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LIVING IN AUSTRIA

How will Austria’s new retirement rules affect people in the country?

Austria is changing the retirement age for women, while regulations and benefits are also being adjusted starting in 2024. Here's what this means for you.

Published: 15 January 2024 12:43 CET
Updated: 15 February 2024 17:03 CET
How will Austria's new retirement rules affect people in the country?
People who intend to retire in Germany have a few extra incentives to consider public rather than private insurance. Photo: Bruno/Pixabay.

Starting in 2024, the statutory retirement age for women in Austria will slowly rise until it reaches that of men. This change came after the country’s Constitutional Court ruled that the different retirement ages were contrary to equality in the country.

The key dates were specified last year, and implementation will begin this year. The statutory retirement age for women will now rise from 60 to 65 in half-yearly increments until 2033. 

This now affects women born between January 1st and June 30th, 1964, for the first time. They can only retire at the age of 60.5. Women born between July 1st and December 31st, 1964, will then have a standard retirement age of 61. 

READ ALSO: How Austria plans to raise the retirement age for women

This continues until women born after June 30th, 1968, have a standard retirement age of 65, as is the case for men.

More time in retirement

Despite the later retirement age, the increase in life expectancy means that women will spend more years in retirement, according to calculations by Agenda Austria, a liberal think tank in Vienna. 

If the system remains the same, with no other major pension reforms, women will spend 28.9 years of their lives in retirement in 2060 instead of 26 years as of 2023. Men currently spend 20.5 years in retirement, which should rise to 25.3 in 2026 as life expectancy increases. 

READ ALSO: EXPLAINED: Everything you need to know about retiring in Austria

‘The government has failed’

The government’s pension reform has been heavily criticised in Austria. “The idea behind the 1992 pension reform was that women had to be on an equal footing with men before the retirement age was raised. But we are miles away from that,” Klaudia Frieben (SPÖ), Chairwoman of the Austrian Women’s Ring, told Die Presse. 

Currently, women receive, on average, 40.55 percent less pension money compared to men, the report states. This is partly due to unequal career choices (and opportunities) – as women are underrepresented in sectors where salaries are higher, but also because women tend to interrupt their careers much more frequently due to childcare or caring for relatives. 

READ ALSO: Five things you need to know about the Austrian pension system

Another issue is that women tend to have a more significant gap between their last employment and retirement age, affecting their pension later. 

According to a study by the Chamber of Labour, not even half (48 percent) of women retired directly from active employment in 2019. They were unemployed or on sick leave, for example. This gap could grow further with the increase in the retirement age, warn employee representatives. 

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HEALTH

Patients in Vienna face long waits for specialist health appointments

Waiting times to get appointments with health specialists in Vienna have increased significantly, a new study has revealed.

Published: 17 May 2024 09:56 CEST
Patients in Vienna face long waits for specialist health appointments

Accessing essential healthcare within a reasonable timeframe is becoming increasingly difficult for Viennese residents.

The Vienna Medical Association presented their new study this week which shows that waiting times for appointments with health specialists have increased significantly in recent years.

The study, which involved contacting over 850 doctors’ practices via so-called “mystery calls,” revealed that child and adolescent psychiatry currently had the longest waiting times in the city.

Patients can expect to wait an average of 90 days for an appointment.

Other specialisations where patients have to wait long to receive help include radiology (57 days), neurology (45 days), ophthalmology (44 days), pulmonology (36 days), internal medicine (33 days), and dermatology (28 days).

The waiting time for seeing a gynaecologist has increased fourfold since 2012, with patients now waiting an average of 32 days.

READ MORE: Why are there fewer public sector doctors in Austria?

No new patients accepted

In certain specialist areas, there is no capacity to accommodate new patients. The situation where no new patients are accepted occurs particularly often in paediatric practices, where more than half of the public healthcare practices have put a freeze on admissions.

In child and adolescent psychiatry, 40 percent do not accept new patients, and among gynaecologists, it is almost a third (30 percent). Family doctors also struggle with welcoming new patients, and many of their practices have already reached full capacity.

The Medical Association calls for immediate action, urging the health insurance sector to become more attractive and receive better funding. This could involve measures to incentivise doctors to work within the public system, potentially reducing wait times and improving patient access to care.

During the study presentation, Johannes Steinhart, president of the association, described the increased waiting times as the result of neglect within the established health insurance sector. He said he believes that the public health system is massively endangered.

Naghme Kamaleyan-Schmied, chairwoman of the Curia of the resident doctors in the association, pointed out that while the population of the federal capital has grown by 16 percent since 2012, the number of public doctors has fallen by 12 percent in the same period.

The association now wants to make the public healthcare system more attractive to doctors, which could cut down waiting times and make it easier for patients to receive care. The association’s demands for this to happen include increasing flexibility in contract options, integrating health and social professions in individual practices, reducing bureaucracy, and improving fees.

ÖGK, Österreichische Gesundheitskasse, Austria’s largest public healthcare fund, is currently creating 100 additional public health positions, with almost two-thirds of the positions already having applicants, as well as planning for another 100 positions. They also aim to create a central telemedicine service and a platform for making appointments by phone and online, which is meant to reduce waiting times and improve access to care.

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