Austrian Home Prices Reached Record Levels With a 5.1% Annual Rise in the Second Quarter

Austrian home prices rose 5.1% over the year in the second quarter of 2026. Existing dwellings gained 5.1% and newly built ones 4.9%, on preliminary figures.

Austrian residential property prices were 5.1% higher in the second quarter of 2026 than in the same quarter of 2025, and the national statistics office titled its release of 23 September with the finding that prices for owner-occupied housing reached record levels in the first half of the year. The headline index stood at 105.00 against a 2025 base of 100. All figures are preliminary.

The second-hand market is the faster half

Existing dwellings came in at 105.27, up 5.1% over the year. Newly built dwellings reached 104.13, up 4.9%. The two segments are only two tenths of a percentage point apart, but the older stock is the one on top, and it is the segment a foreign buyer can actually reach without waiting for a completion date. With the base set at the 2025 average, an index of 105.00 says the typical Austrian home in the second quarter cost about a twentieth more than it did across last year as a whole.

A neighbour going the other way

The comparison that gives the Austrian number its shape arrived a day later. For exactly the same quarter, the German federal statistics office reported residential property prices up 0.6% year on year. Two adjoining German-speaking markets, the same three months, 4.5 percentage points apart. Austria is not tracking the larger market next door, and has not been asked to.

What a buyer actually pays

Asking prices for Austrian apartments average roughly 7,242.70 dollars per square metre, against asking rents of about 18.55 dollars per square metre a month. That works out at a gross rental yield of 3.07%, falling to 2.42% once the standardised 21.17% effective tax on non-resident rental income is taken out. Purchase costs run to about 10.1% of the price. Ownership is freehold, but buyers from outside the European Union need approval from the province in which the property sits, and each province writes its own land-transfer rules rather than following a federal template.

The record is in the price, not the return

Over ten years Austrian prices are up 61.2%; over five years, 13.9%. Set that ten-year figure beside a 3.07% gross yield and the arithmetic speaks for itself: the rent that has to service a purchase has not climbed at the pace of the purchase price. That is what a nominal record looks like from the income side, and it is why the market carries a moderate rather than a low reading on a valuation basis, scoring 54 out of 100 on a scale where higher means more stretched. Investors buying into the record are buying capital growth, with the yield covering progressively less of the cost of getting in.

Sources: Statistik Austria, Haeuserpreisindex und OOH-PI, second quarter 2026 preliminary results, press release of 23 September 2026 https://www.statistik.at/statistiken/volkswirtschaft-und-oeffentliche-finanzen/preise-und-preisindizes/haeuserpreisindex-und-ooh-pi; Statistisches Bundesamt (Destatis), Prices of residential property in the second quarter of 2026, 24 September 2026 https://www.destatis.de/EN/Press/2026/09/PE26_336_61262.html

Market data: Austria