Austria Electricity Tariff API

How a household electricity price is built in Austria

Austrian households have chosen their supplier freely since 2001, and every address keeps a statutory right to default supply from the regional incumbent if it never chooses at all. The competitive half of the bill is genuinely competitive — provincial incumbents against national challengers — while the regulated half is unusually centralized: the regulator sets every grid tariff in the country in one annual ordinance, and the renewables levy in another. The one fragmented piece is municipal: a right-of-way levy that only some towns charge, in rates each sets for itself.

What a household bill is made of

1. 1

   Energy

   The competitive part, freely priced by the supplier. Fixed-price products quote one rate for the contract term; "floater" products re-index against a declared reference every month, quarter or half-year; dynamic products pass the hourly day-ahead exchange price through with a markup. Austria has formed its own bidding zone since the German-Austrian split in 2018, so the reference price is Austrian, not German.

2. 2

   Grid charges (Systemnutzungsentgelt)

   Set nationally by the regulator, not by the operator. Although the country has well over a hundred network operators, tariffs are priced per grid area rather than per company, so many small operators publish the same numbers. A household sits on the lowest network level and pays a flat annual capacity charge plus a per-kWh work price that varies by area, plus a loss charge and a metering charge. A seasonal time-of-use discount now cuts the work price during summer midday hours for electronically metered customers.

3. 3

   Taxes and levies

   A federal electricity excise, a renewables contribution (legally a percentage markup on the national average grid charge, but published and billed as fixed per-kWh and per-metering-point amounts), a flat annual renewables lump sum per metering point, and — in some municipalities only — the Gebrauchsabgabe, a right-of-way levy governed by nine different provincial laws. It exists in two forms, a flat per-kWh rate or a percentage of the energy and/or grid bill, and in some network areas it is already inside the grid tariff and must not be added twice.

4. 4

   VAT

   20%, the standard rate, on every component including the levies. There is no reduced rate for domestic electricity and no household/business split.

Regulation shaping the price

• E-Control sets all grid tariffs by annual ordinance under an incentive-regulation regime, and runs the statutory tariff database every supplier must file its products into.
• The Elektrizitätswirtschaftsgesetz, in force since 2026, codifies suppliers’ price-change rights and obliges them to pass fallen procurement costs on within six months.
• Every household has a statutory right to default supply (Grundversorgung) at the incumbent’s published standard price, and since 2026 a means-tested social tariff caps the price for a first tranche of annual consumption.
• Rooftop solar is supported through a market premium and a monthly-set feed-in tariff administered by OeMAG; households can alternatively sell surplus to any supplier at a commercial buy-back rate.