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 — and 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. Austria's Niederlassungsverordnung 2026 sets roughly 5,616 quota places nationally across all quota-bound categories (down from 5,846 in 2025), of which only about 285 are reported for Privatiers. A one-week December booking window allocates them. No amount of wealth improves your position — and you may not work, in Austria or remotely.
Qualifying routes
No investment. Requires regular monthly income of double the ASVG §293 reference rate: for 2026 roughly EUR 2,616.78/month for a single applicant and 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 is the quota place, not money.
- 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 and renewed
- Family
- spouseminor children — but each family member consumes a quota place
- Permanent residency
- Daueraufenthalt-EU after 5 years' lawful continuous settlement, subject to integration and German requirements
- Citizenship
- 10 years' lawful residence (or 6 in limited cases) under the ordinary route — which requires renouncing your existing citizenship
- Language test
- B1 German for ordinary naturalisation; A2 German generally required for permit renewal stages under the Integration Agreement
- Dual citizenship
- Not permitted — you would have to renounce
- Requirements
- a quota place (Quotenplatz) secured in the annual booking windowregular income of roughly double the ASVG reference rate (about EUR 2,616.78/month single, EUR 4,128.24 couple for 2026)adequate accommodation in Austriacomprehensive health insurance valid in Austriano gainful employment anywhereclean criminal record
- You may not engage in ANY gainful employment — this includes remote work for a foreign employer, which catches many applicants by surprise.
- The quota is tiny and allocated in a one-week annual booking window. Missing it costs a full year.
- The 285 Privatier sub-quota figure comes from secondary press reporting; the primary Niederlassungsverordnung 2026 text could not be retrieved (the official RIS database was returning errors), so treat the exact sub-quota as reported rather than confirmed.
- Austria's ordinary naturalisation demands renunciation of your existing citizenship — so this route leads to a passport only at the cost of your current one.
- German language obligations attach under the Integration Agreement and escalate at renewal.
- Austria taxes at 55% over EUR 1m and has full CFC and exit-tax regimes — residence here is a serious tax event, not a flag-planting exercise.