Austria in the register

Rules and sources

Disclosure threshold

Until 8 July 2019: single donations above €50,000 reported immediately; 9 July 2019–2022: single donations above €2,500 published immediately; from 2023: donations above ~€500 (index-linked 540/560/580) published with name and postcode

Legal framework

Parteiengesetz 2012 (PartG, BGBl. I 56/2012), reformed in 2022 by BGBl. I 125/2022 (§ 6 donations, § 5 annual accounts, § 5a/§ 4a Wahlwerbungsbericht (election campaign report), § 1 Parteienregister (party register)). Parties report donations above roughly EUR 150 (index-linked: 165 in 2024, 170 in 2025, 180 in 2026) to the Rechnungshof (Court of Audit) every quarter; the Rechnungshof immediately publishes, with the donor's name, donations above roughly EUR 500 (540/560/580 index-linked) and, during election campaigns, above EUR 2,500; the cap per donor is roughly EUR 7,500 index-linked (9,900 in 2026). Annual accounts, with lists of donors, sponsors and advertisements, are published by the Rechnungshof on 1 January of the second year following; Wahlwerbungsberichte within six months of the election. Oversight: the Rechnungshof (independent unit since 2023, with direct inspection powers) and the Unabhängiger Parteien-Transparenz-Senat (Independent Party Transparency Senate) for sanctions; public funding is paid by the Bundeskanzleramt (Federal Chancellery) under the Parteien-Förderungsgesetz 2012.

Currency

EUR

Sources

• Rechenschaftsberichte der Parteien 2013–2022 – donation lists (Spendenlisten, § 6 PartG) in the PDF annual accountsRechnungshof Österreich · 2013–2022 · 843 rows
• Parteispenden.at – Förderungen (public funding from federal, state and municipal bodies)Forum Informationsfreiheit (civic tech, partly from FOI requests) · 1990–2017 · 818 rows
• Rechenschaftsberichte der Parteien 2023–2024 – donation annexes (Spendenlisten)Rechnungshof Österreich · 2023–2024 · 748 rows
• Parteispenden – Spendenmeldungen (donation reports published by the Court of Audit)Rechnungshof Österreich · 2012–2025 (reports of donations above EUR 50,000 from 2012 to 8 July 2019, then yearly register files from 9 July 2019 to 2025) · 737 rows
• Parteispenden.at – Spenden, Sponsoring, InserateForum Informationsfreiheit (civic tech) · 2012–2016 · 155 rows
• Parteienförderung gemäß PartFörG 2015–2025Bundeskanzleramt Österreich · 2015–2025 · 72 rows
• Förderung der Parteiakademien 2015–2025Bundeskanzleramt Österreich · 2015–2025 · 58 rows
• Parteispenden.at – Parteifinanzen (transcribed Rechenschaftsberichte)Forum Informationsfreiheit (civic tech) · 2013–2017 · 43 rows

Caveats

• Sources overlap: donations above the thresholds appear both in the Rechnungshof register (Parteispenden – Spendenmeldungen (donation reports published by the Court of Audit): individual donations with dates, above EUR 50,000 until 8 July 2019 and above EUR 2,500 afterwards) and in the annual-accounts annexes (Rechenschaftsberichte der Parteien 2013–2022 – donation lists (Spendenlisten, § 6 PartG) in the PDF annual accounts and Rechenschaftsberichte der Parteien 2023–2024 – donation annexes (Spendenlisten): amounts cumulated per donor per year). Do not add the register and the annex source_keys together.
• Register files 2019–2022 only carry the Court of Audit reporting date; 'date' holds the receipt date when a note gives it, otherwise the reporting date.
• Before 2023 only donations above EUR 50,000 (until July 2019) or EUR 2,500 were published by name during the year; the other named donations of 2013–2022 come from the annual-accounts PDFs (Rechenschaftsberichte der Parteien 2013–2022 – donation lists (Spendenlisten, § 6 PartG) in the PDF annual accounts).
• Annual accounts 2013–2022 are mostly scanned PDFs: donor lists were read by OCR, every amount was confirmed by a second reading and unconfirmed rows were rejected (see source notes); donor names and towns can still contain residual OCR errors. The lists are split by recipient level (party and branches without legal personality, affiliated organisations, candidates, municipal level, Land-law lists), so one donor can appear several times in a year; description names the level.
• Team Stronach annexes 2013–2017 publish the imputed interest on Frank Stronach's interest-free loans as in-kind donations, and transfers and loan interest from the federal party to its Land branches as donations; these intra-party rows are kept with donor kind 'party' and must be excluded when measuring outside funding.
• Reports checked page by page with no named donor: BZÖ 2013, FPÖ 2013 and 2021, KPÖ 2013–2014, Liste Fritz 2013–2022, Vorwärts Tirol 2014–2017, FPS 2015–2018, Team Stronach für Salzburg 2016, Freie Wähler Salzburg 2017, JETZT 2019, Volt 2019. KPÖ reports 2015–2022 are not on the RH site. Donors printed without an amount (FPÖ 2022 Upper Austria Land list) and sponsoring/advertising lists are not ingested.
• Annual-account annex formats differ per party; ÖVP lists cash and in-kind donations together and includes company-register numbers in donor names; some parties list donations below the legal threshold.
• donor kind is taken from source categories where available (parteispenden.at Geber_Typ, KPÖ first/last name lists) and otherwise inferred from legal-form words, academic titles or organisation words; 'unknown' otherwise.
• donor country is only filled when the source gives a foreign postcode prefix (CH-, (DEU) ...); Austrian postcodes are kept in donor_locality without asserting the country.
• Street addresses present in one MFG 2024 annex were dropped; only postcode and town are kept.
• public_funding covers federal party and party-academy funding 2015–2025 (BKA) plus the parteispenden.at compilation (1990–2017, aggregated) of federal parliamentary-group, state and municipal funding; state-level party funding after 2017 (Landesparteienförderung, about as large as federal funding) is not included.
• Academy mapping of IDEENGARAGE and Bildungsverein–Offene Gesellschaft to JETZT – Liste Pilz is based on the parliamentary party entitled in 2018/2019.
• party_finances (2013–2017) sum all organisational levels without netting intra-party transfers; donations are included in other_income because the old layout did not split them by donor type. Annual accounts 2023–2024 income statements (XLSX) were not normalised.
• Campaign spending reports (Wahlwerbungsberichte 2024) and the lobbying register contain no donor names and were not ingested.
• Parteispenden.at funding rows for local lists not belonging to a national party were skipped (55 recipient labels).
• Second pass (checked 2026-09-29): the Wahlwerbungsberichte (NR-Wahl 2024, EU-Wahl 2024; https://www.rechnungshof.gv.at/rh/home/was-wir-tun/was-wir-tun_5/wahlen/Wahlwerbungsberichte.html) and the statements of the statutory chambers under § 4a PartG contain expenditure only, and the register of Personenkomitees lists committees only: no donors are named there. No 2026 donation file has been published by the Rechnungshof yet (the shortlink https://www.rechnungshof.gv.at/Parteispenden still shows 2025).
• Not yet ingested: (a) donor lists of the presidential elections 2016 and 2022 (§ 24a BPräsWG, https://www.rechnungshof.gv.at/rh/home/was-wir-tun/was-wir-tun_5/was-wir-tun_12/Bundespraesidentenwahl.html, 11 PDFs, donors above EUR 3,500 and party transfers per candidate; partly scanned); (b) state-level donation lists: Landesrechnungshof Salzburg (donations from EUR 500 to Landtag parties and clubs 2018-2024, https://www.salzburg.gv.at/pol/landesrechnungshof/lrh-sonderaufgaben/spendenliste), Vorarlberg (Amtsblatt), Kärnten (finance reports to the Land), Wien, Tirol and Steiermark were not examined.