When someone you love dies, the last thing you want is a tax bill. That deeply human instinct may explain, more than any policy paper ever could, why Austria’s inheritance tax has been gone since 2008 and why bringing it back remains one of the most politically untouchable ideas in the country, according to ORF News.
Austria is not entirely alone in its reluctance. In the early 2000s, a quiet wave swept across Europe: the Czech Republic, Portugal, Cyprus, Slovakia, and Sweden all abolished their inheritance taxes around the same time. It felt like a new direction. But the wave broke early. Today, 17 of the EU’s 27 member states still tax inherited wealth and no country has scrapped such a tax since 2014. Austria, comfortably or uncomfortably, sits in the minority.
WIFO economist Margit Schratzenstaller, speaking with the Austrian news agency APA, laid out the picture plainly. Countries like Romania, Estonia, Lithuania, and Malta appear never to have introduced an inheritance tax at all. Meanwhile, across much of Europe, the systems that do exist tend to be thoughtfully designed, taxing the heirs rather than the estate itself, and adjusting the rate based on both the size of the inheritance and how closely the heir was related to the person who died. A distant relative pays more. A child pays less. It is a system built on human logic.
But even well-designed systems struggle against raw emotion. Schratzenstaller is candid about it: “Someone you love dies, and then the state shows up, seemingly wanting to profit from it.” That feeling, unfair or not, makes inheritance taxes uniquely hard to sell to the public, far more than almost any other kind of tax.
In practice, these taxes raise very little revenue anyway. Broad exemptions for close family members mean most ordinary inheritances pass through untouched. What is taxed tends to be larger, more distant transfers of wealth.
Yet Schratzenstaller believes the conversation is worth having. As Europe’s population ages and private wealth quietly piles up across generations, inheritance taxes could help ease the burden on working people not as an extra charge, but as a trade off for lower taxes on labour.
In Vienna, the politics remain stuck. The Greens want it back. Finance Minister Markus Marterbauer has signalled openness. But ÖVP, NEOS, and FPÖ are firmly opposed.
Austria’s inheritance tax is history, at least for now.
