Austrian passport holders have visited the United States visa-free since 1991 with an ESTA approved before departure from Vienna or a neighbouring hub. Expect two years of validity for most adults and 90 days per stay.
90 days
Maximum stay per visit
2 years
ESTA validity
Multiple
Entries permitted
72 hours
Apply at least this far ahead
100% online
No embassy visit
Overview
For Austrians, America is the classic big trip. A first visit usually means New York, often in Advent or over Easter; a second means a rental car and the open road, from San Francisco down Highway 1 or in a loop through the canyon country. Add skiers comparing the Rockies with the Arlberg, students visiting friends made on exchange years and engineers calling on customers in the Midwest, and the traffic adds up.
Austria has been part of the Visa Waiver Program since 1991. An Austrian citizen can therefore travel to the United States without a visa, provided an ESTA has been approved before the journey begins. Austrian Airlines confirms it at check-in in Vienna, and so do Lufthansa and SWISS when travellers from Salzburg, Innsbruck or Graz route through Munich, Frankfurt or Zurich.
The application is not difficult, but Austrian documents have their own traps. Academic titles sit in the passport next to the name and do not belong on the form. Umlauts and the sharp s are spelled differently in the machine-readable lines. Children's passports follow a three-step validity scale. And Vienna's role as a seat of the United Nations means more residents than you might expect have travel histories that close the visa-free route.
At a glance
Eligibility
Yes. Any Austrian entering the United States without a visa needs an ESTA, on arrival by air or sea and at the land borders with Canada and Mexico. Permitted purposes are tourism, business, medical treatment and transit. If you already hold a valid American visa that fits your trip, you travel on that and need no ESTA.
The Personalausweis is not sufficient, even though it works across Europe. Only the Reisepass is accepted. The Notpass, the emergency passport that can be issued in a hurry before a holiday, should be treated with caution: the programme demands that emergency and temporary passports be electronic as well, so check whether yours carries the chip symbol before relying on it.
Austria restricts dual citizenship more tightly than most European states, so the exclusion of dual nationals affects fewer people here, but it does affect some. Children of an Austrian and an Iranian, Iraqi or Syrian parent often hold both nationalities from birth, and naturalised Austrians cannot always shed the original one. Anyone who is also a national of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, North Korea or Cuba must use the visa route.
An ESTA is issued per person, so Austrian parents apply separately for each child. It also has firm limits on activity. Working as an au pair, taking a paid internship, enrolling for a credit-bearing semester or covering a story for ORF or an Austrian newspaper are all outside it, and each has its own visa category.
Stay & validity
An approved ESTA normally runs for two years and covers repeated visits of up to 90 days. Adult Austrian passports are valid for ten years, so most adults receive the full term. The catch is the expiry rule: once the Reisepass lapses, the authorisation lapses too, whatever date was shown at approval.
Children are where Austrian families lose validity. A passport for a child under two lasts two years, one issued between the ages of two and eleven lasts five, and only from twelve does the ten-year term apply. An ESTA for a toddler may therefore end well before the parents' do, and each child's dates need checking before a second trip.
The 90 days are a hard limit for every stay. Nothing can be added at an immigration office in the United States, and no other status can be applied for from inside the country. Time spent in Canada, Mexico or the neighbouring Caribbean islands part-way through a visit is included, so a detour to the Canadian side of Niagara or a week in Cancún does not buy extra days.
Apply again whenever a new passport is issued, and after any change of name, for instance on marriage, since Austrian law lets spouses adopt a common surname or a double name. A change of gender marker, a new nationality or a different answer to an eligibility question likewise ends the old authorisation.
Pricing
Live fees for Austrian passport holders, shown all-in — the US government charge and our service fee together, with nothing added later.
Your nationality is pre-selected as Austria
Requirements
Everything Austrian passport holders need before starting an application. The first five items apply to every applicant; the rest are specific to your nationality.
A biometric e-passport from a Visa Waiver Program country, carrying the chip symbol on its cover
A valid email address, which is where the decision is sent and which you should keep accessible while travelling
A credit or debit card to pay the government ESTA charge and our service fee together
Your home address, phone number and an emergency contact
Employer details and, if you have them, the address of where you are staying in the United States
Simple process
Four steps, entirely online, with our team checking every field before anything reaches U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Enter your passport details exactly as printed, your contact and employment information, and answer the eligibility questions. Most applicants finish in about fifteen minutes.
Our team checks your passport number, name spelling, dates and declarations against CBP requirements before anything is submitted.
Your application goes to U.S. Customs and Border Protection with the government charge paid, and we track its status until a decision is issued.
There is nothing to stick in your passport. The authorisation is held electronically against your passport number, and the airline verifies it when you check in.
Decisions on Austrian applications typically arrive the same day. CBP recommends allowing at least 72 hours, because some applications are held as pending for further review. There is no express service to buy and no office in Vienna that can speed things up.
The most reliable approach is to apply when the flights are booked. That is especially true for trips timed to the Semesterferien in February or the summer holidays, when a whole family's applications should be approved together. If one member is refused or delayed, you want to know while there is still time to act.
If an ESTA is refused, the alternative is a B-1/B-2 visitor visa through the US Embassy in Vienna, which involves an online form and a personal interview. Travellers from Vorarlberg or Tyrol should factor in the journey to the capital. Starting the ESTA early is what makes this fallback realistic.
On arrival
An approved ESTA gets you on the plane. This is what happens once you land, and how to make the arrival as quick as possible.
Visa Waiver travellers are seen by U.S. Customs and Border Protection at the first American airport they land at, even when connecting onward. The officer takes a photograph and, for most adults, fingerprints.
There is no paper form to fill in on the aircraft. Your arrival record, the I-94, is created digitally and shows the date by which you must leave. You can look it up online afterwards.
Expect to be asked where you are staying, for how long and what you do for a living. A return ticket and the address of your first night are usually all it takes.
Queues at the busiest gateways can run past an hour at peak arrival times. If you are connecting to a domestic flight, leave a generous margin, since you also reclaim and recheck your bags.
Getting there
Vienna is Austria's only airport with nonstop flights to the United States, operated chiefly by Austrian Airlines to the East Coast, Chicago and Los Angeles. The west of the country looks elsewhere: Salzburg and Tyrol are closer to Munich, Vorarlberg to Zurich, and Graz, Linz, Klagenfurt and Innsbruck have feeder flights to Frankfurt or Vienna. Many itineraries therefore involve a Lufthansa or SWISS long-haul flight.
Best time to go
Austria's nine-week summer holiday starts at the beginning of July in Vienna, Lower Austria and Burgenland and a week later in the other six states. It coincides with peak season across the United States, so the national parks are crowded and Florida is hot and stormy. Families who can only travel then do best in the mountain West, where Yellowstone, Grand Teton and Glacier offer a cooler climate and scenery that even Austrians find impressive.
Since 2020 Austrian schools have had a uniform autumn break running from the national holiday on 26 October to All Saints' Day. One week is short for the West Coast, but it is ideal for New York, Boston or Washington, where late October is crisp and colourful and Halloween is in full swing. Fares out of Vienna rise sharply for that week, so book early.
The staggered Semesterferien in February are split between ski resorts at home and sun abroad. Florida is the obvious American choice, with the Everglades at their driest and the Gulf beaches mild. Easter suits California and the desert parks. Advent in New York has become an Austrian tradition of its own, though anyone used to the Christkindlmarkt in front of the Rathaus may find the American versions rather commercial.
Vienna is six hours ahead of New York and nine ahead of Los Angeles. The late-morning Austrian Airlines departures land in the early afternoon on the East Coast, which makes the first day manageable. On the return, overnight flights reach Schwechat in the morning, and travellers continuing to Linz or Salzburg can board a long-distance train at the airport station.
Avoid these
Refusals are rare, and almost always technical rather than substantive. These are the problems that come up most often on applications from Austria — we check for every one of them before submitting.
Austria is one of the few countries that prints academic degrees in the passport, and Austrians are used to writing them on every form. They are not part of the name and are absent from the machine-readable zone. An ESTA issued to DR ANNA GRUBER will not match a passport that reads GRUBER ANNA.
Weiß, Köhler and Jäger appear that way in the upper part of the passport, but the lines at the bottom read WEISS, KOEHLER and JAEGER. The form should follow the bottom lines. Replacing ö with a plain O, as English keyboards encourage, is the most frequent Austrian spelling error.
Because adult passports last a decade, parents rarely think about expiry. A baby's passport is good for two years and a primary-school child's for five. Families returning to Florida for a second winter often find the children's ESTAs ended with their passports while the adults' are still valid.
Vienna hosts the IAEA, OPEC, the OSCE and several UN agencies, whose staff travel routinely to countries on the restricted list. Service with an international organisation is not the same as diplomatic or military service for a Visa Waiver country, so do not assume the exception applies. A visa is usually the correct route.
Travel to a restricted country
Anyone who has been in Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, Libya, Somalia or Yemen on or after 1 March 2011, or in Cuba on or after 12 January 2021, is generally not eligible for the Visa Waiver Program and needs a visa instead.
A previous visa refusal or overstay
An earlier refusal of a US visa, a denied entry or a past overstay must be declared. Each one commonly leads to an ESTA being refused and the traveller being directed to apply for a visa.
Passport details that do not match
A single wrong character in the passport number, or an expiry date typed in the wrong order, produces an authorisation the airline cannot find at check-in.
Conditions
These conditions are set under the Visa Waiver Program and do not vary by nationality. The 90-day limit and the passport-linking rule catch out a great many otherwise well-planned trips.
Your authorisation is held electronically against the passport number you enter. If you renew or replace that passport, change your name or change citizenship, the ESTA no longer applies and you need a new one.
Every person travelling under the Visa Waiver Program needs their own ESTA, including babies and children, each linked to that traveller's own e-passport.
An approved ESTA generally lasts two years from the date of authorisation, or until the passport it is linked to expires, whichever comes first.
Within its validity you can make repeated trips. Each stay can be up to 90 days, and time spent in Canada, Mexico or the nearby Caribbean islands during a trip counts towards those 90 days.
A Visa Waiver stay cannot be extended and cannot be converted into another immigration status from inside the United States. Anyone who needs longer must apply for a visa before travelling.
An ESTA lets you board a carrier bound for the United States. Admission is decided by a CBP officer at the port of entry, who can ask about your plans, your funds and your ties to home.
Consular services
The United States has a single diplomatic mission to Austria, the embassy in Vienna, alongside separate missions to the UN organisations and the OSCE that do no consular work. An ESTA never requires a visit: Austrian applicants complete everything online and receive the result by email. The embassy's consular section is for those who need a visa, including au pairs, students and anyone refused an ESTA.
FAQs
The questions Austrian passport holders ask most often about travelling to the United States.
No, Austrians do not need a visa for trips of up to 90 days, but an approved ESTA is mandatory before departure. Austria has belonged to the Visa Waiver Program since 1991. The ESTA is an online travel authorisation linked to your Reisepass, and airlines check it at check-in.
No. Leave out Mag., Dr., DI, Ing. and any other title, even though it is printed in your Austrian passport. Enter only the surname and given names that appear in the machine-readable zone at the bottom of the data page. Titles are not recognised as part of a name by CBP.
Follow the machine-readable zone of your passport. Austrian passports render ä as AE, ö as OE, ü as UE and ß as SS there, so Strauß becomes STRAUSS and Müllner becomes MUELLNER. Use that spelling on the ESTA and, ideally, on your airline booking as well.
For two years or until the child's passport expires, whichever is sooner. Austrian passports for children under two are valid for two years and those for children aged two to eleven for five years, so a child's ESTA frequently ends earlier than a parent's. Check the dates before each trip.
Only if it is an electronic passport with the chip symbol. The Visa Waiver Program requires emergency and temporary passports to be biometric too. If your emergency passport has no chip, you cannot use an ESTA with it and would need a visa, so ask the issuing office before you rely on it.
Yes, from Vienna. Austrian Airlines flies nonstop to New York, Newark, Washington, Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles, with some routes seasonal. From other Austrian airports you connect through Vienna, Munich, Frankfurt or Zurich. The flight from Vienna to New York takes around nine and a half hours.
Probably not. Presence in Iran on or after 1 March 2011 generally removes Visa Waiver eligibility, and the stated exceptions are for diplomatic or military service on behalf of a programme country. Declare the travel and apply for a visitor visa at the US Embassy in Vienna.
No. Au pair placements involve work and are arranged through an exchange visa, not the Visa Waiver Program. An ESTA covers tourism, business visits, medical treatment and transit only. Arriving on an ESTA with the intention of working for a host family can result in being refused entry.
Your nationality is already set to Austria. Complete the form in about fifteen minutes, and our team will check every detail before it reaches CBP.
Other nationalities
Routes, passport rules and the practical details differ by country. Here are the guides for other Visa Waiver Program nationalities.
