Income and wealth percentile in Austria

What the numbers say about Austria.

Austrian median income is around €43,600 per adult, with an average of €57,000. Those numbers sit close to Belgium and slightly above Germany on income, supported by a strong social-partnership model that has kept sectoral wage growth steady through cycles. The economy runs on a familiar central-European mix: industrial machinery, automotive components, banking with central-and-eastern European reach, tourism in the Alps, and a thick services layer in Vienna.

The housing situation explains why Austrian household wealth looks lower than wages suggest. Median household net worth per adult is around €83,000, well below Germany and far below France or the UK. Vienna alone houses about 60 percent of its population in subsidised public, cooperative, or limited-profit rental units, a model dating back to the 1920s Red Vienna programme that no other European capital has matched in scale. The result is a city where rents stay manageable for the median resident, but where private-property wealth is much less common than in any peer country. Younger Austrians outside Vienna face rising property prices but a more accessible market than in Munich or Paris.

Wealth concentration at the top is sharper than the median figure suggests. The top 1% threshold for net worth sits above €2.2 million, with the top 0.1% above €8.6 million. Austria has a long tradition of family-owned industrial firms, often headquartered in Linz, Steyr, or Graz, and an older private-banking sector centred in Vienna. The country abolished its inheritance tax in 2008 and has no general wealth tax, which has favoured intergenerational transfer of business and property holdings at the top.

Vienna pulls disproportionately on the top of the income distribution, with the headquarters of OMV, Erste Bank, Raiffeisen, and most other large Austrian firms. Linz and Graz hold significant industrial-sector top incomes. The Alpine tourism regions in Tyrol, Salzburg, and Vorarlberg generate seasonal but high per-capita revenue, with hotel-owning families forming a notable component of regional wealth. Carinthia and Burgenland sit somewhat below the national median.

Two themes shape the next decade. The energy-cost shock since 2022 has hit Austrian industry harder than the headline figures suggest, with several family-owned firms restructuring quietly. And immigration policy has tightened, even though the labour market remains short of skilled workers, especially in healthcare and the building trades.