Health and Safety in Austria: 5 Duties and the Hours Rule
Most countries tell you what to achieve and leave you to decide how much effort that takes. Austria is more specific than that. Austrian law sets out a minimum number of hours of professional prevention support you must buy for every employee, every year, and prescribes how those hours are divided between disciplines.
For a foreign parent used to reasoning about proportionality, this is an unfamiliar mechanism. It is also unusually easy to check, which cuts both ways: you can establish your position in an afternoon, and so can an inspector.
Five duties for a Vienna office, starting with the one that has a number attached.
1. Prevention time, calculated per head
Under the Austrian employee protection legislation, employers must engage preventive specialists and give them a defined minimum amount of time.
The statutory figure is 1.2 hours per employee per calendar year for office workplaces and workplaces with comparable exposures involving low physical load. Other workplaces attract 1.5 hours per employee. Additional time applies for employees performing night work above a defined frequency. The calculation is per site, with rounding rules, and it only has to be redone during the year if the headcount changes by more than five per cent.
Two points that matter more than the arithmetic.
This is a minimum, not an allowance. Where the situation requires more support, the employer must provide it, and the statutory figure does not cap the obligation.
And the hours must be divided between disciplines rather than spent wherever convenient: a defined share to the safety specialist, a defined share to the occupational physician, and a remaining portion allocated according to the actual hazard and strain situation, which is where other experts including work psychologists can be used.
The Labour Inspectorate publishes an overview of the preventive services and what they are for.
2. The two specialists you must appoint
The prevention time is delivered by specific roles rather than by whoever is available.
A safety specialist, the Sicherheitsfachkraft, and an occupational physician, the Arbeitsmediziner. Both can be employed internally or engaged externally, and external engagement is the normal arrangement for an office-sized entity. The obligation to appoint them applies from a defined headcount, with different arrangements available for smaller undertakings, so confirm which model applies to your entity.
The occupational physician requirement is the one British and American parents most often omit entirely, because there is no equivalent duty at home and an office is assumed not to need one. As in Germany, the appointment is the duty, independent of whether anyone attends a consultation.
3. Psychological strain has been explicitly assessable since 2013
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The area where Austria expects more than most, and where an office entity has the most substance to cover.
The workplace evaluation obligation covers psychological strain expressly, following a 2013 amendment that put it beyond argument. The Labour Inspectorate publishes detailed guidance on evaluating psychological strain, and the framework distinguishes the strain arising from the work itself from the individual response to it, which keeps the exercise focused on work design rather than on individuals.
Where hazards are identified, they are to be tackled at source. For a technology or financial entity, that means looking at workload, interruption, on-call arrangements and role clarity rather than adding a wellbeing benefit.
This is also where the flexible portion of the prevention time is typically spent, since work psychologists can be used within it.
4. Safety trust persons
Austria requires the appointment of safety trust persons, Sicherheitsvertrauenspersonen, where more than a small number of employees are regularly employed, with the number scaling as the workforce grows.
These are employee-side roles rather than management appointments, and they have a defined function: to be informed and consulted, to be involved in the evaluation and in the work of the preventive services, and to raise matters on behalf of colleagues. Confirm the applicable threshold and number for your entity, because they are specific.
The failure pattern is familiar from elsewhere in the region. A foreign-owned entity grows past the threshold, nobody revisits the governance, and the arrangement that existed when the office had eight people is still in place at thirty.
5. Consultation, and the works council layer
Where a works council exists, it has a role in health and safety matters alongside the safety trust persons and the preventive services.
As across German-speaking Europe, the expectation is engagement before decisions rather than notification afterwards. A group project that treats the Austrian entity as an implementation site will encounter this at the point of rollout, which is the expensive moment to encounter it.
The Vienna checklist
| Duty | What to establish | Typical gap | |---|---|---| | Prevention time | Hours calculated per head and actually delivered | Never calculated | | Split between disciplines | Correct share to each role | Spent entirely on safety, none on medicine | | Specialists appointed | Safety specialist and occupational physician engaged | Physician omitted | | Psychological strain | Evaluated expressly, measures at source | Treated as wellbeing | | Safety trust persons | Appointed to the required number | Threshold crossed unnoticed | | Consultation | Engagement before decisions | Group decides, entity implements |
Row two is worth checking even where row one has been done. An entity that engaged an external safety provider and never engaged an occupational physician has bought some of the required hours and none of a required discipline, which is a partial arrangement rather than a compliant one.
What Austria illustrates about European entities generally
Austria is unusual in quantifying the obligation and entirely typical in where the exposure sits for a foreign-owned office.
Germany requires both a safety specialist and a company doctor, with hours set by its own framework. Belgium requires an internal prevention service from the first employee alongside affiliation to an external one. The Czech Republic requires every job to be categorised and the outcome notified to the state. France attaches obligations at headcount thresholds that step rather than scale.
Each descends from the same EU Framework Directive 89/391/EEC and each built a different architecture on top. The consistent pattern is that the requirements which catch foreign parents are appointments, documentation and quantified support rather than anything about the premises. The office is usually fine. The structure around it was never built.
Holding one group view while each entity satisfies its own national test is where health and safety consultants and software are worth more together than either alone, and periodic health and safety audits confirm the smaller entities were not skipped.
Where Arinite fits
Arinite works with locally qualified practitioners in Austria, so the prevention time is delivered by the right disciplines under Austrian rules while your group keeps one point of contact across every country. We support 1,500+ businesses across 50+ countries and protect 100,000+ employees, with 95%+ client retention over 15+ years. Our health and safety consultants work extensively with finance and banking, legal and IT and software organisations, which describes much of what an international presence in Vienna consists of.
Our global health and safety consultants handle the surrounding jurisdictions that usually accompany an Austrian entity, and our international health and safety consultants can establish what is outstanding locally. If nobody can tell you how many prevention hours your Vienna office is entitled to, a free gap analysis will calculate it and show you what else is missing.
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Written by
Arinite Health & Safety Consultants
Health & Safety Expert at Arinite
