Employment contract in Austria: the Dienstzettel, probation and working hours

An Austrian employment relationship does not depend on a signed document. A spoken offer, accepted and acted on, is enough to make someone an employee with full rights under the collective agreement and the labour statutes. What the law insists on is a written record of the essential terms, and it places that duty on the employer alone.

That record is the Dienstzettel (written statement of terms) under § 2 of the Employment Contract Law Adaptation Act, AVRAG. It is due without delay once the job has started. An employer who hands over a written contract with the same content has met the duty and needs no separate statement, which is why most Austrian employers simply issue a full contract and treat the Dienstzettel as a checklist for it.

For a company abroad, the practical consequence is that a short offer email is never the whole story. Whatever the email promised becomes part of the contract, and whatever it left out still has to be supplied in writing, in a form the employee can keep. An offer that says only “€70,000, start in March” leaves the grade, the hours, the notice terms and the severance fund to be filled in later, and each of those is a point on which the employer can be fined if it stays blank.

The difference matters most when something goes wrong. In a dispute over notice, pay grade or overtime, a labour court or an inspector from the Labour Inspectorate will start from what the employee was given in writing. Gaps there tend to be read against the employer.

Since 28 March 2024, when Austria transposed the EU directive on transparent working conditions, the written terms have to cover considerably more than before. Alongside the names of both parties, the start date and the pay, the statement must now include:

• the employer’s seat, so the employee knows which business is the legal employer;
• a short description of the work the employee is hired to do;
• the procedure for ending the employment, including notice periods and dates;
• how overtime is paid and how salary is paid out;
• whether a trial month applies, and on what terms;
• the social insurance carrier, normally ÖGK for private-sector staff;
• the Mitarbeitervorsorgekasse (severance fund) that receives the 1.53% contribution;
• any training the employer provides.

Changes to any of these points must reach the employee in writing by the day they take effect, not afterwards. A missing or incomplete statement can be fined at €100 to €436 per case, or €500 to €2,000 where the breach is aggravated.

The same reform added two employee rights that a contract cannot quietly remove. People may take a second job unless it is incompatible with the first, and any training the employer makes compulsory counts as paid working time. Clauses on outside work are therefore narrower than many foreign templates assume; our article on inventions, confidentiality and non-competes covers what can still be restricted.

The longest probation an Austrian employer can agree is one month. For white-collar staff the limit comes from § 19 of the Salaried Employees Act (AngG), and the general civil code applies the same rule to manual workers. A collective agreement may set a shorter period. Neither a collective agreement nor an individual contract may set a longer one.

Inside that month, either party can end the employment on any day, without notice and without giving a reason. Once it is over, the ordinary notice rules take hold. An employer then gives at least six weeks during the first two years of service, and that notice runs out on a calendar quarter-end; a contract can widen the choice to the 15th or the final day of any month, and the periods lengthen with service. Our guide to notice and dismissal rules in Austria sets out the full scale.

A one-month window is short for judging a senior engineer or a sales lead. The usual response is better preparation rather than a longer clause: agree concrete goals for the first four weeks, line up equipment and system access before day one, and schedule a review meeting in week three, while ending the trial is still simple. The Austrian Economic Chamber’s probation page summarises the statutory position.

Austrian law allows a first fixed-term contract without any justification. The difficulty begins with the second. Back-to-back renewals, known as Kettendienstverträge (chain contracts), need an objective reason, such as covering an employee on parental leave. Where there is none, the chain is treated as one open-ended employment, with the notice and protection rules that come with it.

The Supreme Court (OGH) has made clear that uncertainty about future business volume does not count as an objective reason. For an ordinary employee there is also no statutory maximum number of renewals and no maximum total duration, so the question is decided case by case rather than by counting contracts.

A common example is a replacement for someone on Karenz (parental leave), which can last until the child’s second birthday. A fixed contract tied to that absence has a clear objective reason, and renewing it because the parent extends the leave is easy to explain. Renewing a sales role three times because next year’s pipeline looks uncertain is the pattern the courts have rejected.

In practice a fixed term works well for genuine cover and for projects with a known end. If you expect to keep the person, an open-ended contract with the one-month probation is usually easier to defend than a series of short terms that a court may later merge into one.

Normal working time under the Working Time Act (AZG) is eight hours per day and 40 per week, and a collective agreement may set a shorter normal week, so check the one that applies before writing the hours clause. With overtime, a day can run to 12 hours and a week to 60, but across any 17-week period the weekly average may not exceed 48. Those caps have applied since 1 September 2018.

Overtime attracts a 50% surcharge on the hourly rate; alternatively the employee takes one and a half hours off for each extra hour worked. Employees can turn down the 11th and 12th hour of a day, and any hours beyond 50 in a week, without having to explain why. A contract clause that tries to remove that choice will not hold.

Many professional contracts in Austria are all-in agreements, where one salary covers overtime as well. Two conditions apply. The contract has to show a separate base salary covering normal hours, as § 2g AVRAG requires, or the usual local market salary for the role is deemed to be the base. The employer must also check that the all-in figure actually covers the overtime worked, normally over a 12-month period, and pay the difference if it falls short.

Working from home needs its own written agreement under the 2025 telework rules. Our guide to home office rules in Austria explains what that agreement has to cover.

The pay clause should name the collective agreement, the grade within it and the gross salary, stated either per instalment or per year. Austria has no statutory minimum wage; the floor for each role comes from the Kollektivvertrag (collective agreement), which covers 98% of employees. Agreeing a figure below the grade minimum does not lower the employee’s entitlement, it only creates a back-pay claim. How grades and minimums interact is covered in our piece on collective agreement pay floors.

Salaries are normally quoted as 14 instalments, because the collective agreements add two extra payments to the twelve months: the Urlaubszuschuss around the holiday season and the Weihnachtsremuneration before Christmas. A €60,000 offer therefore reads as 14 payments of €4,285.71. The article on why Austrian pay comes in 14 salaries covers the tax side.

Leave belongs in the contract too, even though the law fixes the minimum. The statutory entitlement is 30 Werktage, which for a five-day week means 25 working days, and 30 working days once someone has 25 years behind them. Stating it in working days avoids confusion for staff used to other systems. The calendar adds 13 public holidays in 2026, running from New Year’s Day to St Stephen’s Day on 26 December, and the contract can simply refer to them. Sick pay, care leave and the parental-leave rules follow from statute and the collective agreement, so the contract usually refers to them rather than repeating them in full.

Once you choose Employer of Record Austria for a hire, we issue the Austrian employment contract as the legal employer, and it carries all the content the Dienstzettel rules require. You set the job, its pay, the first day and the day-to-day direction of the work; we put those into Austrian form, place the job in the right collective agreement grade and register the employee with ÖGK through ELDA before the first working hour.

A typical draft for your review covers the points in this article: job description, grade and gross pay in 14 instalments, normal hours and the overtime arrangement, the one-month probation, notice terms, leave, the severance fund and, where relevant, a telework agreement. You see it before the candidate does.

• Confirm the job title and a two- or three-line description of the work.
• Give the gross annual salary and say whether it is meant to be all-in.
• Name the expected weekly hours and whether any work will be done from home.
• Flag any outside activity the candidate already has, such as a side business or a teaching post.
• Say whether the role is open-ended or tied to a project or a leave cover.

With those five answers the draft can usually be settled in one round of comments rather than several, and the candidate receives terms that already match the Austrian rules on probation, hours and pay.

Our week-by-week Austrian onboarding plan puts those steps in order, starting with the signed offer. For a wider view of hiring rules, see our overview of employing in Austria.