Many internationals living in Austria will have made pension contributions somewhere else before arriving here – or perhaps even in several places over the course of their lives. Maybe you studied in your home country outside the EU and worked there for a few years before moving to Germany for another 20 years – before deciding to come to Austria to retire.
It’s not an uncommon story – especially here, where people move to trade the bustle of their working lives for fresh mountain air. So if you take the alpine retirement leap, how much of your pension counts, when can you retire, and who pays it out?
What happens in reverse? What if you’ve worked in Austria for years and maybe decided to return to your home country for your retirement years?
There’s no easy answer. But depending on the countries you’ve worked in, you may be able to combine your contributions.
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Which countries combine with Austria and how does it work?
To be eligible for an Austrian state pension, you need to have worked and made pension contributions in Austria for at least 15 of the last 30 years.
That’s quite a bit higher than many countries, including Germany, which requires just five years of contributions – or places like Ireland, which typically requires ten.
The good news is that the contributions you’ve made in other countries may end up counting, depending on your situation.
The most obvious example is if you worked in EU countries other than Austria. If someone worked in Ireland for three years and made pension contributions there before moving to Germany, worked in Germany for another 25 years, and then moved to Austria for the last 15 years of their career before retiring – EU law mandates that they be treated as having made 43 years of contributions.
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This is true even though someone typically has to work for ten years in Ireland to receive an Irish pension, for example. The person in this example would file their application to the authorities of the last country in which they made pension contributions – in this case Austria. The Austrian authorities would then get in touch with both Germany and Ireland on their behalf to arrange the necessary payments.
It’s important to bear in mind though that the person in this example would probably end up getting paid only a partial pension for the first few years of their retirement.
In Austria, the regular retirement age for men is 65. The regular retirement age for women is being raised gradually from 60 to 65, depending on date of birth, with women born after June 30th 1968 reaching the regular pension age at 65.
Germany is also phasing up the regular retirement age to 67, with 67 applying to people born in 1964 or later. This means someone with pension rights in both Austria and Germany may start receiving one part of their pension earlier than the other, depending on their sex, date of birth and the rules in each country.
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What about pension contributions made in non-EU countries?
EU social rights protections are the most straightforward, with your contributions made in different EU countries generally combining to your overall total when you reach retirement age. Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Switzerland also fall under these rules.
But Austria also has treaties with certain non-EU countries that sometimes work in a similar way. The thing to do is to check and see if the non-EU country you made contributions in has such a treaty with Austria. If it does, you are quite likely to be able to have the pension contributions you made in that country to be counted into your Austrian entitlement.
Austria currently has social security agreements with several non-EU countries, including the US, Canada, India, Australia, Israel, Chile, South Korea and others. You can find a fuller list here.
These agreements, however, may not be quite as simply applied as EU rules are. Each agreement might have certain unique provisions, so it may be useful to get expert advice in certain cases.
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However, one thing these treaties can often do is give someone a certain entitlement they may not necessarily have otherwise.
For example, under the US-Austrian Social Security Agreement, if someone had made ten years of contributions in the US followed by five years of contributions in Austria, the Austrian authorities would treat them as having made the minimum 15 years of contributions required for an Austrian pension. Even though only five of those years were in Austria, the ten years of contributions made in the US would then be combined into the Austrian total.
The UK is a special case after Brexit. UK contribution periods are no longer covered by ordinary EU membership rules, but they are not simply excluded.
Austria’s official guidance says that, in relation to the UK, similar coordination rules apply under the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement. Arbeiterkammer says working periods from Great Britain can generally count as insurance periods for an Austrian pension, with exceptions, especially for disability or invalidity pensions.
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What if I retire to Austria but have never worked here?
In general, if you finish your working life before moving to Austria and only settle here after retirement – perhaps on a settlement permit that doesn’t come with permission to work – you will apply for your pension in the last country where you made contributions. There may be exceptions to this depending on what social security agreements might be in place – so get expert advice if you need it.
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If the reverse is true, where perhaps you finish your working life in Austria and then move to a country like Italy or Spain to retire, you would generally file your pension application with the Austrian authorities – as Austria was the last place you made pension contributions, even if you end up living somewhere else.
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