Wage inspections in Austria under the anti wage dumping act

Austria's Anti Wage and Social Dumping Act requires a notification to the Central Coordination Office before work begins, filed separately for each posting. Missing notifications or pay records at the place of work cost up to 20,000 euro under section 26. For underpayment section 29 reaches 400,000 euro.

Austria therefore checks not only whether someone may work but above all whether they are paid correctly. That is the difference from many neighbouring systems, and it is why a formally clean posting to Austria can still become expensive.

The notification to the Central Coordination Office

Section 19 addresses employers and hiring out businesses established in a member state of the European Union, in the European Economic Area or in Switzerland who post or hire out workers to Austria. The notification is filed before work begins, and for mobile transport workers before entry into Austrian territory, exclusively by electronic form through the Federal Ministry of Finance.

The content is listed in the statute: name and address of the employer, the contact person in Austria, names and dates of birth of the workers, their social security numbers, the place of deployment, its duration, the level of pay due, and the type of work. Each posting is notified separately; there is no annual collective filing.

Documents must be kept available at the place of deployment, in German or English: a copy of the notification, form A1 for social security, the employment contract or written statement of terms, payslips, proof of payment, working time records, and the documents showing pay classification. Pay classification is where companies from Germany most often fail, because the Austrian collective agreement applies by sector and pay group rather than by the posting company's own scale.

The penalty range follows the shortfall, not the headcount

Section 29 treats underpayment as a single administrative offence regardless of how many workers are affected. The range is set by the total amount withheld.

One rule inside that table is regularly overlooked and is worth real money: where the employer cooperates in establishing the facts without delay and in full, the next lower range applies instead of the 100,000 euro or 250,000 euro range. The decision whether to open the payroll accounts at once or to stall therefore moves the ceiling by a full step.

The district administrative authority decides in every case. On site checks are carried out by the tax authority bodies, and in construction the holiday and severance pay fund for construction workers acts as a further inspecting body.

The three cases that show up in practice

The first is a late notification. It is often sent on the first day of work, once the crew is already on site. Section 19 requires it before work begins, and a morning inspection does not find an afternoon filing.

The second is pay classification. A fitter paid in Germany on a company scale has to be classified in Austria under the applicable collective agreement, and the difference between the two is exactly the sum against which section 29 measures its tiers. An employer who records the classification in writing before the posting and sends the document with the crew removes the inspection's main finding.

The third is confusing the two procedures. For third country nationals posted to Austria from an EU state the notification is not the right route; here the Foreign Employment Act requires a posting authorisation or an employment permit, applied for by the Austrian client with the Public Employment Service. File a notification instead and the authorisation is missing, which makes the employment unlawful. Which social security evidence applies in both cases is set out in the A1 certificate for postings.

For seasonal businesses there is the added point that the permit and the pay audit are two separate procedures with two separate penalty ranges, as Austria's seasonal quotas show. How these duties sit inside the wider chain of employer responsibility is described in the EU employer sponsorship compliance chain.

An Austrian inspection report is rarely a surprise. It reads the documents the company assembled before the first shift, or did not. Which of those Werklist prepares ahead of a posting is set out on our employers page.