Austria has 13 public holidays a year, set by federal law rather than by each province. In Vienna that means shops close under the national shop-closing law, most museums and restaurants stay open, and public transport runs on a reduced, Sunday-style timetable — except on a handful of dates that behave nothing like a Sunday at all.
How many public holidays does Austria have?
Austria recognizes 13 statutory public holidays a year. They’re fixed by federal law, not by province. Unlike Germany, there’s no regional patchwork — the same 13 dates apply in Vienna, in Salzburg, and in the smallest Carinthian village. Nine have roots in the Catholic liturgical calendar. Two are secular state holidays. The rest sit on fixed calendar dates that never move.
- Jan 1 — Neujahr (New Year’s Day)
- Jan 6 — Heilige Drei Könige (Epiphany)
- Ostermontag (Easter Monday) — date moves with Easter
- May 1 — Staatsfeiertag (Labor Day)
- Christi Himmelfahrt (Ascension Day) — 39 days after Easter, always a Thursday
- Pfingstmontag (Whit Monday) — 50 days after Easter
- Fronleichnam (Corpus Christi) — 60 days after Easter, always a Thursday
- Aug 15 — Mariä Himmelfahrt (Assumption of Mary)
- Oct 26 — Nationalfeiertag (National Day)
- Nov 1 — Allerheiligen (All Saints’ Day)
- Dec 8 — Mariä Empfängnis (Immaculate Conception)
- Dec 25 — Christtag (Christmas Day)
- Dec 26 — Stefanitag (St. Stephen’s Day)
Austria’s citizen portal, help.gv.at, publishes the current list every year, including the exact date for each movable holiday. Four of the 13 shift with Easter, so the calendar isn’t identical year to year.
What actually happens in Vienna on each public holiday?
Most of the 13 follow one pattern: shops close, museums and restaurants mostly stay open, and transport runs a reduced timetable. A handful break that pattern entirely. The table below sets out each date against what actually happens.
| Date | Holiday | Shops & supermarkets | Restaurants, museums & pharmacies | Transport |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 1 | Neujahr | Closed citywide; only station/airport exempted shops trade. | Most restaurants closed; some reopen for dinner. Museums mostly closed. On-call pharmacy rotation applies. | Sunday-equivalent timetable. |
| Jan 6 | Heilige Drei Könige | Closed, ordinary Sunday pattern. | Restaurants and museums generally open, as on any Sunday. | Sunday timetable. |
| Movable | Ostermontag | Closed. | Restaurants busy with family lunches; museums open. | Sunday timetable. |
| May 1 | Staatsfeiertag | Closed — harder than Sunday; some normally-exempted shops stay shut too. | Restaurants mixed near rally routes; museums generally open. | Reduced service plus rerouted lines near the City Hall rally; confirm current closures with the operator. |
| Movable (Thu) | Christi Himmelfahrt | Closed Thursday; many small businesses also close the following Friday informally. | Restaurants and museums mostly open. | Sunday timetable on the Thursday only. |
| Movable | Pfingstmontag | Closed, Sunday pattern. | Open as usual. | Sunday timetable. |
| Movable (Thu) | Fronleichnam | Closed; Friday bridge-day pattern common again. | Churches hold Corpus Christi processions; restaurants and most museums open. | Sunday timetable; some inner-city street closures near processions. |
| Aug 15 | Mariä Himmelfahrt | Closed, Sunday pattern; falls in peak summer season. | Most restaurants and major museums open, geared to summer visitor numbers. | Sunday timetable. |
| Oct 26 | Nationalfeiertag | Closed, Sunday pattern. | Some federal museums have offered free entry in past years as part of a national open-day tradition; practice varies by year. | Sunday timetable. |
| Nov 1 | Allerheiligen | Closed — identical to any Sunday on the retail side. | Restaurants and museums open; cemeteries fill with grave-visiting families. | Sunday timetable; cemetery-adjacent lines notably busier. |
| Dec 8 | Mariä Empfängnis | The one legal exception — retailers may trade if they choose. | Restaurants and museums open as a normal day. | Often a full weekday timetable rather than a holiday reduction. |
| Dec 24 | Heiliger Abend (not a statutory holiday) | Shops must close by early afternoon under the law’s Christmas Eve provision. | Most restaurants close for the evening; many museums close all day. | Weekday timetable in the morning, reduced from early afternoon. |
| Dec 25 | Christtag | Closed harder than any Sunday; even most exempted travel-retail shops reduce hours. | Overwhelming majority of independent restaurants close; hotel dining rooms are the main exception. Nearly all museums closed. | Thinnest service of the year, below a standard Sunday reduction. |
| Dec 26 | Stefanitag | Closed, Sunday pattern. | Many museums reopen after the Dec 25 closure, with high holiday footfall; restaurants mostly open. | Sunday timetable. |
Two things decide where a holiday lands in that table: whether the shop-closing law makes an exception for the date, and whether Wiener Linien treats the day as a deep reduction or a mild one. Vienna’s free museum days follow their own separate logic, covered on its own here. The next three sections take the exceptions apart.
Which holidays shut down harder than an ordinary Sunday?
Two: Christmas Day (Dec 25) and Labor Day (May 1, Staatsfeiertag). On a normal Sunday, Vienna keeps a thin layer of exempted trade — station shops, some museums, tourist restaurants. On these two dates that layer thins further, and May 1 adds a second disruption: a traditional union rally that closes streets near Vienna’s City Hall.
Christmas Day comes closest to a full stop. The overwhelming majority of independent restaurants close. Hotel dining rooms are the main exception, built around guests already staying the night. Nearly every museum closes too. Wiener Linien runs its thinnest schedule of the year — confirm current timetables on the operator’s own site rather than assuming a standard Sunday reduction.
May 1 is different in kind, not just degree. It’s a secular labor holiday, not a Christian one. The Austrian Trade Union Federation has, for decades, organized a rally and march that converges on Rathausplatz, the square in front of Vienna’s City Hall. Streets nearby close for part of the morning. Shops that might open on an ordinary public holiday sometimes don’t, out of custom rather than law.
Which holidays behave differently than you’d expect?
Three dates surprise people: Nov 1, Dec 8, and Dec 24 afternoon. None of them are secretly harder closures. One is a cultural pattern. One is a legal exception that lets shops open. One isn’t a statutory holiday at all.
All Saints’ Day (Allerheiligen) looks, on paper, exactly like any Sunday: shops closed, restaurants and museums open. What differs is foot traffic at cemeteries. Zentralfriedhof (Vienna’s Central Cemetery) and the city’s parish cemeteries fill with families tending graves and lighting candles, a Catholic custom tied specifically to this date. Tram and bus lines serving the cemetery gates get noticeably busier, even though the retail picture hasn’t moved from a standard Sunday.
Mariä Empfängnis (Immaculate Conception) is the one legal exception on the list. Austria amended its shop-opening law to let retailers trade on this date even though it remains a public holiday for employment purposes, a change driven by its position in the pre-Christmas shopping calendar. Not every shop opens; it’s a choice, not an obligation. Inner-city shopping streets, including Mariahilfer Strasse — the shopping street running through the 6th district (Mariahilf) and the 7th (Neubau) — typically see stores trading much as they would on any weekday. Vienna’s shop-opening exceptions run on the same underlying law.
Christmas Eve (Heiliger Abend) isn’t one of the 13. It’s not a statutory public holiday at all; legally, it’s a regular working day. In practice, the shop-opening law forces an early-afternoon closing time on Dec 24, and from that point Vienna behaves like a holiday that was never declared. Restaurants largely shut for the evening. Many museums close entirely, breaking their usual weekly pattern — a different mechanism from why the city shuts on an ordinary Sunday, but the same effect for a visitor standing outside a locked door.
Are supermarkets ever open on a public holiday?
Occasionally, and only in specific locations, not by brand. Austria’s retail law carves out an exception for travel-related shops — inside train stations and the airport — that lets them trade on Sundays and holidays when neighborhood branches can’t.
Spar and Billa both run small-format branches inside Wien Hauptbahnhof (Vienna’s main train station) and the airport terminals under that exemption. Those branches stay open on most of the 13 dates in the table above. Hofer, the Austrian arm of Aldi Süd, operates almost none of its stores inside those exempted travel zones, so its holiday closures tend to be uniform across the city. None of this is brand preference. It follows from where a shop sits, not who owns it. The Austrian Economic Chamber (WKO) publishes the underlying opening-hours regulations and their exceptions.
What happens to pharmacies on a public holiday?
Not every pharmacy opens, but a rotating on-call system guarantees at least one is reachable in each area. The rotation is published by Austria’s pharmacy regulator and posted on the door of any pharmacy that’s closed.
This duty applies on every Sunday and public holiday without exception, including dates like Dec 25 that shut down harder than a normal Sunday. A closed pharmacy’s door typically lists the nearest one currently on duty. What changes from one holiday to the next isn’t the system — it’s how many ordinary pharmacies are closed around it.
Does public transport change on these days?
Wiener Linien, the city’s transport operator, runs all 13 public holidays on a Sunday-equivalent timetable by default. Expect fewer departures and no early-morning rush. A few dates deviate in either direction, as the table above shows.
This is separate from Vienna’s weekend night service, which runs the U-Bahn (subway) all night on Friday and Saturday regardless of the calendar. A holiday falling on a Tuesday doesn’t get that overnight run just for being a holiday. For a resident weighing whether reduced holiday frequency matters across a full year of commuting, the more useful question is closer to whether the annual transport pass is worth it than about any single date.
How should this shape a plan to live in, or visit, Vienna?
Treat the 13 dates as Sundays with four exceptions worth remembering: Dec 25 and May 1 close harder, Dec 8 opens more, and Dec 24 behaves like a holiday despite not being one. Everything else follows the ordinary Sunday logic this site covers elsewhere.
For residents, the dates worth marking aren’t the big ones. They’re the Thursday holidays — Ascension Day and Fronleichnam (Corpus Christi) — because many small businesses quietly take the following Friday too, an informal Fenstertag (bridge day) with no legal status at all. Corpus Christi processions pass through the inner city from churches including Stephansdom, Vienna’s cathedral, whose nave and towers keep separate access rules worth checking on their own terms.
For visitors, the planning question is narrower: does the trip cross Dec 24 through 26, or May 1? Those are the dates where a specific museum or restaurant’s own page is worth checking directly, rather than assuming a generic holiday rule. For the broader logic behind Vienna’s closing habits — not just on holidays but every week — the practical planning hub covers the rest.
Access Vienna is an independent guide written from published, checkable sources. We have not visited the places described here and we do not publish personal recommendations or invented ‘local favorites’ — where something is singled out as notable, we say who says so. Opening times, fares, closures and prices change at short notice, so treat everything here as a starting point and confirm with the museum, operator or venue directly before building a day around it. We give no advice on visas, insurance, health or safety; use your own government’s official guidance for those.
Featured image: Photo by Geolina163, source, CC BY-SA 4.0
