Austria
Profile written September 2026 · figures updated nightly
Where things stand
The latest published reading for each measure, with the last five years beside it.
the ECB's rate, which Austria has shared since 1999
01Structure
Austria combines a manufacturing base larger than the euro-area average — industry is about seventeen per cent of value added — with one of Europe's most important tourist economies. The industrial side is heavy on machinery, metals, vehicle components and chemicals, much of it supplying German producers; the tourist side runs on alpine winter sport and the cities of Vienna and Salzburg.
Tourism's direct value added is under four per cent of GDP, but counting what it pulls in from other sectors the share is far larger, and roughly every sixth job depends on it.1 That makes the Austrian cycle two cycles at once: an industrial one set by German orders, and a consumer one set by European travel.
02Trade and exposure
Exports amount to more than half of output, and Germany is by a wide margin the largest market. A large share of Austrian manufacturing is embedded in German supply chains — particularly automotive — so a weakness in German industry reaches Austria as a fall in intermediate orders rather than as a change in final demand.
Rising labour and energy costs have eroded Austrian firms' price competitiveness over several years, a pressure the OECD names alongside weak productivity growth as the central structural problem.2
03Energy and resources
Austria imports a little over half of the energy it uses, and until very recently most of its gas came from a single source. For more than half a century Russian gas arrived under long-term contracts, the last of which ran to 2040. On 16 November 2024 Gazprom stopped deliveries to OMV, and on 1 January 2025 the transit agreement through Ukraine expired, ending the route entirely.3
The supply was replaced through Germany and Italy, at higher cost, and it is manufacturing that carries most of that cost: the energy-intensive branches in section 01 use gas as fuel and, in some cases, as feedstock.2 Hydropower gives Austrian electricity a large renewable base that gas-dependent neighbours lack.
04Labour and demography
Around seventy-eight per cent of 20- to 64-year-olds are in work and youth unemployment is near twelve per cent, both better than the euro-area average. Wages are set through a long-established social partnership, in which employer and union federations negotiate sector agreements led by the metalworkers' round each autumn.4
That system has historically delivered wage restraint in exchange for employment security. After the inflation shock it delivered several years of large increases instead, which is the labour-cost side of the competitiveness problem in section 02; recent settlements have been more restrained.
05Public finances
Austria has been under the European Union's excessive deficit procedure since mid-2025, after a deficit of 4.6 per cent of GDP in 2024 breached the treaty reference value. The government has committed to a multi-year consolidation aimed at bringing the deficit back to three per cent by 2028.5
Debt is lower than in the large southern members but has risen since the pandemic, and the consolidation coincides with higher defence spending and the pension costs of an ageing population.
06Money and prices
Austria has set no policy rate of its own since 1999; the rate shown above is the European Central Bank's. Its inflation ran above the euro-area average for much of the recent period, partly because energy and wage indexation passed through faster, so the common rate was looser for Austrian conditions than for the currency area as a whole.
For a small member so tightly bound to Germany, the ECB decision matters less than the German cycle it responds to.
07What the models expect
These are computed on this site from each series' own history, and are nobody's official projection. The bar is the range the figure lands in half the time; the dot is the central path.
Replayed from past origins on today's revised figures, the same baseline was usually off by 0.76 on consumer price inflation, 2.52 on real gdp, 0.30 on unemployment rate, 0.60 on central bank policy rate, 3.21 on government debt.
08Structural indicators
The figures behind the sections above. They move by a point or two a year, so each carries the year it was measured.
| Measure | Value | Year | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Industry, share of gross value added | 17.1% | 2025 | Eurostat |
| Exports, share of GDP | 55.0% | 2025 | Eurostat |
| Energy import dependency | 53.3% | 2024 | Eurostat |
| R&D spending, share of GDP | 3.3% | 2024 | Eurostat |
| Employment rate, ages 20–64 | 77.6% | 2025 | Eurostat |
| Youth unemployment rate | 12.2% | Jul 2026 | Eurostat |
| Government deficit | −4.2% | 2025 | Eurostat |
09Sources and method
Live figures: Eurostat, Bank for International Settlements. Each is fetched nightly and validated before publication; the delivery report on /status/ says how old every one of them is. Profile written 2026-09-11, next review September 2027.
- Tourism's share of output and employment — Austria Economy 2026
- Energy dependence of manufacturing and the erosion of competitiveness — OECD Economic Outlook 2026/1, Austria
- The end of Gazprom deliveries and of transit through Ukraine — OSW Centre for Eastern Studies
- Collective bargaining and the social partnership — Eurofound, Austria
- The excessive deficit procedure and the consolidation path — European Commission, excessive deficit procedure: Austria; IMF Country Report No. 26/180