Visa information

Austria offers three named routes in the 2026 guide: the Red-White-Red Card points visa for skilled workers, graduates and key staff, the EU Blue Card for graduates with a job offer above the salary threshold, and a Settlement Permit for financially independent people that is capped by an annual quota. The guide scores Austria just 44/100 for visa and bureaucracy — the lowest of its seven dimensions — so expect the paperwork stage, measured in weeks on every plan tier, to be the hard part.

The three routes the guide names

Red-White-Red Card — a points visa for skilled workers, graduates and key staff.

EU Blue Card — for university graduates with a job offer above the salary threshold. The guide names the test but prints no threshold figure (see below).

Settlement Permit (Niederlassungsbewilligung) — for financially independent people, capped by an annual quota. This is also the family of permit the guide's retirement text uses (see the Retirement page).

There is no digital nomad visa: the guide states that remote work for a foreign employer needs a residence title.

Points, salary and income tests — what the sources actually say

The guide describes the tests in words, not figures. The Red-White-Red Card is a points system, but neither source prints the points threshold or how points are awarded. The EU Blue Card requires a job offer above the salary threshold, but no salary figure is printed. The Settlement Permit is for financially independent people and is capped by an annual quota, but neither source prints an income amount or the size of the quota.

This page therefore invents none of those numbers. Confirm the current points, salary and income figures, and whether quota places remain, before you build a plan around any of the three routes. At the guide's exchange rate of $1 ≈ €0.86, any euro figure you are quoted converts at roughly that rate for planning.

What the paperwork costs — plan budgets, not government fees

The guide does not list individual government visa fees. What it gives is a bundled “Visa, permits & translations” budget line in each move plan, and those lines are the only sourced cost figures for the application itself:

• $1,050 — Affordable plan (you file yourself)
• $1,500 — Mid-range and Retirement plans
• $3,550 — Luxury plan (the plan notes the luxury tier adds an immigration lawyer)

The Retirement plan carries one further, separate line: $2,750 for “Retirement visa, lawyer & pension certification”, covering an immigration lawyer, apostilled pension letters, medicals and translations.

Application steps and timelines, by tier

The guide builds the application into each plan's timeline rather than printing a single step list. The common sequence across the plans and checklists is:

• Choose the route first and print its requirements; the Affordable checklist starts with “Visa route chosen and requirements printed.”
• Gather and legalise documents — apostilles and translations are named in every tier; the Retirement paperwork stage adds pension or income letters certified and apostilled, a police certificate, a medical, and birth and marriage certificates translated.
• Check your passport — the Affordable checklist requires a passport valid 18+ months.
• Arrange health insurance before you file (see the Hospitals page for the guide's first-year insurance budgets).
• File — yourself on the Affordable tier, or with a lawyer or agent on the Mid-range, Luxury and Retirement tiers.

Paperwork-stage durations in the guide: ~10 weeks filing yourself (Affordable), ~8 weeks with a lawyer or agent filing (Mid-range), ~6 weeks with a lawyer filing everything (Luxury), and ~14 weeks for the Retirement paperwork stage. After the move, the settle stage includes registering your address and opening a bank account.

Renewals and the path to residency — the honest limit of the guide

Neither the guide nor the site data gives renewal intervals, permit durations, years to permanent residence or citizenship, or absence limits for any of the three routes — so this page states none. The one hard structural fact the sources do give is the Settlement Permit's annual quota cap, which makes timing part of the application itself. Treat durations and pathways as questions to confirm with an immigration lawyer or the authorities before you rely on them — the higher plan tiers budget for a lawyer for exactly this kind of question.

Frequently asked questions