Work contracts in Austria can be lucrative for many Slovak companies. If you want to temporarily assign employees to a third party in Austria, you should know exactly which conditions you must meet. It’s not enough to simply find a client to whom you can lease workers – you also need to obtain the necessary permits and approvals from Austrian authorities. Employee leasing to Austria is subject to strict rules.

A key prerequisite for your company to lease employees to Austria is to have a valid temporary employment agency license issued by the Central Office of Labour, Social Affairs and Family of the Slovak Republic. Before starting the leasing process, you must notify the Austrian Federal Ministry for Labour and Economy. The Ministry will check whether your company meets all legal requirements – without its approval, you cannot send any workers to Austria.

Same Conditions

Before your employee starts work with the Austrian client, you must submit a ZKO-4 notification. This contains basic information about the employee, the Slovak agency, and the Austrian company where the employee will work, along with the expected duration of the assignment. Preparing the required documentation is best entrusted to experts in Austrian labour law to avoid unnecessary bureaucratic complications and unpleasant surprises.

Austria strictly protects its labour market from wage dumping, so you must ensure that your temporarily assigned employees have at least the same wage and working conditions as an Austrian colleague in the same position. This means checking in advance the applicable collective agreement wages, bonuses, and other entitlements at your client’s company.

Additional Contributions

If employees perform construction work in Austria, there are extra obligations – mainly registration and monthly contributions to the BUAK holiday fund. On top of this, there are contributions to the Social and Training Fund (SWF), which applies to all agency workers. These mandatory contributions can significantly increase the total cost per leased employee.

Mandatory Deductions

An unpleasant surprise may also come from invoice deductions. Austrian clients are legally required to withhold 20% of the invoiced amount and remit it directly to the Austrian tax office. You can avoid this deduction entirely only if you run payroll accounting in Austria for your assigned employees and voluntarily pay wage tax there. In that case, you can apply for an exemption from the withholding. Without such an exemption, the 20% will be deducted automatically. While you can request a refund later, the process is often lengthy and bureaucratically demanding.

For construction work, the Austrian client may also deduct an additional 25% under the so-called Auftraggeberhaftung – a principal contractor’s liability mechanism. If both deductions are applied, your company could temporarily lose up to 45% of the invoiced amount, which could significantly affect the profitability of the entire project.

Temporary assignment of employees to Austria involves many obligations that should not be underestimated. To be even closer to Slovak businesses leasing or posting workers to Austria, ProfiDeCon has opened a new branch directly in Hainburg an der Donau. Our experts will be happy to advise you so you can avoid mistakes, penalties, and unnecessary financial risks when leasing or posting workers.