ienna’s public transport operator, Wiener Linien, has defended its decision to abolish the discounted single ticket for senior citizens, as the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) accuses the city of placing an unfair burden on older people.
Since the beginning of the year, senior passengers have had to pay €3.20 for a single journey, compared with €1.50 under the former system. The change has led to strong criticism from the ÖVP, which says the ticket was widely used and could not be dismissed as a niche product.
Around 3.7 million discounted senior tickets were sold in 2025. Between 2022 and 2025, sales reached approximately 12.8 million. Ingrid Korosec, the ÖVP’s spokesperson for senior citizens, said the figures showed that many older people depended on the cheaper fare.
“For the budget consolidation, this is a drop in the ocean,” Korosec said. “For many older people in Vienna, however, it is a massive increase in the cost of mobility.” She added that the price of a single journey had more than doubled and promised to continue challenging the decision.
Wiener Linien says the new fare structure is intended to favour people who use public transport regularly. The former discounted ticket was also available to tourists and people living outside Vienna. By contrast, the discounted senior annual pass is aimed specifically at residents of the city.
The annual pass allows senior passengers to use Vienna’s entire public transport network for the equivalent of 80 cents a day. More than 150,000 senior citizens already hold one, representing almost one in three older people living in Vienna.
The operator also says that 41 per cent of senior single tickets sold online or through its app were bought by people who do not live in the city. It estimates that the proportion was at least similar for paper tickets.
Wiener Linien further argues that keeping the discount would have required similar concessions for all people under 26 and for people with disabilities. This, it says, would have created an additional annual subsidy requirement of about €11 million.
Low income residents can still apply for Vienna’s Mobilpass, which the city says is designed to keep public transport affordable for those most in need.
