Austria

Austrian citizenship law is governed by the Staatsbürgerschaftsgesetz 1985 (StbG, Federal Law Gazette – BGBl No 311/1985, the consolidated re-publication of the 1965 Act), as amended, most recently by BGBl I No 39/2026 – a technical adaptation of asylum terminology that leaves the descent and § 58c rules untouched. Citizenship follows the ius sanguinis principle: a child acquires citizenship at birth from an Austrian parent (§ 7 StbG); birth on Austrian soil confers nothing by itself. There is no general "citizenship by descent application" for people with remoter Austrian ancestry. Four routes matter:

• Automatic acquisition by descent at birth (§ 7 StbG). A person born to a parent who was an Austrian citizen at the time of the birth (under the transmission rules in force on that date) is an Austrian citizen already, however many generations the family has lived abroad. Such a person does not apply for citizenship but for official confirmation of it.
• Determination of citizenship (Feststellung der Staatsbürgerschaft, § 42 StbG). Anyone who may already hold Austrian citizenship through descent, or is unsure whether it was lost, can have the competent authority determine their status by formal decision. For applicants born abroad and living abroad the authority is the Vienna provincial government, acting through Municipal Department 35 (MA 35), because Vienna is the register office of record for persons born abroad (§ 39(2) with § 49(2) StbG); a person born in Austria but living abroad falls instead to the province of the Austrian birth municipality.
• Declaration under § 58c StbG for victims of National Socialist persecution and their descendants in the direct line. Since 1 September 2020 descendants of persecuted persons can acquire citizenship by a simple written declaration (Anzeige), without residence in Austria, without language or income tests, and without giving up their present nationality. The provision was further expanded with effect from 1 May 2022.
• Facilitated naturalisation for former citizens (§ 10(4) StbG): the usual ten-year residence period is waived for a person who held Austrian citizenship continuously for at least ten years and lost it other than by deprivation (§§ 32–34 StbG); residence in Austria at the time of application is still required, as are the general naturalisation conditions. Spouses of Austrians have no descent-based claim and must naturalise, but § 11a(1) StbG gives them an entitlement after six years of lawful, uninterrupted residence in Austria combined with five years of subsisting marriage in a common household, rather than the ordinary ten years.

All routes require an essentially clean criminal record and the related personal conditions; for § 58c these are the conditions of § 10(1) nos 2–6 and 8 and § 10(2) nos 1 and 3–7 StbG. Residence, livelihood, German-language and civics requirements are expressly not applied, and the residence-conduct bar in § 10(2) no 2 is deliberately left out of the list, so an earlier irregularity of residence status does not disqualify a § 58c applicant.

For the ordinary descent line there is no generational limit: citizenship passes from parent to child indefinitely, including to families abroad for a century or more. What is required is an unbroken chain – every intermediate ancestor must actually have held Austrian citizenship at the time of the next child's birth and must have transmitted it under the rules in force on that date. A claim "through a grandparent" therefore only succeeds if the connecting parent was still an Austrian citizen when the claimant was born. The chain breaks if a link acquired a foreign nationality on application before the next generation's birth, and it may break where a female link married a foreign national before 1 July 1966 – but only if she thereby acquired her husband's nationality and no retention was granted, so the question turns on the husband's national law at the date of the marriage rather than on the marriage as such. Loss by legitimation is a further, easily overlooked break. Whether the chain holds is examined in the Feststellung procedure, in which the authority itself researches Austrian archives where the family's documents are incomplete.

The § 58c route works very differently. The anchor ancestor may be a parent, grandparent, great-grandparent or a more remote ancestor in the direct line – the statute sets no generational limit – and no chain of transmission is required: descendants qualify even where the persecuted ancestor never re-acquired citizenship and where the intermediate generations neither hold nor want Austrian citizenship. The statute expressly dispenses with any examination of the ancestor's own eligibility conditions (§ 58c(3) StbG). Descent may run through the maternal or paternal line without distinction, and adoptive children adopted as minors count as descendants (§ 58c(6) StbG); persons adopted as adults do not.

Whether an ancestor was Austrian must be assessed under a succession of regimes. In the Habsburg era, citizenship of the Austrian half of the monarchy was governed by the General Civil Code of 1811 (ABGB, §§ 28 et seq.), supplemented from 1863 by the municipal right of domicile (Heimatrecht); children born in wedlock took the father's citizenship, children born out of wedlock the mother's, and wives followed their husbands. After the monarchy's collapse, the Law of 5 December 1918 on German-Austrian citizenship tied citizenship of the new republic to Heimatrecht in a municipality of its territory; the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye (signed 10 September 1919) settled state succession with the new neighbouring states and gave minorities time-limited option rights, liberalised for Czechoslovakia by the Brno Treaty of 1920. The Federal Law of 30 July 1925 (BGBl 285/1925) then regulated federal and provincial citizenship, retaining paternal descent and the marriage-based rules.

Between the Anschluss and liberation, Austrians were German nationals under the ordinance of 3 July 1938 on German nationality in the Land of Austria; the Eleventh Decree to the Reich Citizenship Law of 25 November 1941 collectively denaturalised Jews living abroad, leaving them stateless. The Citizenship Transition Act of 10 July 1945 (Staatsbürgerschafts-Überleitungsgesetz, StGBl 59/1945, re-published as Anlage 1 to BGBl 276/1949) declared Austrian citizens, as of 27 April 1945, all persons who had held Austrian federal citizenship on 13 March 1938, together with those who would have acquired it in the interim by descent, legitimation or marriage under the 1925 law – but only where no ground of loss under that law had arisen in their person before 27 April 1945. The exclusion therefore covers acquisition of a foreign nationality (which shut out many Holocaust refugees naturalised in their countries of exile), marriage and foreign military service alike; there is one express carve-out, for persons who by 15 July 1945 had already served in the armies of the United Nations, whose service is not treated as a loss.

The wartime statute was continued as the Citizenship Act of 10 July 1945 (StGBl 60/1945), re-published as the Staatsbürgerschaftsgesetz 1949 (Anlage 2 to BGBl 276/1949), and replaced by the Staatsbürgerschaftsgesetz 1965 (BGBl 250/1965), which entered into force on 1 July 1966 and dropped marriage from the grounds of loss altogether. Descent remained gender-unequal for decades: a child born in wedlock before 1 September 1983 acquired citizenship only from an Austrian father, unless the child would otherwise have been stateless, in which case an Austrian mother transmitted; a child born out of wedlock acquired only from an Austrian mother. Since 1 September 1983 children born in wedlock acquire citizenship if either parent is Austrian. For children born out of wedlock to Austrian fathers, transmission at birth became possible only from 1 August 2013 (following a Constitutional Court decision of 29 November 2012), where paternity is acknowledged before or within eight weeks of the birth or is judicially established; a later acknowledgment supports only a facilitated naturalisation, available where the child lives in Austria and is under 14. Legitimation by the parents' subsequent marriage transmits the father's citizenship to a minor, unmarried child (§ 7a StbG), though a child who has already turned 14 acquires only if the child and the legal representative consent within three years of the marriage. Foundlings under six months found on federal territory are presumed citizens by descent until the contrary is proved (§ 8 StbG).

Five historical mechanisms account for most broken descent chains, and three of them are conditional rather than automatic:

• Acquisition of a foreign nationality on application (Ausbürgerung), a ground of loss under every regime since the 1925 Act, with retention available for good cause. It extended to a wife and to non-self-supporting children only where they simultaneously acquired the foreign nationality, and to daughters only where they were unmarried.
• Marriage to a foreign national. Under § 8(1) of the 1925 Act as re-published in 1949, a woman lost Austrian citizenship only where it was shown that the husband's own law conferred his nationality on her by virtue of the marriage, and retention could be granted for good cause; where the husband's state did not confer nationality by marriage, the chain did not break. For marriages between 27 April 1945 and 19 January 1950 retention could still be sought retrospectively until 19 July 1950. The ground ceased to operate for marriages contracted from 1 July 1966, when the Citizenship Act 1965 entered into force.
• Legitimation, the mechanism most easily missed in family papers: a child born out of wedlock who held citizenship through the mother lost it on being legitimated by the parents' marriage, where the father was a foreign national but not stateless and the child thereby acquired, or already held, the father's nationality.
• Voluntary entry into the military or public service of a foreign state.
• The National Socialist collective denaturalisations.

One important corrective exists: the Administrative Court held in 2001 that victims of National Socialism who fled and then naturalised abroad did not acquire that citizenship voluntarily, so they – and descendants deriving from them – may be found never to have lost Austrian citizenship at all, a question resolved in the Feststellung procedure.

Under current law, an Austrian who acquires a foreign nationality by application, declaration or express consent loses Austrian citizenship automatically by operation of law (§ 27 StbG) unless retention (Beibehaltung, § 28 StbG) was granted beforehand; acquiring another nationality automatically, for example by marriage, causes no loss. A minor loses only where the declaration directed at the foreign acquisition was made by the legal representative or with that representative's express prior consent, a child over 14 must have consented personally, and where the representative is someone other than a parent or adoptive parent the guardianship court must have approved beforehand (§ 27(2) and (3) StbG). Citizenship is also withdrawn for voluntary service in a foreign military (§ 32 StbG) and, under § 33 StbG, for service of a foreign state that seriously damages Austria's interests or reputation, for voluntary active participation in combat abroad for an organised armed group, and, at the authority's discretion, on conviction for terrorism offences. Voluntary renunciation (§ 37 StbG) requires possession of another nationality and, for those living in Austria, settled military-service obligations and no pending serious criminal proceedings; both of those conditions fall away after five years' continuous principal residence abroad.

For § 58c the exclusions are asymmetric and the distinction matters. A descendant who himself held Austrian citizenship and lost it by acquiring a foreign nationality is barred only where that loss occurred after 1 May 2022, according to official guidance, and not even then if he did not know he held Austrian citizenship; a loss of that kind before 1 May 2022 leaves the declaration open. By contrast, loss by withdrawal (§§ 32–34 StbG) or by renunciation (§ 37 StbG) bars the declaration whenever it occurred – § 58c(5) StbG attaches no date to that limb, so a renunciation in, say, 2015 is disqualifying.

The central exception is § 58c StbG, the restitution route for victims of National Socialism. A declaration is open to persons who, as Austrian citizens, as nationals of a successor state of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (officially listed as Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia, besides Austria itself), or as stateless persons, had their principal residence in Austria and left before 15 May 1955 because they suffered or feared persecution by organs of the NSDAP or the authorities of the Third Reich, or because they stood up for the democratic Republic of Austria. Since 1 May 2022 the provision also expressly covers persons who lost citizenship through a marriage connected in time with their flight, persons who had no principal residence in Austria between 30 January 1933 and 9 May 1945 because return would have exposed them to persecution, persons deported before 9 May 1945, and – for the benefit of their descendants – persons who perished under persecution. The victims themselves have been able to re-acquire citizenship under § 58c since 1993; the decisive extension to all descendants in the direct line took effect on 1 September 2020. In the first three years to September 2023 more than 31,000 declarations had been filed and more than 23,000 people had become citizens, the largest groups filing from Israel, the United Kingdom, the United States and Argentina.

Two closed windows are worth knowing because outdated advice still circulates. Children born in wedlock or legitimated before 1 September 1983 whose mother was an Austrian citizen on the day of the birth could acquire citizenship by simple declaration only between 1 August 2013 and 30 April 2014, and only if they were unmarried and under 19 on 1 September 1983 and had never been citizens or had lost citizenship by legitimation (§ 64a(18) StbG). That window is closed, and no general remedy for the pre-1983 maternal line exists today unless the mother's family history independently opens § 58c. A declaration option for ethnic German expellees resident in Austria since the 1940s existed in 1954 and is likewise long closed. Austria has no ethnic-origin route of the Hungarian or Croatian type.

There is no registration deadline for children born abroad: a child of an Austrian parent is a citizen from birth automatically, and entry in the citizenship register is declaratory. For § 58c the position is different and time-sensitive: a separate declaration is needed for each child already born, and also for a child expected to be born before the date on which the parent acquires citizenship. Only children born after that date are citizens by descent.

Austria is among Europe's strictest states on multiple nationality, but the strictness is route-specific. Dual citizenship arising at birth – an Austrian child who also takes another nationality from the second parent or from a ius soli birthplace – is fully accepted, and no election between the nationalities is demanded at majority. By contrast, ordinary naturalisation in Austria generally requires giving up the previous nationality (§ 10(3) StbG), and an Austrian who voluntarily acquires a foreign nationality loses Austrian citizenship ex lege (§ 27 StbG) unless retention was approved in advance. Section 28 StbG allows retention where it is in the Republic's interest or, for citizens by descent, where reasons in private and family life particularly worthy of consideration exist; the permission must be applied for in writing and lapses unless the foreign nationality is actually acquired within two years of the decision (§ 28(3) StbG).

Applicants by descent are not asked to renounce anything: confirmation of citizenship (Feststellung) merely records a status that already exists, and the § 58c declaration does not import the § 10(3) renunciation requirement, so beneficiaries keep their existing nationality as far as Austrian law is concerned. Whether the other state tolerates the new Austrian citizenship is a matter of that state's law. Austrian official guidance states that no loss is generally expected in the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, Argentina or Australia, and names the Netherlands, South Africa, Slovakia and Ukraine as states that may withdraw their nationality, adding that naturalised Mexican citizens may also be affected; that list reflects the Austrian authorities' understanding rather than the other states' current statutes, several of which have been amended in recent years, so the position should be checked under the law of the state concerned before the Austrian acquisition takes effect. After acquiring Austrian citizenship, any later voluntary acquisition of a further nationality triggers § 27 loss unless retention is granted first – a point § 58c beneficiaries with pending foreign naturalisation applications must watch closely, since the Austrian acquisition is backdated to the day the declaration reached the competent authority (§ 58c(7) StbG), which may be some weeks after it was lodged at the representation abroad.

Both the Feststellung and § 58c procedures rest on two evidentiary pillars: the applicant's civil-status chain and the ancestor's Austrian status. The chain is proven with birth and marriage certificates for each generation, plus divorce decrees and name-change documents where names diverge. The ancestor's citizenship is proven with whatever survives: old Austrian passports and travel documents, citizenship certificates, the pre-1938 municipal Heimatschein, an extract from the Heimatrolle, police registration records (Meldezettel), or naturalisation files. Documents showing when a foreign nationality was acquired matter as much, because they fix the moment a chain may have broken. Where family papers are missing, the Austrian authorities research the federal and municipal archives themselves; in § 58c cases the National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism can be consulted as expert (§ 58c(10) StbG), and the persecution itself is evidenced by documents such as an Opferausweis of the Republic of Austria, compensation or restitution records, and deportation or emigration records.

Formal requirements are applied pragmatically but firmly, and they differ according to whom the document concerns. Foreign public documents concerning the applicant personally must be produced in the original and must carry an apostille or diplomatic legalisation unless an authentication waiver applies. Documents concerning the persecuted ancestor need neither apostille nor legalisation, and copies are accepted where the originals no longer exist. A current criminal-record certificate from the country of residence, not older than eight months, is required of every § 58c applicant aged 14 or over; applicants whose principal residence is in Austria or Germany are exempt, applicants in the United States must produce an FBI certificate, and no authentication is needed where a waiver applies or where the issuing authority transmits the certificate to the Austrian representation directly, as is the practice for Israeli certificates. Documents in German or English are accepted without translation; other documents must, at the authority's request, be accompanied by a German translation from a sworn and court-certified translator.

Citizenship is administered by the provincial governments (§ 39(1) StbG). For applicants born abroad and living abroad, the competent authority for both the § 58c declaration and the determination of citizenship is the Vienna provincial government – MA 35, Immigration and Citizenship; applicants resident in an Austrian province deal with that province. Competence abroad is territorial: the file is lodged with the Austrian embassy or career consulate-general in whose consular district the applicant has his principal residence, and no other representation may accept it. For the § 58c declaration this channel is statutory (§ 58c(8) StbG, which routes the declaration through the representation competent under § 41(2) StbG); for the Feststellung it rests on MA 35's own instructions to applicants abroad. In both cases the representation forwards the file to Vienna.

The § 58c procedure runs as follows: we help you gather the required documents; we lodge the signed declaration with the competent authority (personal appearance is not mandatory, but originals of the applicant's own documents are), which examines the case, researches archives, and may put questions directly; if the conditions are met the authority issues a written decision (Bescheid) determining that citizenship was acquired retroactively on the day the declaration reached the authority (§ 58c(7) StbG). There is no oath, ceremony, interview, language test, civics test or residence requirement, and no filing deadline. In the Feststellung procedure the sequence is similar – application with documents via the representation, archival examination, then a declaratory decision (Feststellungsbescheid) that the applicant possesses, or does not possess, citizenship.

With the Bescheid in hand, the new or confirmed citizen may obtain a certificate of citizenship (Staatsbürgerschaftsnachweis) and an Austrian passport, neither of which is a precondition of the other: the certificate is issued only by the Austrian embassy or career consulate-general competent for the applicant's principal residence, honorary consulates excluded, while a passport is applied for at the competent representation, including those honorary consulates authorised to act as passport authorities. Passports require personal appearance for fingerprinting and are produced in Austria and returned to the representation within a few weeks. Male citizens aged 17 to 50 become subject to conscription rules, though those permanently resident abroad only register with the representation and are not called up while living abroad.

Austrian administrative law obliges authorities to decide within six months (§ 73 AVG), and that duty applies to § 58c declarations as much as to other citizenship files, but citizenship procedures regularly exceed it; a complaint for administrative delay (Säumnisbeschwerde) is the remedy. No average or service standard is published for § 58c declarations or for determinations of citizenship: the duration depends on the completeness of the file and the archival research needed, and we typically have anything from several months to well over a year. The caseload is large but moving: Vienna's MA 35 completed roughly 10,400 § 58c procedures in 2025, and about 9,570 persons abroad – a category the authority itself describes as in practice consisting of § 58c cases – acquired citizenship through Vienna that year. For ordinary in-country naturalisations the same annual report gives an average file-handling time of 301 days in 2025, on top of an average wait of 310 days simply to obtain an application appointment, which gives a fair sense of the authority's tempo.

The following are official fees only. Austria's currency is the euro, so no conversion arises.

• § 58c declaration: free of charge. The declaration, the decision and the supporting documents including translations are exempt from federal fees by law (§ 58c(9) StbG), and Vienna levies no provincial charges. The costs of obtaining foreign documents, apostilles and translations remain with the applicant.
• Determination of citizenship (Vienna tariff): EUR 21 for the application and EUR 36 for the decision, payable even if citizenship is not confirmed, plus charges on enclosures – EUR 11 per non-Austrian civil-status record, EUR 42 per foreign passport, EUR 21 per other travel document, EUR 21 per apostille or authentication, and EUR 6 per page of translation up to EUR 36 per document. On a multi-generation file these enclosure charges can exceed the base fees.
• Facilitated or ordinary naturalisation: EUR 163 federal application fee; in Vienna the grant itself costs EUR 1,202 to 1,600 in federal and provincial charges.
• Documents obtained abroad through a representation: certificate of citizenship EUR 71 (free for children up to age two); passport EUR 112, EUR 44 for children aged 2 to 12 and free up to the second birthday; identity card EUR 91, EUR 39 for children aged 2 to 15 and free for a first card up to the second birthday. A surcharge of EUR 30 applies where the application is made at an honorary consulate.

This page is not updated regularly, and it may not reflect the current position. It is a general account of Austrian citizenship law: statutes are amended, time limits expire, and the practice of the competent authorities moves without the legislation moving with it. Nothing here is legal advice, and nothing here is an assessment of your own family’s position.

Whether there is a claim in your case turns on names, dates and documents that no general page can take into account. The questionnaire is where we ask about them, and a lawyer in our citizenship team reads the answers.