🇦🇹 Payments in Austria

A market of in-store checkouts, cash, and debit cards

The OeNB's Zahlungsmittelstudie (payment methods study) measures how Austrians pay, based on a payment diary kept by the households surveyed. The edition published on June 23, 2026, covers 2025. It finds that 91% of household purchases are paid in person, at the checkout. Cash accounts for 55% of transactions and 45% of spending, down from 63% and 48% three years earlier. Cash has lost more ground in transaction count than in value. The gap between the two shares persists because purchases paid in cash are smaller than the average transaction. The study also finds that half of all payments in Austria are now cashless, which puts the crossing of that threshold in 2025.

The cash share depends first on the size of the purchase. Under €10, 69% of payments are still made with notes and coins. At €100 and up, the cash share drops to 43% and cards take the lead at 48%. Age is the second driver, measured across all amounts. Among 16- to 29-year-olds, cash accounts for 38% of point-of-sale payments and cards for 52%, and one transaction in 10 already starts from a phone or a watch. Among people aged 66 and over, the picture flips, with 76% in cash.

Most Austrians shop online, but online purchases remain a minority by number. 67% of respondents buy online, and half of them do so at least once a month. The payment mix differs from the one in stores. Traditional cards account for 35% of transactions, the largest share but not a majority. Wallets and online payment services such as PayPal, Klarna, Apple Pay, and Google Pay account for 30%, online bank transfers for 23%, and direct debits for 8%. By value, the ranking flips: bank transfers carry 62% of the value paid online, because large purchases such as housing or vehicles are paid that way.

Most cards in Austria are debit cards. PSA counts about 11 million debit cards in circulation and reports 3.45 billion transactions a year across all its services. Nine card payments in 10 at the checkout are contactless. Credit cards remain a minority, and the category's name is misleading. Most so-called credit cards are actually charge cards, paid off in full on a fixed date. The difference lies in repayment: a charge card clears the whole balance when it falls due, while a revolving credit card lets a balance carry over from one month to the next.

Cards: the Maestro exit and a single operator

PSA Payment Services Austria GmbH is the shared utility for Austrian retail payments. Owned by the country's banks, it runs the Bankomat brand, the ATM network, retail clearing, the ems direct debit, and the eps pay-by-bank service. For a merchant or an acquirer entering the market, that concentration shrinks the list of counterparties to a handful. It also makes the availability of payments nationwide depend on a single operator, so PSA's modernization is a matter for the whole market. The agreement with Worldline announced on January 13, 2026, covers PSA's move to a next-generation platform.

Bankomat is a shared national brand, carried by Austrian debit cards and ATMs, with no authorization network of its own. Where girocard or Bancontact route transactions over a network they own, the Bankomatkarte has long relied on Mastercard's, first under the Maestro brand and then as Debit Mastercard. The word Bankomat refers to the card as much as to the ATM. When Mastercard stopped issuing new Maestro cards in Europe on July 1, 2023, Austrian banks switched products within the same network. No domestic brand was co-badged with Maestro, so the switch took away no routing option. The Bankomat brand, which is independent of the product issued, lived on. The banks had moved ahead of the deadline. The Raiffeisen group started migrating to Debit Mastercard in April 2021 and announced that summer that it would replace about 3.3 million cards.

This history, a national brand riding on an international network, has three operational consequences. First, there is no brand selection at the Austrian point of sale, because there is no local rail to route a transaction to. The German debate over routing co-badged girocard transactions has no equivalent in Vienna. The second consequence emerged in practice: Debit Mastercard and Visa Debit work online, where Maestro did not, so Austrian debit cards entered e-commerce. The third concerns merchant setup. A merchant still running its 2021 3-D Secure rules now takes online debit payments it never planned to handle.

Card pricing is governed by EU law. Regulation (EU) 2015/751 caps interchange at 0.2% for consumer debit cards and 0.3% for credit and charge cards, on domestic and intra-EEA transactions. Austrian charge cards fall under the second cap, not the first, which pushes up the average cost of an affluent customer base. Commercial cards fall outside the regulation, with no cap and no surcharging ban, so a B2B portfolio is priced separately. Since January 13, 2018, Article 62 of PSD2 has banned surcharging consumers who pay with a card covered by those caps. Austria transposed PSD2 as the Zahlungsdienstegesetz 2018 (Payment Services Act).

• Ask for interchange++ pricing. The caps in Regulation (EU) 2015/751 cover neither scheme fees nor the acquirer's margin. Without a breakdown, you are negotiating a number you cannot verify.
• Segment by card type. Consumer debit at 0.2%, charge and credit cards at 0.3%, commercial cards outside both the caps and the surcharging ban.
• Do not plan on surcharging consumers. Article 62 of PSD2 has banned it since January 13, 2018, for cards covered by the caps.
• Enable contactless everywhere. Nine card payments in 10 at Austrian checkouts are contactless (OeNB, 2024 data). A flow that forces card insertion adds friction to almost every transaction.
• Review your e-commerce setup for debit cards. Since the move to Debit Mastercard and Visa Debit, Austrian debit cards show up in card-not-present sales, with the authentication rules that come with them.

eps-Überweisung, QR codes, and the move to Wero

eps-Überweisung is the Austrian banks' online bank transfer payment method, launched in 2005 and operated by PSA with STUZZA, the banks' standards body. It works through a redirect. The merchant sends the shopper to their own bank's online banking, the shopper approves a prefilled credit transfer, and the bank's server sends a confirmation back to the merchant. Once accepted, the order is irrevocable. The confirmation tells the merchant, before anything ships, that the payment is guaranteed. About 25 banks take part, including Raiffeisen, Bank Austria, BAWAG P.S.K., Erste Bank, the Sparkassen, and the Volksbank group.

eps does not publish transaction volumes. The eps-ueberweisung.at website advertises more than 11,000 participating online stores but never gives a transaction count. PSA reports 244 million e-commerce transactions processed in a year across all its services, without breaking out eps. A conversion forecast built on these two numbers would compare different scopes. Two things can be verified: the list of participating banks, by name, and the availability table PSA publishes for each service.

Two kinds of QR code coexist in this market, and they work in opposite directions. The European QR code standardized by the European Payments Council, EPC069-12, encodes the payee's details, the amount, and the reference so that a banking app can prefill a SEPA credit transfer. The payer scans, checks, and confirms. With Bluecode, the payer's app displays a single-use barcode or QR code that the checkout scans, and the transaction is then charged to the payer's bank account. The first is used to pay invoices, the second to pay at the checkout. The two are not linked in any way.

Bluecode is run by Blue Code International AG, an Austrian company. In both Austria and Germany it is offered inside banking apps rather than as a standalone app. The service works beyond Europe: a partnership with Ant International lets users in the Bluecode app network pay Alipay merchants in-app. No independent source publishes Bluecode's market share in Austria, and the OeNB does not break it out in its payment diary. Any volume figures attributed to the service therefore rest on no independent measurement.

SEPA instant credit transfers in Austria stem from an EU mandate. Banks have had to receive them since January 9, 2025, and send them since October 9, 2025. Regulation (EU) 2024/886 bans charging more than for a standard credit transfer and requires verification of payee (VoP). PSA opened its instant clearing service in June 2025 and is registered with the European Payments Council as a routing and verification mechanism for VoP. Adoption is lagging the regulatory timetable. The OeNB reports that 80% of Austrians know the term, yet nearly two-thirds say they did not use instant payments in 2025.

Since January 23, 2026, PSA has been preparing a Wero issuing service for banks in Austria and Germany, covering technical integration, compliance, fraud management, dispute handling, and day-to-day operations. Erste Bank Oesterreich took a stake in the European Payments Initiative on June 22, 2026, alongside Raiffeisen Bank International. Three regional Raiffeisenlandesbanken (Lower Austria-Vienna, Upper Austria, and Styria) are set to join them, subject to approval by their supervisory boards. The timeline is still open. No Austrian launch date has been announced, and no end date for eps either. A payment methods plan for 2027 should therefore keep eps and evaluate Wero in parallel.

The cash register requirement and its signature device

The Registrierkassenpflicht (cash register requirement) obliges businesses to record their Barumsätze, as Austrian tax law defines the term, in an electronic cash register. A business is covered once its annual revenue per establishment exceeds €15,000 and its Barumsätze exceed €7,500 for the year. Both thresholds must be met. The requirement takes effect at the start of the fourth month after the end of the VAT reporting period in which the thresholds were crossed. The legal basis is § 131b of the Bundesabgabenordnung (Federal Fiscal Code), with the technical details set out in the Registrierkassensicherheitsverordnung (cash register security ordinance).

The technical security requirement has applied in full since April 1, 2017. Every transaction is signed by a Signaturerstellungseinheit, a signature creation unit registered to the taxpayer. The receipt carries a machine-readable code, in practice a QR code, containing the signature value. Each receipt includes the signature of the previous one, chaining a register's transactions together. Deleting a sale breaks the chain and leaves a detectable gap. The data capture log, the Datenerfassungsprotokoll, keeps the complete sequence and must be produced during an audit.

Three mandatory receipts mark the register's life cycle, and missing them is the most common violation. The Startbeleg is issued for a zero amount when the register goes into service, then verified within a week using the Finance Ministry's Belegcheck app. That check confirms the device works and starts the signature chain. The Monatsbeleg closes each month. The Jahresbeleg closes the fiscal year and must be verified by February 15 of the following year. The register and the signature unit are registered through FinanzOnline, the tax authority's online portal, where any outage longer than 48 hours must be reported within a week.

• Register the cash register and the signature unit in FinanzOnline before going live, under the taxpayer's ID.
• Issue the Startbeleg for a zero amount, then verify it with the Finance Ministry's Belegcheck app within the following week.
• Produce the Monatsbeleg at the end of every month, and back up the Datenerfassungsprotokoll to external storage.
• Produce and verify the Jahresbeleg after the last transaction of the fiscal year, no later than February 15 of the following year.
• Report any outage longer than 48 hours of the cash register or the signature unit in FinanzOnline within a week, and document the sales made during the outage.

The duty to issue a receipt is set out in § 132a of the same code, and it applies regardless of revenue. Every Barzahlung requires a receipt for the payer, and an electronic receipt is allowed if it is available immediately after payment. The customer must take the receipt out of the store, but faces no penalty for not doing so. The business meets its obligation by making the receipt available. A merchant that fails to do so commits a Finanzordnungswidrigkeit (a tax regulatory offense) punishable by a fine of up to €5,000, under § 51 of the Finanzstrafgesetz (Fiscal Penal Code).

The exemptions are listed in the Barumsatzverordnung 2015, and they are narrow. The so-called cold hands rule covers sales made outdoors, outside enclosed premises. Its revenue ceiling, long set at €30,000 net a year, has been raised to €45,000. Mountain huts, nonprofit canteens, and vending machines with transactions of €20 or less have their own regimes. Finally, the guidance on the Unternehmensserviceportal, the government's business portal, places online sales paid by bank transfer outside the requirement, which leaves registered cash registers to physical retail and on-site services.

Cash: ATM coverage, measured use, and the constitutional debate

Households get their cash almost entirely from ATMs. 88% of respondents in the OeNB's 2025 survey withdraw cash at ATMs, up from 87% the year before, and bank counters keep losing ground. 35% withdraw cash at least once a week. The most common amount is €200 or less. Cash withdrawal at a store checkout is marginal, at 1% of respondents. That sets Austria apart from markets where cash-back, a withdrawal made at the checkout along with a card payment, fills gaps in the ATM network. Austrians carry €80 on average, and about €100 in rural areas.

Under the OeNB-Bankomat initiative, the central bank installs ATMs itself. It targets municipalities of 500 or more residents that have neither an ATM nor a bank branch. Two further conditions apply: the nearest ATM must be more than two kilometers away, and the new machine must cut that distance by at least one kilometer. A year after the July 2025 launch, the OeNB counted 66 sites in operation, serving more than 80,000 people. PSA runs the machines. In Güttenbach, the average distance to the nearest ATM fell from 4.4 to 0.6 kilometers.

A Volksbegehren is an Austrian popular initiative: voters back it during a signing week, and the National Council (Nationalrat) then takes it up. Two Volksbegehren have targeted cash, and neither led to legislation. The first, “Für uneingeschränkte Bargeldzahlung” (for unrestricted cash payment), open for signatures from September 19 to 26, 2022, gathered 530,938 signatures. It called for a constitutional law guaranteeing unrestricted cash payments. The National Council formally took note of it on May 24, 2023, after a hearing in the finance committee on May 9. The second, “BARGELD-Zahlung: Obergrenze NEIN!”, targeted the idea of a cap on cash payments. The Council took note of it on December 14, 2023, rejecting along the way an amendment on cash supply and an obligation to accept cash.

In August 2023, Chancellor Karl Nehammer said in a summer interview with the APA news agency that he wanted to enshrine a right to pay in cash in the Constitution. A constitutional law in Austria requires a two-thirds majority in the National Council, and therefore the support of at least one opposition party. The published parliamentary record on the two Volksbegehren includes no constitutional law on cash payments. The debate still shapes cash policy but has not changed the law. It draws on an attachment the OeNB measures: 94% of respondents say they cannot imagine a world without cash.

The construction sector already faces a restriction of this kind. Since January 1, 2016, construction work paid for in cash between businesses above €500 is not tax-deductible, under § 20 of the Einkommensteuergesetz (Income Tax Act). Splitting what is economically a single job does not preserve the deduction. Paying construction wages in cash is banned, and a violation is a Finanzordnungswidrigkeit punishable by a fine of up to €5,000. An audit of an Austrian construction project therefore focuses on bank statements. Paying a subcontractor more than €500 in cash costs the business the deduction for that expense.