| Date | Who is affected | What applies |
|---|---|---|
| 1 January 2014 | Contractors of the federal administration | Obligation to submit structured e-invoices to the federal government |
| open | Domestic B2B transactions | No national obligation, no published timeline |
| 1 July 2030 | Cross-border B2B transactions within the EU | Mandatory e-invoicing under the ViDA reporting requirements |
There is none. Austrian companies may refuse structured e-invoices and ask for paper or PDF.
There is none. An extension to B2B is under discussion, but no concrete timeline has been presented so far.
Under § 11(2) of the Austrian VAT Act (öUStG), an electronic invoice is only permitted with the recipient’s consent. Consent requires no particular form and can also be given tacitly, for example by paying without objection. The legal text is available via the Federal Legal Information System (Rechtsinformationssystem des Bundes).
Freely agreed. In Austrian B2B, a PDF remains a valid invoice, even though it is not a structured e-invoice. Common structured formats are ebInterface and formats based on UBL 2.1; both are aligned with the EN 16931 standard.
There are no prescribed channels for transmitting e-invoices. Peppol is a permitted channel, but not an obligation.
Under § 132(1) of the Federal Fiscal Code (BAO), receipts, books and records must be retained for seven years, counted from the end of the calendar year to which they relate. For documents related to real estate, the VAT Act provides for extended periods of up to 22 years. Electronic retention is permitted as long as complete, orderly and content-identical reproduction is ensured throughout the entire period.
Contractors of the federal administration have had to submit their invoices in structured electronic form since 1 January 2014. The legal basis is § 5 of the ICT Consolidation Act (IKT-Konsolidierungsgesetz). Under § 5(3), foreign contractors are only obliged to the extent that this is technically possible. A foreign company with a permanent establishment in Austria, by contrast, counts as a domestic contractor.
The federal government accepts ebInterface in versions 4.3, 5.0, 6.0 and 6.1 as well as UBL 2.1. ebInterface is the Austrian XML standard and is maintained by AustriaPro, an association of the Austrian Federal Economic Chamber (Wirtschaftskammer Österreich).
Invoices to the federal government need an order reference. It is a mandatory field and is carried in ebInterface via InvoiceRecipient/OrderReference/OrderID, and in UBL via the corresponding reference fields. If the order reference is a ten-digit purchase order number, the matching order item number must also be stated for each invoice line. In the Peppol network, Austrian public bodies are addressed via identifier scheme 9915, companies via 9914 with the Austrian VAT identification number (UID). Both schemes can be looked up in the Peppol code list.
Submission runs via the Business Service Portal (Unternehmensserviceportal, USP) and the e-Rechnung.gv.at platform, both operated by the Federal Computing Centre (Bundesrechenzentrum). Submitting companies need a one-time registration with the USP. The Federal Procurement Agency (Bundesbeschaffung GmbH) additionally operates its own invoice portal connected to the USP.
Options are manual entry in the online form, upload of an invoice file, automated transmission via web service, and delivery via the Peppol network. For a connection from within software, the web service and Peppol are the relevant options. Non-compliant invoices are rejected automatically and are deemed not to have been submitted.
At the level of the federal states and municipalities, there is no statutory obligation to receive e-invoices. Individual bodies join the federal platform voluntarily, others use their own channels. The reachability of a specific body should therefore be queried rather than hard-coded in the product.
Austria is not a mandatory market, but a follow-on market. If you already send and receive via Peppol, you reach the Austrian federal government through the same connection and mainly need to add country-specific fields.
The order reference is a mandatory field with its own rules and cannot be filled from a generic reference field. The retention period is seven years. Both should be configurable per country rather than hard-coded.
In Austrian B2B, the recipient’s consent remains necessary. Your product therefore needs a reliable fallback route to PDF and, ideally, a place where consent is recorded per business partner.
To connect to the Peppol network, you can build your own Peppol Access Point or integrate a certified Access Point such as InvoiceRails. Whether an Austrian recipient is reachable and which formats it supports can be checked in advance with a Peppol ID lookup.
Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 is the OpenPeppol specification for invoices and credit notes in the Peppol network. It is a core invoice usage specification (CIUS) of the European standard EN 16931.
When an e-invoice from your software is rejected, your team has to work out from the validation report which field triggered the message and who can correct it.
In Belgium, structured e-invoicing has been mandatory in B2B since 1 January 2026, for both sending and receiving, with no phase-in by company size.
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