IS NOT THE VALUE: 'Most collective agreements already provide for minimum wages of at least EUR 1,700 gross 14 times a year, resulting in an average monthly wage of EUR 1,983 gross.' The EUR 1,700 is a social-partner convergence target reached across most KVs (successor to the 2017 social-partnership commitment to lift all KVs to EUR 1,500 monthly), and EUR 1,983 is a derived average. Neither is enacted, neither binds any individual employer, and serving either as Austria's minimum wage would be false. Note also that Austrian KV pay is quoted 14 TIMES A YEAR (Urlaubszuschuss and Weihnachtsremuneration), so multiplying a monthly KV figure by 12 understates annual entitlement by about 17% — the single most common arithmetic error in Austrian pay data. EU LAW POSITION, VERIFIED AT EUR-LEX. Directive (EU) 2022/2041 on adequate minimum wages had a transposition deadline of 15 November 2024 (Art. 17(1)), but Art. 1(4)(a) provides that nothing in it obliges a Member State whose wage formation is ensured exclusively via collective agreements to introduce a statutory minimum wage; the Chapter II adequacy machinery bites only on states that HAVE a statutory rate. Art. 4(2) requires an action plan only where collective bargaining coverage is below 80%; the Sozialministerium confirms Austria is above that threshold and therefore has no action-plan obligation. FURTHER 2025 DEVELOPMENT: in Case C-19/23 Kingdom of Denmark v Parliament and Council, judgment of 11 NOVEMBER 2025, the Court of Justice dismissed the application to annul the Directive in its entirety and dismissed the alternative challenge to Art. 4(1)(d) and Art. 4(2), but ANNULLED Art. 5(2), the words 'including the elements referred to in paragraph 2' in the fifth sentence of Art. 5(1), and the words 'provided that the application of that mechanism does not lead to a decrease of the statutory minimum wage' in Art. 5(3). Those annulled provisions govern criteria for setting STATUTORY minimum wages and so have no direct effect in Austria; the collective-bargaining promotion duty in Art. 4 survives. The judgment therefore REINFORCES rather than threatens the Austrian model. Austria is one of five EU member states without a statutory wage floor, alongside Italy, Denmark, Finland and Sweden. DO NOT SUBSTITUTE, under any circumstances: a KV Mindestgrundlohn, the EUR 1,700 or EUR 1,500 social-partner figures, the EUR 1,983 average, a Mindestlohntarif, an EU or OECD average, or any 'effective minimum wage' estimate. ACCESS QUIRKS: the German-language mirror of the ministry page at /Themen/Arbeit/Arbeitsrecht/Entlohnung/Mindestlohn-in-Oesterreich.html returns HTTP 404 — use the /en/ path cited above, which is a full official translation. The sibling ministry page 'Minimum Wage Directive' carries a stated last-update date of 24 February 2025 and therefore predates and does not mention the November 2025 CJEU judgment. RIS (ris.bka.gv.at), where ArbVG §§ 18 and 22 live, returns HTTP 503 without a browser User-Agent.

Get it programmatically

curl https://euroref.dev/v1/at/minimum-wage
# $0.001 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History:    curl https://euroref.dev/v1/at/minimum-wage/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://euroref.dev/provenance/at/minimum-wage

Other Austria series: policy interest rate · VAT rate · public holidays · inflation rate (CPI) · corporate tax rate · income tax rates · ECB main refinancing rate · late-payment interest rate