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SUMMARY
Yes. Rent is getting more expensive in Vienna, but the sharpest increases are hitting people looking for a new private apartment rather than tenants who already have a long-running lease.
The most important split in Vienna is now between rents already being paid and rents available on the market. Vienna's broad 2025 average was €10.60/m² including running costs, while advertised private rents reached €22.45/m² in early 2026.
That gap is structural, not a statistical accident. Municipal, co-operative and regulated housing makes up a huge share of Vienna's rental stock, so old and protected contracts pull citywide averages far below the price faced by somebody moving today.
The open market has repriced quickly. ImmoScout24 measured Vienna asking rents 10% higher year on year, while Willhaben found increases of 15% to more than 20% in several districts during 2025.
The pressure is no longer confined to prestigious central neighbourhoods. Brigittenau recorded one of the largest increases, and outer districts such as Floridsdorf, Favoriten and Simmering increasingly produce private asking rents around €20/m² or more.
That weakens one of Vienna's traditional escape routes. Moving farther from the centre still saves money in many cases, but peripheral Vienna is no longer automatically cheap.
Small apartments are particularly expensive per square metre. Singles, students and newcomers who need 40–50 m² can therefore face some of the highest effective rental prices in the city despite renting less space.
Existing tenants remain much better protected. Regulated benchmark rents moved only slightly in 2026, while long municipal and co-operative tenancies continue to reset much more slowly than private-market leases.
Vienna's affordable-housing reputation is therefore still real, but increasingly dependent on which part of the housing system a renter can access. The city can feel relatively inexpensive to a long-term municipal tenant and very expensive to a newcomer at exactly the same time.
Near-term pressure on private asking rents still looks more likely than a broad reversal. Supply has improved slightly, but advertised rents have continued to rise, so Vienna's biggest rental affordability problem remains the cost of entering the market rather than simply staying in it.
Is rent in Vienna actually going up right now?
Yes. Rent in Vienna is getting more expensive today, although people hunting for a new private apartment are seeing a much steeper increase than tenants who stay where they are.
The latest Statistics Austria data make that gap unusually clear. Across Austrian main tenancies, average rent including running costs reached €10.50 per square metre in the second quarter of 2026, up from €10.20 a year earlier. Vienna's latest full-year figure was €10.60 per square metre in 2025.
Now compare that with the apartments actually being advertised in Vienna. ImmoScout24 measured an average gross asking rent of €22.45 per square metre during the first four months of 2026, 10% higher than a year earlier.
The two figures describe different groups. Official averages include long-running municipal, co-operative and regulated leases that rarely reset to today's market price. Asking-rent data capture apartments available to someone trying to move now.
Vienna rents are clearly rising. The increase just gets much more aggressive once we focus on the homes a new tenant can actually rent today.
| Vienna rent measure | What it captures | Latest useful reading | Recent change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Austrian main-tenancy average | Existing rental stock | €10.50/m² incl. running costs | About +3% YoY |
| Vienna main-tenancy average | Existing Vienna tenants | €10.60/m² in 2025 | Above previous years |
| Vienna private asking rent | Homes currently advertised | €22.45/m² gross | +10% YoY |
| Vienna regulated benchmark | Base rent for qualifying regulated homes | €6.74/m² | About +1% |
Why do Vienna rent numbers look so contradictory?
Vienna rent numbers look contradictory because somebody moving today is shopping in a much more expensive market than the one occupied by much of the city's existing tenant population.
Vienna is an unusual rental city. Statistics Austria's 2025 housing data show that 42.4% of households lived in municipal or co-operative rentals, while another 34.1% lived in other main tenancies. Only 19.3% were owner-occupiers.
Cheap or relatively protected leases therefore have enough weight to pull the citywide average down. A municipal tenant who has stayed in the same apartment for many years counts in the same broad statistics as somebody who just signed a private lease at more than €20 per square metre.
Tenancy duration reinforces the divide. Across Austria, municipal leases lasted a median 12.4 years in 2025 and co-operative tenancies 7.9 years. Other private main tenancies lasted only 2.5 years. Roughly 40% of those private tenancies were less than two years old.
Private rents reset much more often. Vienna's average still reflects the prices paid inside a huge stock of older contracts, while today's listings show what the marginal renter has to pay.
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Are new private rentals in Vienna getting much more expensive?
Yes. New private rents in Vienna are rising fast enough that we can no longer dismiss the increase as ordinary inflation or a few expensive neighbourhoods skewing the data.
ImmoScout24 put Vienna's average advertised gross rent at €22.45 per square metre in the first four months of 2026, up 10% year on year. Its first-quarter analysis had already measured €22.41, so the high level persisted beyond a single month.
Willhaben reached a similar conclusion from a much larger 2025 dataset covering more than 250,000 Austrian rental advertisements. Eleven of the 15 districts with the country's strongest rent increases were in Vienna. Brigittenau rose 20.6%, Mariahilf 19.9%, Neubau 17.9%, Margareten 15.0% and Josefstadt 14.2%.
That distribution is more convincing than any one Vienna-wide average. The biggest increases appeared in a traditionally cheaper district, fashionable inner districts and more ordinary residential areas at the same time.
There is some evidence that the number of available rental listings has lately improved after several years of tightening. ImmoScout24 described a slight easing in supply during the first quarter of 2026. Yet Vienna asking rents still increased strongly. More listings have not produced cheaper rents so far.
| Private-rental measure | Latest result | Comparison | What it tells us |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vienna ImmoScout24 asking rent | €22.45/m² | +10% YoY | Strong citywide increase |
| Brigittenau | +20.6% | 2025 vs. 2024 | Cheaper district repriced sharply |
| Mariahilf | +19.9% | 2025 vs. 2024 | Strong inner-city pressure |
| Neubau | +17.9% | 2025 vs. 2024 | Premium demand remained strong |
| Margareten | +15.0% | 2025 vs. 2024 | Pressure spread beyond top districts |
Is €20 per square metre now normal for a private apartment in Vienna?
Yes. Around €20 per square metre has become a normal starting point across much of Vienna's private rental market rather than a price reserved for luxury apartments.
ImmoScout24's current Vienna average is already €22.45 per square metre. That figure includes apartments across the city, so €20 can hardly be treated as an exceptional premium anymore.
Recent market examples show what that means in practice. A 50 m² apartment in Floridsdorf was advertised around €1,149 a month, or roughly €23/m². A 60 m² apartment around Rennweg was marketed around €1,294, roughly €21.60/m². A 59 m² apartment in Leopoldstadt appeared around €1,190, just above €20/m².
Floridsdorf is the useful example here. A tenant does not need to be searching beside Stephansplatz, Neubau or the Belvedere to encounter a €20-plus asking rent.
Cheaper homes certainly still appear. Favoriten and other outer districts can produce listings in the mid-teens per square metre. They increasingly look like the inexpensive part of the available market rather than its normal price.
For a 50 m² home, the difference is easy to feel: €15/m² means €750 a month, €20 means €1,000 and €22.45 means roughly €1,123.
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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.
Are Vienna's cheaper districts catching up with the expensive ones?
Yes. Some traditionally cheaper Vienna districts have been catching up quickly, which is reducing the savings renters once got by moving farther from the centre.
Brigittenau provides the clearest example. Willhaben measured a 20.6% increase in its average advertised rent during 2025, the strongest rise in its entire Austrian comparison. Margareten was up 15%.
Recent district asking-price data also put places such as Favoriten, Simmering, Floridsdorf and Liesing around or above €20 per square metre in many datasets. Inner-city districts remain more expensive, and the Innere Stadt still sits in a completely different price bracket, but the floor underneath Vienna's cheaper private market has moved higher.
Going from Neubau to an outer district can still save money. It just no longer guarantees the dramatic discount that older Vienna rent comparisons might suggest.
| Area | Recent asking-rent level | What stands out |
|---|---|---|
| Innere Stadt | Around €28/m² | Still a clear premium market |
| Neubau | Around €23/m² | Expensive inner district |
| Favoriten | Around €21/m² | Little room below €20 |
| Simmering | Around €21/m² | Outer district has caught up |
| Floridsdorf | Around €20/m² | Peripheral no longer means cheap |
| Liesing | Around €21/m² | Similar pressure at the edge of Vienna |
Are existing Vienna tenants getting hit as hard as people who move?
No. Existing Vienna tenants are currently seeing much smaller increases than people signing fresh private leases.
The newest Statistics Austria quarterly data put average Austrian main-tenancy rent including running costs at €10.50/m², compared with €10.20 one year earlier. Rent excluding running costs rose from €7.70 to €7.90/m². Those increases are meaningful, but they are nowhere near the 10% citywide increase in Vienna asking rents or the 15–20% jumps seen in several districts.
Long leases explain part of the difference. Municipal and co-operative tenants stay much longer, while private leases turn over quickly and repeatedly reset toward current market prices.
Contract age produces the same pattern nationally. In 2025, main tenancies less than two years old averaged €12.40/m² including running costs, while contracts at least 30 years old averaged only €6.50/m².
That is nearly a two-to-one difference inside the existing rental stock before we even look at Vienna's more expensive open-market listings.
Staying in a reasonably priced Vienna apartment has consequently become much more valuable. Moving can trigger a far larger jump in housing costs than the annual increase an established tenant sees on the existing lease.
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Has Vienna's rent regulation actually kept rents under control?
For protected Vienna apartments, yes. Rent regulation is currently holding increases far below the pace seen in new private listings, although tenants can still face higher total housing bills.
Vienna's official benchmark rent for qualifying regulated housing moved from €6.67 to €6.74 per square metre in 2026, an increase of only about 1%. The benchmark is a base amount rather than the final rent because permitted additions can apply, but its movement is tiny beside a 10% increase in advertised private rents.
Austria's new rent-indexation rules also limit how quickly indexed main rents can rise. Under the Mietpreisbremse framework explained by the Arbeiterkammer, an indexed main rent can generally be increased only once a year and no earlier than April. When inflation exceeds 3%, landlords cannot simply pass the full excess through.
Running costs remain a separate source of pressure. Statistics Austria's newest figures show average operating costs rising from €167.90 per dwelling in the second quarter of 2025 to €176.50 one year later, while the per-square-metre figure moved from €2.60 to €2.70.
A protected tenant can therefore still pay more each year. But regulation has clearly kept the base-rent increases of many established Vienna tenants far below what people are seeing when apartments return to the private market.
Does Vienna's huge social-housing sector still keep rents down?
Absolutely. Vienna's municipal and co-operative housing stock remains large enough to keep the city's overall rental costs far below the prices visible on private listing sites.
Statistics Austria found that 42.4% of Vienna households lived in municipal or co-operative rentals in 2025. Vienna itself has roughly 220,000 municipal apartments, alongside a similarly large subsidised and co-operative sector.
At that scale, affordable housing changes the whole citywide average. This is not a small programme helping a narrow slice of tenants.
The contrast with private renting is huge. Subsidised new construction follows cost-controlled rent rules, while the latest private asking-market average is above €22/m². Even allowing for additional charges and differences between housing types, the gap is several euros per square metre every month.
This is how Vienna can still publish broad rental averages around €10–11/m² while somebody opening a property portal today sees apartments around twice that price.
The system is still doing what Vienna is famous for: shielding a very large share of residents from the full market price. The problem is that people outside that protected stock increasingly face a different Vienna.
| Vienna housing group | Approximate scale or price | Effect on renters |
|---|---|---|
| Municipal + co-operative households | 42.4% of households | Large protected segment |
| Municipal apartments | About 220,000 | Long-term lower-cost housing |
| Vienna average rent in 2025 | €10.60/m² incl. costs | Reflects protected and older leases |
| Current private asking rent | €22.45/m² gross | Price faced by many movers |
| Gap between the two measures | €11.85/m² | Huge difference in market exposure |
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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.
Is Vienna still a cheap city for renters?
Vienna is still relatively cheap for many existing tenants, but calling Vienna cheap today gives a misleading picture to anybody searching for a private apartment.
According to Statistics Austria, Vienna's average 2025 rent including running costs was €10.60/m². Salzburg averaged €12.20, Tyrol €12.00 and Vorarlberg €11.80. On those broad figures, Vienna looks surprisingly affordable for a rich European capital.
The private asking market tells a very different story. ImmoScout24 currently places Vienna around €22.45/m², ahead of Salzburg and Tyrol in its provincial-capital comparison and among Austria's most expensive markets for a person looking for a new rental.
Vienna therefore deserves its affordable-housing reputation when we talk about people already inside municipal, co-operative and regulated housing. The label works much less well for a newcomer who needs an apartment this week.
That distinction has become too large to hide inside one average.
Are small apartments getting especially expensive in Vienna?
Yes. Small Vienna apartments often cost much more per square metre, so singles and people looking for compact homes can face some of the city's harshest pricing.
Recent asking-price data show a strong size premium. In the Innere Stadt, apartments below 50 m² were advertised around €33/m² in one 2026 dataset, compared with roughly €24/m² for homes larger than 130 m². Leopoldstadt showed roughly €27/m² for the smallest category against about €22/m² for the largest. Alsergrund also exceeded €30/m² for apartments below 50 m².
A national ImmoScout24 analysis of the 10% most-clicked rental advertisements adds another clue. The typical highly sought-after home in 2026 had shrunk from 60 to 57 m² compared with the previous year, while its average monthly rent rose by €41 to €859.
People are therefore competing heavily for relatively small homes even as those homes become smaller and more expensive.
At €27/m², a 40 m² apartment costs €1,080 a month. At €33/m² it reaches €1,320. The apartment may be compact, but the rent no longer is.
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Is moving to Vienna especially expensive for newcomers now?
Yes. Newcomers to Vienna are exposed to the expensive side of the rental market almost immediately unless they can access subsidised housing or take over an unusually favourable lease.
The citywide €10.60/m² figure is particularly dangerous for relocation budgets because a newly arrived renter cannot simply choose an average existing Vienna tenancy. The apartments available today are much closer to the private asking-market level of €22.45/m².
For a 50 m² apartment, those two figures imply roughly €530 versus €1,123 per month. A 70 m² apartment at the current asking-market average comes to about €1,572.
Eligibility for subsidised and co-operative housing is relatively broad by international standards, but eligibility does not mean immediate access to every apartment. Residence requirements, housing-need rules, waiting times and the availability of suitable units can all matter.
People who need a home quickly often end up in the open market first. That is why an expat, student, newly separated household or worker moving across Vienna can experience a much more expensive city than somebody who has occupied a protected apartment for years.
Is Vienna becoming unaffordable for ordinary renters?
For people entering the private market, Vienna is becoming genuinely difficult to afford; across the whole tenant population, the picture is still much less severe.
A 70 m² private apartment at €22.45/m² works out at roughly €1,572 per month. At Vienna's 2025 observed average of €10.60/m², the same 70 m² calculation gives €742. The gap is about €830 every month.
We should not read that as two prices for an identical home. It shows how different the economics are depending on which part of Vienna's rental system a household can access.
Geography can now change the budget substantially as well. An ImmoScout24 analysis found that a renter willing to live 30–60 minutes outside Vienna could save roughly €660 a month on a 70 m² apartment compared with a relatively inexpensive Vienna location.
That is large enough to alter where an ordinary household can realistically live, rather than merely changing how much disposable income it has left after rent.
Vienna has avoided a citywide affordability crisis of the scale its private asking prices alone might suggest because social housing still absorbs such a large share of the population. People entering the private market have far less protection from the recent increase.
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Will Vienna rents keep getting more expensive?
Private rents in Vienna are likely to remain under upward pressure for now, although another 10% jump every year across the entire rental market would be much harder to justify.
Several pieces of evidence point in the same direction. ImmoScout24 recorded another 10% annual increase in Vienna asking rents in early 2026. Willhaben found strong increases across much of the city during 2025. And although ImmoScout24 has lately seen a slight improvement in rental supply, prices have continued rising rather than falling.
That last part is telling. If a modest recovery in listings were enough to reverse the market, we would expect asking rents to soften. So far, they have not.
There are clear brakes on further increases. Higher prices encourage some households to reconsider buying, regulated rents cannot reprice as quickly, and Vienna keeps adding subsidised housing. The new federal indexation limits will also slow increases for many existing contracts.
We can be much more confident about continued pressure on newly advertised private apartments than about Vienna rents as a whole. The private market still looks tight and expensive today; the protected stock should continue moving much more slowly.
So, is rent getting more expensive in Vienna?
Yes. Rent is getting more expensive in Vienna, and the increase is already severe for people trying to rent a private apartment now.
The private-market evidence is hard to argue with. Average advertised Vienna rents have climbed to €22.45/m², around 10% higher than a year earlier, while several districts recorded increases well into double digits during 2025. Brigittenau's 20.6% rise also shows that the pressure has reached areas that renters once used to escape the highest inner-city prices.
The broad rental stock is moving much more slowly. The newest official quarterly figures show Austrian main-tenancy rents around €10.50/m² including running costs, while Vienna averaged €10.60 in the latest full-year data. Vienna's regulated benchmark increased only about 1%, and more than four in ten city households remain in municipal or co-operative housing.
Those figures describe two very different experiences of the same city. Someone with a long-running protected lease can still enjoy the relatively affordable Vienna that appears in international comparisons. Someone signing a private lease today is increasingly dealing with a €20-plus-per-square-metre market.
Our conclusion is firm: Vienna rents are rising, but the biggest change is happening at the point of entry. The price of finding a new home has moved much faster than the price paid by many people who already have one.
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OUR METHODOLOGY
The question of whether rent is getting more expensive in Vienna cannot be answered reliably with one citywide average. Vienna combines a very large stock of municipal, co-operative and regulated housing with a private rental market in which people looking for a home today can face completely different prices.
We therefore broke the question into the dimensions that could materially change the answer: rents already being paid, the price of newly advertised private apartments, differences across districts and apartment sizes, contract age, regulation, the scale of Vienna's protected housing stock, and the cost faced by people entering or moving within the market.
For existing tenancies and the structure of Vienna's rental market, we prioritised Statistics Austria. Its housing-cost and housing-condition datasets provide the official figures for rents including running costs, operating costs, tenancy duration, contract age and the share of Vienna households living in municipal or co-operative housing.
We kept existing-tenancy rents and advertised rents separate because they answer different questions. Official averages are useful for understanding what Vienna tenants already pay, while current listing data are much more relevant to somebody trying to rent an apartment now.
For that open market, we used first-hand datasets from ImmoScout24 and Willhaben. ImmoScout24 provides the early-2026 Vienna asking-rent level, annual change, supply trends, commuter comparisons and data on highly sought-after smaller apartments. Willhaben's analysis of more than 250,000 rental advertisements gives us another large dataset for district-level rent changes.
We then checked whether the broad result survived at a more granular level. District comparisons were used to see whether increases were confined to expensive central areas or spreading through cheaper parts of Vienna, while apartment-size data helped identify the particularly high cost per square metre faced by renters searching for smaller homes.
Regulation and subsidised housing were treated separately from the private asking market. Statistics Austria's benchmark-rent data, the Arbeiterkammer's explanation of the Mietpreisbremse and the underlying federal legislation in Austria's RIS were used to assess how quickly regulated rents can change. City of Vienna, Wohnberatung Wien and Wiener Wohnen sources were used to establish the scale of municipal and subsidised housing and the rules governing access.
Key sources include: Statistics Austria's housing-cost statistics, Statistics Austria's housing-condition data, Statistics Austria's benchmark-rent data, ImmoScout24's May 2026 provincial-capital rental analysis, ImmoScout24's Q1 2026 rental-market analysis, Willhaben's Mietpreisspiegel, the City of Vienna's overview of rental-housing types, Wohnberatung Wien's Wiener Wohn-Ticket requirements, Arbeiterkammer Wien's explanation of the Mietpreisbremse, and the underlying federal rent-indexation legislation in Austria's RIS.
The final conclusion comes from comparing those measures rather than forcing them into one blended Vienna rent figure. That lets us distinguish the relatively slow movement experienced by many established tenants from the much faster repricing taking place when private apartments return to the market.
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