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SUMMARY
Vienna home prices are going up. The broad market has moved out of its falling-price phase, with the latest OeNB reading showing residential prices 2.9% higher year on year in Q2 2026.
The recovery is real, but it is not a return to the old boom. Used apartments are doing most of the work, while new-build transaction prices have been almost flat over the latest half-year.
Vienna still has some ground to recover from the 2022–2024 correction. Used apartment prices fell hard enough during that period that a few positive quarters have not yet brought the segment back to its earlier peak.
The strongest confirmation comes from transactions, not just price indices. Vienna condominium sales rose 18% year on year in the first half of 2026, while transaction value climbed 21%, so the rebound is happening with more completed deals behind it.
Buyers are coming back into a market that is still much more expensive to finance than it was before 2022. Mortgage rates around the mid-3% range are easier than at the peak of the rate shock, but nowhere near the ultra-cheap loans that powered the previous cycle.
The new-versus-used split is unusually important in Vienna now. OTTO's latest averages put existing apartments around €4,645/m² and first-occupancy units around €7,395/m², leaving a new-build premium of roughly 59% at the city level.
Nominal appreciation currently looks stronger than real appreciation. Vienna prices are rising at roughly the same pace as Austrian inflation, so owners are recovering euro value faster than purchasing power.
The supply side may become the bigger story from here. New completions are falling sharply, especially in commercially developed rental housing, while Vienna's population continues to grow.
The recovery is not uniform across the city. District, building condition, renovation needs, energy performance, floor level and elevator access can still matter more to an individual sale than the headline Vienna index.
Our read is that Vienna prices are likely to keep rising moderately rather than surge. A sharper downturn would probably require a new financing or economic shock, while a true boom would need much stronger real price growth and easier credit than we see today.
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Are home prices in Vienna going up right now?
Vienna home prices are going up again, and the latest data make that direction fairly clear.
The Oesterreichische Nationalbank's residential property price index shows Vienna prices rising 2.9% year on year in the second quarter of 2026. Growth had been 2.3% in the first quarter, so the increase has recently picked up rather than stalled.
That follows two difficult years. Vienna residential prices fell 2.3% in 2023 and another 3.4% in 2024 before turning upward. The latest quarterly reading therefore fits into a broader recovery rather than one unusually strong quarter.
The rebound is visible across several categories too. Vienna condominiums were up 2.7% year on year in the second quarter, used apartments gained 3.1%, new apartments 2.4%, and single-family houses 5.9%.
For someone asking the simple question today, the answer is yes: Vienna home prices are rising.
| Period | Vienna home-price change | Direction | What happened |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | -2.3% | Down | Correction started |
| 2024 | -3.4% | Down | Decline deepened |
| 2025 | +2.9% | Up | Market turned |
| Q1 2026 YoY | +2.3% | Up | Recovery continued |
| Q2 2026 YoY | +2.9% | Up | Growth accelerated |
If Vienna prices are rising, why does the market still feel weak?
Vienna property can feel weaker than the headline price numbers suggest because today's rise comes after a sizeable correction and several years of high inflation.
Used apartments show this especially well. OeNB research found that Vienna resale condominium prices fell 9.4% between the third quarter of 2022 and the second quarter of 2024 as higher interest rates hit affordability.
Prices then began climbing again. From the first ECB rate cut in mid-2024 through the end of 2025, used Vienna apartments recovered around 2.8%.
Those moves are sequential, so we cannot simply subtract one percentage from the other. If an apartment-price index started at 100, a 9.4% fall would take it to 90.6. A subsequent 2.8% rebound gets it to roughly 93.1. That still leaves the index about 6.9% below where it began.
Inflation creates another gap between perception and the headline numbers. Austrian consumer prices have lately been rising at roughly the same order of magnitude as Vienna property prices. A home that gains around 3% nominally while the general price level also rises around 3% has barely become more valuable in real purchasing-power terms.
So Vienna prices are genuinely rising today. They just have not erased all of the damage from the previous correction.
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Investor flats on the edge of the city are priced on a brochure yield the rent has never reached. Where asking prices sit furthest from what places actually earn and resell for.
Have Vienna home prices already hit the bottom?
Yes, Vienna's broad housing market appears to have passed its bottom.
Prices provide the first clue. Vienna moved from a 3.4% annual decline in 2024 to a 2.9% increase in 2025, followed by positive growth in both of the first two quarters of 2026.
Sales provide a second, independent check. OTTO Immobilien recorded 4,290 Vienna condominium transactions during the first half of 2026, compared with 3,644 one year earlier. That is an 18% increase.
The amount of money changing hands rose even faster. Condominium transaction value reached €1.62 billion, up 21% from €1.35 billion and only 8% below the equivalent record period in 2022.
That combination makes the recovery much more convincing. Rising prices in a market where hardly anything sells can fool you. Vienna currently has both higher prices and considerably more buyers completing deals.
We can never know the exact cyclical bottom with perfect certainty until long afterward, but a new Vienna-wide low now looks unlikely without another major economic or financing shock.
Are used apartments in Vienna getting more expensive again?
Yes. Used apartment prices in Vienna are now climbing, and this is where the recovery looks clearest.
The latest OeNB index puts existing Vienna condominium prices 3.1% above their level one year earlier. OTTO's transaction database points in the same direction: the average resale apartment sold for €4,645/m² in the first half of 2026, compared with €4,519/m² during the second half of 2025.
That works out to a 2.8% increase in only six months.
The rebound makes sense when we look at what happened during the downturn. Existing apartments absorbed most of Vienna's price correction when interest rates jumped, losing 9.4% between the third quarter of 2022 and the second quarter of 2024.
New-build apartments behaved very differently. Their prices fell only 0.1% over the same period because developers largely resisted major discounts and instead sold far fewer units.
Resale sellers adjusted earlier and harder. Now that buyers are returning, that cheaper part of the market has more room to recover.
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Are new apartments in Vienna getting more expensive too?
Yes, but new-build apartment prices in Vienna are moving much more slowly than resale prices.
The OeNB's latest index shows new Vienna condominiums up 2.4% year on year. OTTO's actual transaction averages look flatter over the shorter term: first-occupancy apartments averaged €7,395/m² in the first half of 2026, barely above €7,376/m² during the previous half-year.
A €19/m² difference is essentially flat.
That is a useful reminder that two good datasets can describe slightly different things. The OeNB measures a broader price index designed to control for changes in the properties being sold. OTTO reports observed transaction averages, which are more affected by the mix of projects reaching the market.
Both still point to the same broad picture. New-build prices have stopped falling, while existing apartments are showing the stronger rebound.
The price gap between the two segments is now huge. At OTTO's averages, a new apartment costs around 59% more per square metre than an existing one.
| Vienna apartment segment | Recent average price | Recent movement | Current picture |
|---|---|---|---|
| Existing apartments | €4,645/m² | +2.8% vs previous half-year | Clearly rising |
| New apartments | €7,395/m² | +0.3% vs previous half-year | Roughly flat |
| OeNB existing-apartment index | — | +3.1% YoY | Rising |
| OeNB new-apartment index | — | +2.4% YoY | Rising moderately |
Are Vienna apartment prices back to their 2022 peak?
Used Vienna apartments are still below their previous nominal peak, while new apartments have already recovered much more fully.
The difference goes back to how each market handled the interest-rate shock.
According to the OeNB, used Vienna condominium prices fell 9.4% from the third quarter of 2022 to the second quarter of 2024. They subsequently recovered 2.8% through the end of 2025.
Starting with an illustrative index of 100, those two moves would leave used apartments at roughly 93.1. That puts them around 6.9% below their earlier level at that point.
New apartments barely corrected in price. Their index fell just 0.1% during the downturn and then gained 3.8% during the subsequent recovery. Using the same calculation, an index starting at 100 would end around 103.7.
This split explains some of the confusion around Vienna housing prices. Someone tracking newly built apartments can reasonably see prices close to or above old nominal highs, while an owner of a typical resale apartment may still be below the 2022 market.
| Illustrative index starting at 100 | After correction | After initial recovery | Position vs start |
|---|---|---|---|
| Used Vienna apartments | 90.6 | ≈93.1 | ≈-6.9% |
| New Vienna apartments | 99.9 | ≈103.7 | ≈+3.7% |
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Investor flats on the edge of the city are priced on a brochure yield the rent has never reached. Where asking prices sit furthest from what places actually earn and resell for.
How expensive is an apartment in Vienna now?
A typical Vienna resale apartment currently sits around the mid-€4,000s per square metre, while a new apartment is closer to the mid-€7,000s.
OTTO's latest completed transactions put the city-wide averages at €4,645/m² for existing apartments and €7,395/m² for first occupancy.
District-level figures from the First Vienna Residential Market Report show how much prices vary inside the city. In Leopoldstadt, ordinary ownership stock is around €5,100/m² and first occupancy around €7,300/m². Landstraße is approximately €5,050 and €7,000. Mariahilf is closer to €5,700 and €7,300, while Neubau reaches roughly €5,800 and €7,600.
The gap quickly becomes large in euros. At OTTO's city averages, a 70 m² existing apartment comes to about €325,000 before buying costs. The same floor area at the average new-build price comes to roughly €518,000.
That is almost €193,000 more for the new property.
The current recovery is therefore happening inside a market where buyers still have radically different affordability depending on whether they accept older housing stock.
| Example market | Existing / ordinary ownership | New / first occupancy | Approx. premium for new |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vienna average | €4,645/m² | €7,395/m² | 59% |
| Leopoldstadt | €5,100/m² | €7,300/m² | 43% |
| Landstraße | €5,050/m² | €7,000/m² | 39% |
| Mariahilf | €5,700/m² | €7,300/m² | 28% |
| Neubau | €5,800/m² | €7,600/m² | 31% |
Are Vienna home prices rising faster than inflation?
Barely, if at all. Vienna home prices are rising in euros, but the real increase is currently much less impressive.
The city's residential price index gained 2.9% year on year in the latest OeNB reading. Austrian inflation has recently been moving around a similar 3% range.
The periods do not line up perfectly, so pretending we can calculate an exact real Vienna housing return from those two headline numbers would give false precision. The basic comparison is still useful: property prices and consumer prices are currently moving at roughly similar speeds.
We saw the same issue during 2025. The OeNB calculated Austrian residential property growth at 2.1% while inflation was higher. Vienna performed better, with a 2.9% nominal increase, but even that was modest once rising consumer prices were taken into account.
So the nominal charts look better than the real return. Owners are seeing their euro valuations recover, but Vienna housing has yet to produce the kind of strong inflation-adjusted gains associated with a genuine property boom.
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Are lower mortgage rates pushing Vienna prices higher?
Yes. Better mortgage conditions have brought buyers back into Vienna, although borrowing is still far more expensive than it was during the previous boom.
The OeNB currently reports an average rate of around 3.54% for new Austrian housing loans. That is much easier to absorb than the financing conditions buyers faced around the peak of the rate shock.
Mortgage volumes reacted strongly. Austrian banks issued roughly €17 billion of new housing loans in 2025, compared with about €11 billion in 2024, an increase of around 55%.
The recovery continued this year. Monthly housing lending exceeded €1.6 billion in March, April and May after falling as low as €0.7 billion in January 2024. The OeNB's latest bank lending survey also found that household demand for mortgages continued to increase in the second quarter.
Austria's KIM-V mortgage regulation expired at the end of June 2025, which removed some of the formal constraints around loan-to-value ratios, debt-service burdens and mortgage duration. But the timing tells us that KIM-V was never the whole story: mortgage demand had already started recovering in early 2024 as interest rates came down.
More recently, banks surveyed by the OeNB have pointed increasingly to better housing-market expectations and stronger consumer confidence. Buyers are no longer returning only because credit is cheaper. More of them also seem to believe that waiting for another large Vienna price drop may no longer pay off.
There is still a ceiling to how far financing alone can push prices. New mortgages around 3.5% remain nowhere near the exceptionally cheap loans available before the ECB tightening cycle.
Are more people actually buying apartments in Vienna now?
Yes. Vienna apartment sales are now close enough to old highs that buyer demand clearly has returned.
OTTO counted 4,290 condominium transactions during the first half of 2026, 18% more than during the same period a year earlier. Their combined value rose 21% to €1.62 billion.
The comparison with 2022 is even more useful. Transaction value is currently just 8% below the record first half of that year.
What buyers choose has changed, however. New developer-built apartments represented around one-third of Vienna condominium transaction value in the latest period. Before interest rates jumped, their share was usually closer to 45%.
Existing homes have taken more of the recovery because their prices adjusted further during the downturn and remain far cheaper per square metre.
Today's Vienna buyer is back, but generally more price-sensitive than the buyer we saw during the cheap-money years.
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Is Vienna running short of new homes?
Yes. Vienna is heading into a very tight housing-supply period, and this could become more important for prices than interest rates over the next few years.
EHL's latest residential market update expects only 3,738 new ownership apartments to be completed in Vienna during 2026, around 1,000 fewer than previously. Free-market rental completions have fallen almost 50% compared with 2024 and more than 60% compared with the 2022 boom year.
OTTO's wider housing estimate tells a similar story. It expects 12,092 total Vienna housing completions in 2026, followed by only 9,608 in 2027.
The sharpest squeeze is expected in commercially developed rental housing. OTTO estimates that these units will make up around 21% of completions in 2026 but just 3% in 2027, equivalent to roughly 260 apartments.
At the same time, Vienna keeps growing. Statistics Austria puts the city's population at just over 2.04 million currently, after another increase during 2025. That does not translate mechanically into owner-occupier demand because Vienna remains overwhelmingly a rental city, but every additional household adds pressure somewhere in the housing system.
EHL is already arguing that demand for new apartments exceeds available supply and expects Vienna to shift increasingly toward a sellers' market.
That forecast may prove too aggressive if the economy weakens. The underlying supply numbers, though, are difficult to dismiss.
Are home prices rising everywhere in Vienna?
No. Vienna's overall price recovery still hides large differences between districts, buildings and individual properties.
A city-wide increase of roughly 3% does not mean every seller can add 3% to last year's price.
Location remains decisive, but so do building condition, energy efficiency, floor, elevator access, layout and renovation requirements. Those differences became more important when financing got expensive because buyers had less room left in their budgets for major renovation work.
Recent data on Viennese apartment buildings also show how uneven pricing can be. OTTO's 2026 Zinshaus analysis found minimum values rising in some central districts while falling in others. Districts 1, 4 and 9 saw increases at the lower end of their price ranges, while the 17th district recorded a sizeable fall in its minimum-price indicator after several unusually cheap private transactions.
Those figures concern entire apartment buildings rather than normal owner-occupied flats, so we should not use them as condominium price benchmarks. They still show something useful: Vienna can have a common upward direction without anything close to a common rate of increase.
The broad market can rise while a badly renovated apartment on the wrong street remains difficult to sell.
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Could Vienna home prices fall again?
Vienna home prices could fall again, but another broad multi-year decline would probably need a fresh economic or financing shock.
Mortgage rates are the obvious risk. Buyers have returned partly because monthly financing costs became easier to handle. A sharp reversal in European interest rates would hit affordability quickly.
Employment and household confidence matter too. Vienna's housing shortage cannot force people to buy homes they can no longer finance. A serious recession would therefore weaken demand even if the city still had too few apartments.
Affordability itself could eventually stop the recovery. At an average first-occupancy price around €7,395/m², a 70 m² new apartment already costs more than €500,000 before taxes and other purchase expenses. Prices cannot keep outrunning household income indefinitely without shrinking the buyer pool again.
Still, the starting point is healthier than it was before the previous correction. Existing apartments have already taken a meaningful price hit, mortgage lending went through a deep contraction, speculative activity cooled, and developers sharply reduced new construction.
A few flat or negative quarters would be perfectly plausible. Another fall comparable with the 2022–2024 adjustment currently looks much harder to produce.
Is Vienna entering another property boom?
No. Vienna home prices are recovering, but the market still looks far too restrained to call this another boom.
Annual price growth is around 3%, while inflation is running in roughly the same range. Mortgage rates remain around the mid-3%s. New-build prices have barely changed over the latest half-year in OTTO's transaction data. And although mortgage lending has bounced sharply from its low, it has not returned to the extreme conditions of the cheap-money cycle.
What has changed is the balance underneath the market. Existing apartment prices are climbing again, transactions are nearing old highs, financing demand has recovered, and Vienna is entering a period of unusually weak new housing supply.
Those forces could eventually produce faster appreciation, especially if interest rates fall further or household incomes improve.
For now, Vienna looks like a housing market in a solid recovery phase. Calling it a boom would get ahead of the data.
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So, are home prices in Vienna going up or down?
Vienna home prices are going up, and the recovery now looks established enough that another broad decline is no longer the base case.
The latest OeNB data put Vienna residential prices 2.9% higher than a year earlier. Existing apartments are leading the move, with the official index up 3.1% and OTTO recording average resale transaction prices of €4,645/m².
Buyer activity has also returned. As seen above, condominium transactions rose 18% year on year in the first half of 2026 and transaction value increased 21%, putting the market within 8% of its 2022 record.
There are still good reasons to keep the word "boom" out of the conclusion. Used apartments have not fully recovered their earlier peak, inflation absorbs much of today's nominal gain, and mortgages remain much more expensive than they were before 2022.
The next part of the cycle may be shaped increasingly by supply. Vienna has just over 2.04 million residents, while new housing completions are heading toward unusually low levels and commercially developed rental construction is expected to collapse further in 2027.
Our read today is fairly clear: Vienna has moved out of its falling-price phase. Home prices are rising moderately now, resale apartments are doing most of the work, and limited new supply gives the recovery room to continue. Another sharp city-wide downturn would need a new shock that we cannot currently see in the market data.
OUR METHODOLOGY
This analysis tests whether Vienna home prices are going up or down by looking beyond one headline index. We broke the question into current price direction, the recovery from the 2022–2024 correction, transaction activity, new-versus-used apartment performance, mortgage conditions, inflation, new housing supply and the risk of another downturn.
We gave the greatest weight to official data from the Oesterreichische Nationalbank, Statistics Austria, the European Central Bank and Austria's Financial Market Authority. Those sources anchor the price indices, inflation comparison, mortgage-rate and lending data, interest-rate cycle, population figures and the KIM-V lending framework.
We then used direct Vienna market evidence from OTTO Immobilien and EHL/BUWOG where official aggregates do not show enough detail. Their transaction records, city and district prices, new-versus-used apartment figures and completion forecasts help show what is happening inside the headline Vienna market.
We did not force datasets with different definitions or time periods into one calculation. OeNB indices are used for market direction and segment trends, OTTO transaction averages for observed sale prices and volumes, Statistics Austria for inflation and population, and EHL/BUWOG for district-level pricing and the development pipeline.
The conclusion comes from whether these separate pieces agree. In this case, prices, completed transactions, mortgage demand and supply conditions all point toward a genuine recovery, while inflation, still-high financing costs and uneven district performance explain why the market does not yet look like another boom.
Key sources include: OeNB's Residential Property Price Index, the OeNB residential property price data table, OeNB research on the 2022–2025 housing correction and recovery, OTTO Immobilien's Vienna Residential Market Report 2026, OeNB data on the rebound in housing lending, the OeNB Bank Lending Survey for Q2 2026, the FMA's residential real-estate lending framework, the ECB's June 2024 monetary policy decision, Statistics Austria's CPI/HICP data, Statistics Austria's latest population release, EHL's Vienna Residential Market Update Q1 2026, the First Vienna Residential Market Report 2026 from BUWOG and EHL, and OTTO's Spring 2026 Zinshaus Market Report.
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