Wealth & succession

Austria is an unusual mixture for a wealthy family. On one side stands a tax system with no general wealth tax, no inheritance tax and no gift tax — the taxes that dominate estate planning in the United States, the United Kingdom or Germany simply do not exist here. On the other side stands a civil-law succession regime that protects close family through compulsory portions, a court-supervised probate procedure, and a transparency framework that reports far more than newcomers from banking-secrecy jurisdictions tend to expect.

Planning therefore looks different from what many arriving families are used to. The question is rarely how to escape a death duty — there is none to escape. It is how to hold wealth so that it stays together across generations, how the structures the family already owns will be treated under the Austrian tax system once its members become resident, and in which order the steps of the move should happen. That last point matters most: several of the outcomes described in this section — the taxation of a trust, the timing of a distribution, the value from which future gains are measured — are decided by what is done before residence begins, which is why pre-immigration tax planning is the first page many readers should open.

Austrian succession law grants testamentary freedom, then claws part of it back. A testator may leave the estate to whomever they choose, but the spouse (or registered partner) and descendants hold a compulsory portion (Pflichtteil) of half the share they would have taken on intestacy — a monetary claim against the estate, backed by rules that pull certain lifetime gifts back into the calculation. Wills must meet strict formal requirements, estates pass through a court procedure ending in a formal transfer order, and for international families the EU Succession Regulation decides whose law applies in the first place — by default, the law of the country of habitual residence, which changes the moment a family genuinely settles in Vienna. The details, and the choice-of-law election that usually answers them, are on succession law and wills in Austria.

Marriage has its own property logic: separation of property during the marriage, division of marital assets and savings on divorce, and a marriage-contract practice that works — within limits the courts police. Newly arrived couples, especially those with agreements drawn under foreign law, should read matrimonial property and family law. And because the absence of death duties is the question every family asks first, inheritance and gift tax in Austria explains what replaced them: real-estate transfer tax on gratuitous property transfers, the foundation entry tax, and a gift-notification duty with real fines behind it.

Moving to Austria does not lift an estate out of every other country's reach. Foreign death taxes can follow the family: the United States taxes US-situs assets of non-resident aliens, Germany's inheritance tax can trail its emigrants for a period after departure, and the United Kingdom's rules reach long-held UK connections. None of this is Austrian law, but all of it belongs in an Austrian estate plan — alongside the treaty position on investment income, which is dealt with under Austria's double-taxation treaties, and the special position of Americans, for whom US citizens moving to Austria is essential reading.

The practical consequence is a single action point: when residence moves to Austria, the estate plan should be re-signed, not merely re-read. The applicable succession law changes by default, foreign wills remain formally valid but may distribute under rules the testator never considered, and structures created for another system — a revocable US trust, an English will trust, a Liechtenstein foundation — take on an Austrian tax character of their own.