Yes, you will pay a hotel or local tax, but you should not worry too much about.
- Usually works out to something just over 2.5% of the basic room rate
- The tax is typically already included in prices, so rarely something you need to think about
- See also:
The Ortstaxe tourist tax
(Photo licensed from and © iStock.com / DEVASHISH_RAWAT)
This Ortstaxe is a local tourist tax used to help finance the Vienna tourist board: those ads, videos and informative web pages don’t write themselves.
The city of Vienna requires hotels, B&Bs, and anyone offering any kind of temporary accommodation to charge you this Ortstaxe. Even if it’s just a campsite or private apartment.
Only a few exceptions apply. For example, if the person renting the room, flat etc. is studying at a Viennese university. Or if their stay is continuous and lasts over 3 months.
The Ortstaxe rate at the time of writing is 3.2% of the accommodation cost (after taking off sales tax, the cost of breakfast and then 11% of the remaining amount).
To give you an idea of how much that works out to…
Say a hotel charges you €100 per room per night. That includes sales taxes but not breakfast. They’d hand over €2.52 of that €100 as the Ortstaxe. (The exact number changes with the prevailing level of sales tax.)
The relatively small amount is one reason not to worry too much about the tax.
Another is that local law requires that the Ortstaxe cost and status is made clear in displayed prices, so you should always know where you stand.
In general, quoted prices you see on accommodation websites, for example, already include this tax. So you’re highly unlikely to get any kind of surprise later.
In German, the designation “inkl. Ortstaxe” after a price indicates the tax is included in the price. In English, “incl. local tax” is the common translation used.
One thing to note, though, is that this tax is regional, not national; different rules may apply outside of Vienna.
Last time I checked, for example, the province of Tirol charged a fixed sum per person and night that varies according to which region and season you’re in.
For the record, Austria has a fairly devolved political system. So the nine provinces that make up the country have quite a lot of decision-making autonomy.
Vienna, for example, is the capital of Austria, a city, and its own province. So our mayor is also head of the provincial government.