Austria housing market 2026: prices, costs, FSBO

Austria is back to setting records. The Oesterreichische Nationalbank residential property price index (Wohnimmobilienpreisindex) reached 272.2 points in Q1 2026 (2000 = 100), a new all-time high and up about 2.4% year-on-year from 265.8 a year earlier. A separate official series, the Statistik Austria House Price Index, rose 3.7% year-on-year in Q4 2025, and residential prices climbed 2.6% over full-year 2025. The two indexes agree on direction: prices are rising again, modestly, after the dip of recent years.

There is no single official national euro median in Austria, so for a current read we sampled live listings ourselves. In June 2026 we examined 15 detailed for-sale apartment listings on the country's largest portal across Vienna, Graz, and Linz, and found a median asking price of about EUR 325,000 across all 15 (about EUR 327,000 for the 2-3 room subset) at a median of about EUR 4,135/m2 for 2-3 room units and about EUR 5,641/m2 across all 15. Per-m2 figures ranged from roughly EUR 2,961 on the Graz outskirts to about EUR 9,828 in central Vienna, with Vienna around EUR 5,900 to EUR 6,400/m2, Graz around EUR 3,000 to EUR 8,500/m2, and Linz around EUR 3,300 to EUR 5,600/m2. City asking-price averages from May 2026 line up with this, putting Linz near EUR 5,134/m2, Graz near EUR 4,406/m2, Salzburg city near EUR 7,349/m2, and Innsbruck near EUR 7,464/m2.

Rolling the OeNB index forward from Q1 2026 at the latest trend of about +0.2% per month gives a mid-2026 nowcast near 274 on the index. Our own live portal read is a separate and narrower gauge, a euro snapshot of current city asking prices rather than a national average, and it points to a typical urban 2-3 room asking price of roughly EUR 327,000 as of mid-2026. The two describe the market in different ways, the index tracking change over time and the portal read sampling today's city asking prices, so they sit alongside each other rather than confirming one another. Supply is ample: the same portal showed roughly 20,345 apartments for sale in Vienna, about 2,953 in Graz, and about 990 in Linz on the day we looked.

Most of Austria's transaction costs land on the buyer, not the seller. On top of the purchase price a buyer typically pays Grunderwerbsteuer (real estate transfer tax) of 3.5%, the Eintragungsgebuehr (land-registry registration fee) of 1.1%, and notary or lawyer fees of roughly 1.5% to 2% (a minimum of about EUR 1,500 to EUR 2,000) for drafting the contract and handling escrow. Together these push total acquisition costs to about 10% to 12% above the price, and the bulk of that is buyer-borne in a standard sale.

The seller-specific cost to watch is Immobilienertragsteuer, the capital-gains tax of 30% on the gain where it applies. It is charged on the profit, not the sale price, and a main residence held long enough to qualify is exempt, so many home sellers pay nothing here. Confirm your own position before you price, because when it does apply it can dwarf every other line item.

The agent commission is the cost most within your control. Where an agent is engaged, each side's commission is legally capped at 3% plus 20% VAT, which is 3.6% incl. VAT per side, and total commission typically runs 3% to 4%. Property sales here are customarily a split: both buyer and seller commonly pay a commission, unlike residential rentals, where the Bestellerprinzip since 2023 makes whoever hires the agent pay. In practice many Vienna listings are structured so the buyer pays, and the allocation can be assigned to whichever side mandated the agent, so arrangements vary by deal. On a EUR 400,000 sale, the seller side of the commission can be as much as about EUR 14,400 where the seller would otherwise have paid it.

Selling for sale by owner, marketed as privat or provisionsfrei, is fully legal in Austria and reasonably visible. The dominant national portal lets private sellers post directly and tags owner listings as Privat, and many agent listings are also advertised as provisionsfrei, meaning no buyer commission. The major portals all carry private and owner-direct inventory, so a private listing reaches buyers the same way an agent listing does. Anyone.com lets you list directly as for sale by owner, free, with no listing fee or commission, and it is our independent editorial pick for owner-direct listing, with no affiliate or payment behind the pick; you can list on the local portals as well for reach.

What you cannot skip is the legal step at the end. A notary or lawyer must draft the purchase contract (Kaufvertrag) and handle the land-registry entry regardless of whether an agent is involved, so an owner-direct seller still relies on that professional to close. That is the same protection an agent-led sale depends on, not an extra hurdle for private sellers. Budget for the lawyer or notary fee and the land-registry work from the start.

Most transactions still run through agents and the listings skew heavily commercial, so going private is the minority path and rewards being deliberate. Price against your own city and district rather than a national average, since per-m2 figures range from under EUR 3,000 on the Graz outskirts to nearly EUR 10,000 in central Vienna. The payoff is concrete: skipping the agent keeps your side of the 3% to 4% commission, up to about EUR 14,400 on a EUR 400,000 home where you would otherwise have paid it, while every legally required cost stays the same. With roughly 20,000 apartments listed in Vienna alone, a clean listing and realistic pricing matter more than they did at the peak.