Austrian bureaucracy regularly throws up obstacles for foreigners living in the country and editor Amanda Previdelli recalls some of the more memorable things she’s seen or experienced over the years. Share your own stories below.
This is not exactly breaking news. We have written about Austria’s love of forms, photocopies and official counters for years, and it has become almost a national quirk you trade with friends and family back home. You laugh about it, you roll your eyes about it, you pretend it doesn’t get to you.
Then you find yourself standing in front of your neighbour’s printer at 9:30 pm on a Tuesday night, wondering when exactly your life became like this.
In that spirit, I want to share a few of the most ridiculous bureaucratic moments I have seen recently. They all sound made up, but they are all real.
The day a C1 certificate became ‘worse’ than a B1 certificate
This story is not mine, but it lives in my memory like a cautionary tale.
A friend of mine, who is from a non-EU country, had to renew her residence permit. Part of the process involved proving German knowledge, and the required level was B1, I believe. This friend is astonishingly capable. She did not have a B1 certificate because she never needed one. By the time she had to renew her visa, she had a C1 certificate, which is higher, and should have been even better proof of exactly what the authorities wanted to confirm.
She went to her appointment with the C1 certificate. The official refused it.
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I wish I could say this shocked me. The goal was not to assess whether she met the requirement, which she clearly did. The goal was to match an item on a list exactly, as if the letters and numbers mattered more than what they represented.
The PDF that knew exactly what I wanted and refused to let me have it
This one happened to me very recently, and it is so perfectly Austrian that I almost admire it.
I used to have a phone contract with a cheaper operator in Austria that I kept only for business purposes. It was cheap enough that I procrastinated on cancelling it for months, mostly because I assumed the process would involve a fax, a letter, and possibly a witness. Eventually, I decided I would just use my personal number and finally close this extra line.
Then, unexpectedly, I had a small moment of hope. The company website had a cancellation form. It was right there, easy to find, and the instructions were practically generous by Austrian standards: download the form, print it, sign it, and email it to us.
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Print and email is not my dream, but because I am an optimist who lives in Austria, I thought: fine, this is where my tablet comes in. I can download the PDF, fill it in neatly, sign it with my pencil, save it, and email it back.
Except the PDF had other plans.
I filled in every field, including the ones that made me feel like I was applying for a mortgage rather than cancelling a cheap SIM-only contract. I signed it. I went to save the document and that is when the whole thing froze up.
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After a few rounds of repeating the process and questioning my basic competence, I did what you do when you are about to throw your tablet out of the window. I went digging into the file’s detailed settings, the place where you can see information like when it was created and who owns it. There, buried in the permissions, was a line that made me laugh out loud: “the owner of this file did not allow it to be edited”.
It was just a flat refusal to let me fill it in digitally, even though the entire point of putting it online and letting people email it back suggests you are at least vaguely aware that digital paperwork exists.
In the end, I cheated. I took a screenshot of the form, filled it out on my tablet anyway, signed it, and emailed the screenshot (saved as a PDF). I have not heard back yet, which means I am still living with the low-level anxiety that I will receive an email saying: “Unfortunately, we cannot accept screenshots.” If that happens, I will print the screenshot, sign it again, and send it by carrier pigeon, which I assume is the next logical step.
When the ‘better’ document becomes the wrong document
The third story involves my husband and his attempt to apply for Austrian citizenship, a process we later gave up on, partly because of the cumulative weight of moments like this.
As part of the citizenship application, he needed to provide proof of his right to live in Austria. For EU citizens who stay for more than three months, the first document is the Anmeldebescheinigung (registration certificate). But when my husband arrived, things were different, and that specific document did not even exist.
Later, after living here long enough, he received a Daueraufenthalt document, essentially permanent residence. So he went to the office with the Daueraufenthalt. The official looked at it and said, “No, you are an EU citizen; you need the Anmeldebescheinigung.”
He walked out of that building in a state of deep confusion that stayed with us for a couple of weeks.
He went back another day. He spoke to someone else. And this second person, in the same office, was baffled by what the first official had said. Annoyingly, this is also a very Austrian thing to go through: the rules depend on who’s at the desk when you ask.
READ MORE: Why we decided to give up trying to become Austrian
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These are the craziest things about Austrian bureaucracy, for me. It is not the existence of rules, because rules exist everywhere. It is the strictness about the exact wording, combined with an occasional inability to interpret it in a way that makes human sense.
It is the B1 requirement that cannot be met with a C1 certificate because the paper says B1. Or the permanent residence document that cannot be accepted because the checklist says registration certificate.
I’m not telling anyone to bend the rules. You just need someone to review the situation and confirm that the requirement is satisfied, even if the format is not the exact one printed in the box.
Have you had a similar experience? What is the most outrageous, funny, or quietly infuriating thing you have experienced in Austrian bureaucracy? Send it to me (amanda.previdelli@thelocal.com) or comment below. I have a feeling I am nowhere near the end of this collection.
Key vocabulary
Anmeldebescheinigung – registration certificate for EU citizens living in Austria beyond a short stay
Daueraufenthalt – permanent residence status or document
Meldezettel – registration form showing where you officially live
Magistrat – city administration office, especially in Vienna
Amt – government office or administrative authority
Bescheid – official written decision from an authority