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 the country’s grid tariffs in one annual ordinance — all but the metering charge, for which that ordinance sets only a ceiling — while the federal ministry sets the renewables levy in an ordinance of its own. 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, with one exception. 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. A heat pump or storage heater on a meter of its own that the operator may switch off is billed on a lower interruptible work price from the same ordinance, with no capacity charge — a separate network tariff no address selects. The exception is the metering charge: the ordinance sets only a monthly ceiling per meter, lower for a single-phase meter than for a three-phase one, and each operator prices its own at or below it — so that one charge varies by operator, not by grid area. A seasonal time-of-use discount now cuts the work price during summer midday hours for electronically metered customers — the window itself, not only the discount amount, is fixed by the same national ordinance and is identical in every grid area; only the ct/kWh figure it applies to varies by area.

3. 3

   Taxes and levies

   A federal electricity excise under the Elektrizitätsabgabegesetz — except in Jungholz and Mittelberg (the Kleinwalsertal), two municipalities in the German customs and excise territory under nineteenth-century treaties, where the German electricity tax applies instead; a renewables contribution and a flat annual renewables lump sum per metering point, both under the Erneuerbaren-Ausbau-Gesetz (EAG) and set by ministerial ordinance rather than by the regulator — the contribution is legally a percentage markup on the national average grid charge, but published and billed as fixed per-kWh and per-metering-point amounts; 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 — Vienna’s is 7 % of both, net — and in some network areas it is already inside the grid tariff and must not be added twice. Where it is billed separately it follows the municipality, not the network operator: an operator whose area crosses a town boundary charges it at some of its addresses and not at others, as Wiener Netze does in Vienna but not in the Lower Austrian towns it also serves.

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. The one exception is geographic: in Jungholz and Mittelberg a supplier established there charges 19% instead.

Regulation shaping the price

• E-Control sets the grid tariffs by annual ordinance under an incentive-regulation regime — the metering charge only as a ceiling that each operator prices within — and runs the statutory tariff database every supplier must file its products into.
• The Elektrizitätswirtschaftsgesetz (ElWG), which replaced the ElWOG 2010 and has been in force since 2025 with individual parts phasing in through the end of 2026, codifies suppliers’ price-change rights and obliges them to pass fallen procurement costs on within six months. Its own system-charge provisions are the last part to take effect, and they are what will reshape grid tariffs next.
• Every household has a statutory right to default supply (Grundversorgung) at the incumbent’s published standard price, and since April 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 feed-in tariff administered by OeMAG, which sets each month’s price only after that month has ended; households can alternatively sell surplus to any supplier at a commercial buy-back rate. Feeders up to 5 MW owe no network charge on their export in 2026 — the network-loss charge on feed-in applies only above that size — so a household’s export carries no network or levy charge.

Market structure last reviewed October 2026.