Austrian Building Costs Rose 4.9% in Q2, Outpacing Home Prices

Statistik Austria's Q2 2026 construction price index rose 4.9% year on year to 104.9 points, with civil engineering up 7.0% and residential building up 3.6%.

Austria's construction price index reached 104.9 points in the second quarter of 2026, 4.9% above the same quarter of 2025 and 3.1% above the first quarter, Statistik Austria reported on 10 August. With 2025 as the base year, the index measures a little over a year of accumulated cost increase — and the quarterly figure is the one worth noticing, because 3.1% in three months is running ahead of what the annual rate implies.

Roads and bridges, not homes, are driving it

The two halves of the index have separated. Civil engineering (Tiefbau) stands at 106.8 points, up 7.0% year on year and 4.7% on the quarter, with road construction at 107.3 (+7.5%) and bridge construction at 106.6 (+6.8%). Building construction (Hochbau) is far calmer at 103.7, up 3.6% year on year and 2.2% on the quarter. Residential and estate construction — the segment that feeds directly into new apartment pricing — sits at exactly that level, 103.7 and +3.6%, with other building construction marginally higher at 103.8 (+3.8%).

A thin but positive margin for developers

Austrian residential prices rose 4.2% year on year on the latest Eurostat reading, against residential construction costs up 3.6%. A developer selling into today's market is therefore recovering slightly more than the cost increase, but not by much. The other half of that arithmetic matters more for buyers: input costs that have risen 3.6% in a year do not reverse, which puts a floor under new-build asking prices regardless of what demand does next.

Where Austria sits on price and yield

Glopra tracks Austria at about $4,800 per square metre nationally. The figure comes from Statistik Austria's own 2025 average-property-price publication — a national median of €4,162/m² for apartments and €2,836/m² for houses, built from land-registry transactions — cross-checked against Global Property Guide's €4,300/m², with the two landing within 3% of each other. Vienna sits at €5,464/m², giving a national-to-capital ratio of 0.77 that is unremarkable by European standards.

The gross rental yield is 3.82%, one of the lowest in Glopra's European coverage, and the standardised 21.17% non-resident rental tax takes it to roughly 3.0% net before operating costs. In a market priced that tightly, construction inflation reads less as a cost line than as a forecast of how much new supply will actually arrive.

Sources: Statistik Austria, Baupreisindex Q2 2026 (10 Aug 2026) https://www.statistik.at/statistiken/industrie-bau-handel-und-dienstleistungen/konjunktur/baupreisindex; ImmoFokus https://immofokus.at/a/bauen-verteuerte-sich-in-oesterreich-im-2-quartal-2026-weiter

Market data: Austria