Hiring on Austria's Red-White-Red Card for shortage occupations

The Red-White-Red Card for skilled workers in shortage occupations is Austria's main route for a non-EU trade hire. The worker must score 55 of 90 points on the statutory scale, the job must sit on the annual shortage occupation regulation, and the Settlement and Residence Act gives the authority eight weeks to decide.

The application fee is €218, set by the Austrian residence authorities, and the employer must pay the collective agreement rate for the position. The route exists because Austria measures shortage rather than asserting it. An occupation enters the list when there were fewer than 1.5 registered job seekers for every vacancy over the preceding year, a ratio the Public Employment Service calculates from its own records. If the ratio is met, the individual labour market test is waived and the employer does not have to prove an unsuccessful search for each post.

The 2026 list and what it covers

The Fachkräfteverordnung 2026, published as BGBl. II Nr. 316/2025 and in force since 1 January 2026, sets 64 nationwide shortage occupations and 66 regional ones. The regional annexes run for every federal province except Vienna. The Federal Ministry of Labour and Economy issues the regulation each year after consulting the Austrian Federal Economic Chamber and the Austrian Trade Union Federation, and the 2026 list is slightly shorter than the 2025 one, which the chambers attribute to rising unemployment rather than to shortages easing.

Engineering and technical roles dominate both the nationwide and the regional annexes. Skilled trades, healthcare, transport, construction and commerce fill most of the remainder, and the regional lists carry occupations that would never justify a national entry, from locomotive drivers to early childhood educators. An occupation listed only for Styria or Carinthia qualifies a worker for a post in that province and not for the same post in Vienna, so the workplace address settles the question before the CV does.

Points, pay and the two authorities

The points scale allocates a maximum of 30 for qualification, 20 for work experience, 25 for language skills and 15 for age, and the worker needs 55. Qualification for a shortage occupation means completed vocational training recognised as equivalent to the Austrian apprenticeship or school qualification for the trade, which is the point at which most South Asian trade certification has to be documented rather than asserted. German or English at a certified level carries a large share of the score, and age is scored downwards from the early thirties.

Pay is the second gate and it is not a national figure. For shortage occupations the employer must pay at least the minimum set by law, regulation or the applicable collective agreement for the position, and higher if overpayment is customary within that company. Because the Kollektivvertrag is negotiated by industry sector rather than by job title, the rate for a welder in metal fabrication differs from the rate for the same welder in construction, and the employer's own sector membership decides which applies.

Two authorities handle the file in sequence. The Public Employment Service carries out the points assessment and must notify the competent settlement and residence authority in writing within four weeks whether the admission conditions are met. The residence authority then issues the card, and the Settlement and Residence Act requires the decision to be taken without delay and at the latest within eight weeks of the application. The four week AMS step sits inside the eight weeks rather than beside it, so the statutory ceiling on the whole procedure is eight weeks from a complete file.

Where an Austrian file slows down

The eight week period is a legal maximum measured from a complete application, and completeness is where Austrian files stall. The usual gap is qualification evidence. A trade certificate from Nepal or India has to be presented with a recognition assessment showing equivalence to the Austrian qualification for that trade, and obtaining that assessment after the application has been lodged adds weeks that the statutory clock does not absorb. The practical sequence is to settle recognition and the language certificate before filing, not during.

The second gap is the collective agreement. An employer that quotes a salary from its own pay scale rather than from the sector agreement will see the file returned, because the AMS checks the offer against the agreement that binds the employer, not against the market. Naming the agreement and the pay group in the offer letter removes the question entirely.

Family members receive a Red-White-Red Card plus, which carries unrestricted access to the Austrian labour market. That matters for a two year or three year placement, where a spouse unable to work is the most common reason a worker leaves before the contract ends.

Austria's eight week ceiling is short by European standards. Germany runs a longer chain with a separate federal employment agency approval, described in the German work permit employer chain, and the EU Blue Card sits alongside both as a parallel route for graduate level roles, set out in the Blue Card directive. The comparison across destinations is collected in the corridor by corridor timeline.

An employer weighing Austria against Germany for a trades intake should compare the recognition burden rather than the permit timeline, because that is where the real weeks sit. Our employers page sets out which parts of that file Werklist prepares and which remain with the employer.