The Austrian payroll process: ELDA, Lohnsteuer and the L16

The Austrian payroll process repeats the same loop every month. The employer works out gross pay, deducts the employee’s social insurance and Lohnsteuer (wage tax), pays the net salary, and then settles everything it has withheld, together with its own contributions and levies, within a fixed window: whatever relates to January pay is due on 15 February, March pay on 15 April, and so on through the year. Three bodies receive the money: ÖGK for social insurance, the tax office for wage tax and the family-fund levies, and the municipality for Kommunalsteuer.

Two features make the Austrian cycle different from most. Salary is usually paid 14 times a year rather than 12, and the two extra payments are taxed under their own rules. And nearly all reporting to social insurance runs through one electronic channel, ELDA, which handles registrations, the monthly contribution return and the annual payslip for the tax office.

Written as a routine, a single month runs in five moves:

• collect the month’s inputs: new starters, leavers, salary changes, overtime, sickness and unpaid absence;
• calculate gross pay, social insurance, wage tax and net pay for each employee;
• pay net salaries on the agreed pay date;
• send the contribution return through ELDA, then pay all three recipients by the 15th;
• file the payslips and reports so the audit trail is complete.

The sections below follow one month from inputs to filings, then step back to the year-end and the audit that eventually checks it all.

Each run starts from the contract and the applicable Kollektivvertrag (collective agreement). The agreement fixes the minimum salary for the employee’s grade, and often allowances, shorter weekly hours or overtime rules that payroll must apply. Before the first run, the grade and the agreement should be recorded in the payroll file, because every later calculation leans on them.

Month by month, the variable inputs are what you would expect: starters and leavers, unpaid absences, sickness, overtime and any change of salary. Each overtime hour is paid at time and a half, or compensated with 90 minutes off, unless the employee is on an all-in salary that already covers it. An all-in contract must spell out, in writing, how much of the package is base pay for the normal working week, and the employer must check that the package really does cover the overtime worked.

Three thresholds then decide how the gross is treated:

• the contribution ceiling (Höchstbeitragsgrundlage) of €6,930 a month in 2026, above which no further social insurance is charged on regular pay, with a separate ceiling of €13,860 a year for special payments;
• the marginal-employment threshold (Geringfügigkeitsgrenze) of €551.10 a month, below which a job counts as marginal and is insured differently;
• the low-earner bands for unemployment insurance: no employee share up to €2,225 a month, then 1%, 2% and finally the full 2.95% above €2,630.

The 2027 values are already published: €7,410 monthly and €14,820 for the year’s special payments, with the marginal threshold unchanged at €551.10.

From regular pay, the employer first deducts the employee’s share of social insurance. For a white-collar employee in 2026 that is 18.07%: health 3.87%, pension 10.25%, unemployment 2.95%, the housing contribution 0.50% and the Chamber of Labour levy 0.50%.

Wage tax is then calculated on what remains. The month’s taxable pay is annualised, the progressive tariff is applied and the result is divided by twelve. The 2026 bands run from 0% on the first €13,539 of annual taxable income through 20%, 30%, 40% and 48% to 50% above €104,859, with 55% only beyond €1 million. Because the calculation annualises each month on its own, an employee who joins in the autumn or whose pay changes mid-year can end up with more tax withheld than the year as a whole justifies. Credits come off the tax, not the income: every employee receives the Verkehrsabsetzbetrag of €496 a year, and a parent can reduce tax by up to €2,000.16 a year for each child below 18 through the Familienbonus Plus. Lower incomes can also benefit from a supplement to the Verkehrsabsetzbetrag of up to €804. Anything payroll could not take into account during the year, such as further deductible expenses, is settled afterwards through the employee’s own annual assessment.

Take the reference employee used across this site: single, white-collar, working in Vienna, with €60,000 gross for 2026 split into 14 instalments of €4,285.71. Over the year, employee social insurance takes about €10,756, wage tax on regular pay about €7,753 and wage tax on the two special payments about €389, which leaves net pay of roughly €41,102. A normal month nets about €2,865. The full year-by-year arithmetic is in our article on the cost of an employee in Austria.

The Urlaubszuschuss, or holiday bonus, and the Weihnachtsremuneration, or Christmas bonus, go through payroll as special payments, or sonstige Bezüge. Their legal source is the collective agreement rather than statute, and payroll treats them separately from the monthly salary in both social insurance and tax.

On social insurance, special payments carry neither the Chamber of Labour levy nor the housing contribution, so the employee pays 17.07% and the employer 20.48%. On tax, they are subject to fixed rates within the so-called annual sixth (Jahressechstel), which payroll works out by taking the year’s regular pay to date, averaging it per elapsed month and doubling the result. After social insurance, the first €620 is tax-free, the next €24,380 is taxed at 6%, and higher slices at 27% and 35.75%. Where a whole year’s special payments come to less than the €2,615 exemption limit, they escape wage tax entirely.

That 6% band is why an extra Austrian payment feels generous to the employee. In our reference example, each of the two special payments nets about €3,359, against roughly €2,865 for a normal month. Payroll has to track the annual sixth carefully, since bonuses or late joiners can push part of a special payment above it and back into the normal tariff. The guide to 14 salaries in Austria goes into the mechanics.

Once net pay has gone out, the employer settles three separate accounts, each with the same mid-month due date:

• ÖGK receives employee and employer social insurance, the Chamber of Labour levy, the housing contribution, the insolvency fund surcharge and the 1.53% Mitarbeitervorsorge contribution for severance, which starts in the second month of employment and has no ceiling. The amounts are declared in the monthly contribution return (mBGM) sent through ELDA.
• The tax office receives the wage tax withheld, the Dienstgeberbeitrag (DB) of 3.7% of gross pay and its regional surcharge (DZ), which is 0.36% in Vienna and between 0.31% and 0.40% elsewhere.
• The municipality where the workplace is located receives Kommunalsteuer at 3% of gross pay.

Vienna adds a fourth, smaller item: the Dienstgeberabgabe, €2 per employee for every week begun, payable on that same mid-month date. No levy is due for apprentices, for staff aged 55 or older, or for roles of ten hours a week or less, among other cases.

The employer’s 20.98% social insurance rate on regular pay in 2026 splits into 12.55% for pension, 3.78% for health, 2.95% for unemployment, 1.10% for accident cover, 0.50% for housing and 0.10% for the insolvency fund. On the €60,000 reference salary the employer ends up paying roughly €77,805 in all, 29.7% above gross.

ELDA (short for Elektronischer Datenaustausch) is the backbone of the reporting side. Every hire must be registered through it before starting work; paper, email and phone notifications are not accepted. Leavers are de-registered through the same channel, and the mBGM carries each month’s contribution details.

Missing a report is expensive in small amounts that accumulate. A late notification costs €70 per breach in 2026, and an unregistered worker found during an inspection triggers €400 per person plus €600 for the inspection itself.

At the end of the year, the employer files a Lohnzettel (form L16) for each employee through ELDA, by the last day of February once the year has closed. It summarises pay, contributions and wage tax for the tax office, and it is the document the employee’s voluntary annual assessment (Arbeitnehmerveranlagung) builds on when they claim further deductions via FinanzOnline. The ELDA portal lists the report types and formats.

A few dates sit outside the monthly loop. The annual Kommunalsteuer return goes to the municipality by 31 March, and Vienna’s employer levy has its own annual return on that date too. The L16 deadline falls a month earlier, at the end of February.

Every few years, all of this is checked in one go. Since 1 July 2020 the joint audit of payroll taxes and contributions (GPLB) covers wage tax, DB, DZ, Kommunalsteuer and social insurance together, carried out by ÖGK or the tax authority’s audit service. Each employer can expect a visit every three to five years, and the auditors work from the payroll records, the contracts and the ELDA history. Errors found at that stage are corrected with back payments, which is why the monthly loop is worth getting right the first time.

Keep the audit file in a form someone else could follow: the signed contract and written statement of terms for each employee, the grade and collective agreement applied, ELDA confirmations for every registration and change, payslips, and the workings behind each special payment and its annual sixth. An auditor who can trace a figure from the contract to the payslip to the return in a few minutes tends to finish quickly.

With Employer of Record Austria as your provider, the whole cycle described here sits with us: grade and agreement, monthly calculation, ELDA reports, payments by the 15th, the L16 and the audit file. You approve the inputs and receive one consolidated monthly cost. The onboarding sequence shows how the first payroll month is prepared, while what each contribution pays for is covered in our social insurance in Austria guide.