Austria · Passive income
Settlement Permit excluding Gainful Employment (Niederlassungsbewilligung – ausgenommen Erwerbstätigkeit)
Open but quota-limited and heavily oversubscribed. This is the closest thing Austria has to a passive residency route. It is emphatically not a golden visa. There is no investment component, only an income test and a race for a quota place.
The quota is the whole story here. Austria's Niederlassungsverordnung 2026 sets roughly 5,616 quota places nationally across all quota-bound categories, down from 5,846 in 2025. Of those, only about 285 are reported for Privatiers. A one-week December booking window allocates them all. No amount of wealth improves your position, and you may not work, in Austria or remotely.
Qualifying routes
No investment required. You need regular monthly income of double the ASVG §293 reference rate. For 2026, that is roughly EUR 2,616.78/month for a single applicant, EUR 4,128.24 for a couple, plus about EUR 201.88 per child.
The facts
- Total landed cost
- No investment threshold. Costs are accommodation, comprehensive health insurance, modest official fees and legal assistance, realistically under EUR 10,000 plus living costs. The scarce resource here is the quota place, not money.
- Route type
- Income requirement
- Timeline
- 3–12 months (The binding constraint is the annual quota. Applications for the 2026 quota had to be booked online during a one-week window, 1–8 December 2025, at Austrian embassies and consulates. Miss the window, and you wait a year.)
- Physical presence
- Genuine settlement in Austria is required. The permit is generally issued for 12 months, then renewed.
- Family
- SpouseMinor children, though each family member uses up a quota place
- Permanent residency
- You can qualify for Daueraufenthalt-EU after 5 years of lawful, continuous settlement, provided you meet Austria's integration and language requirements.
- Citizenship
- The ordinary route requires 10 years' lawful residence, or 6 in limited cases. It also requires you to renounce your existing citizenship.
- Language test
- Ordinary naturalisation calls for B1 German. A2 German is generally required at permit renewal stages under the Integration Agreement.
- Dual citizenship
- Not permitted. You would have to renounce.
- Requirements
- A quota place (Quotenplatz), secured during the annual booking windowRegular income of roughly double the ASVG reference rate, about EUR 2,616.78/month for a single applicant, EUR 4,128.24 for a couple, for 2026Adequate accommodation in AustriaComprehensive health insurance valid in AustriaNo gainful employment anywhereA clean criminal record
- You may not engage in any gainful employment. This includes remote work for a foreign employer, and it catches many applicants by surprise.
- The quota is tiny, and it is allocated in a one-week annual booking window. Miss it, and you lose a full year.
- The 285 Privatier sub-quota figure comes from secondary press reporting. The primary Niederlassungsverordnung 2026 text could not be retrieved, since the official RIS database was returning errors. Treat the exact sub-quota as reported rather than confirmed.
- Austria's ordinary naturalisation demands renunciation of your existing citizenship. This route leads to a passport only at the cost of your current one.
- German language obligations attach under the Integration Agreement, and they escalate at renewal.
- Austria taxes income over EUR 1m at 55% and has full CFC and exit-tax regimes. Residence here is a serious tax event, not a flag-planting exercise.