Districts of Austria

Districts of Austria
  • Also known as:
  • Österreichische Bezirke (German)
Austria's 94 current districts. Statutory cities darkened.
CategoryDistrict
LocationAustria
Found inStates (Länder)
Number94 (as of 2022)
Possible types
Subdivisions

A district (German: Bezirk) is a second-level division of the executive arm of the Austrian government. District offices are the primary point of contact between residents and the state for most acts of government that exceed municipal purview: marriage licenses, driver licenses, passports, assembly permits, hunting permits, or dealings with public health officers for example all involve interaction with the district administrative authority (Bezirksverwaltungsbehörde).

Austrian constitutional law distinguishes two types of district administrative authority:

  • district commissions (Bezirkshauptmannschaften), district administrative authorities that exist as stand-alone bureaus;
  • statutory cities (Städte mit eigenem Statut or Statutarstädte), cities that have been vested with district administration functions in addition to their municipal responsibilities, i.e. district administrative authorities that only exist as a secondary role filled by something that primarily is a city (marked in the table with an asterisk (*).

As of 2017, there are 94 districts, of which 79 are districts headed by district commissions and 15 are statutory cities. Many districts are geographically congruent with one of the country's 114 judicial venues.

Statutory cities are not usually referred to as "districts" outside government publications and the legal literature. For brevity, government agencies will sometimes use the term "rural districts" (Landbezirke) for districts headed by district commissions, although the expression does not appear in any law and many "rural districts" are not very rural.

District commissions

A district headed by a district commission typically covers somewhere between ten and thirty municipalities. As a purely administrative unit, a district does not hold elections and therefore does not choose its own officials. It is administered by the district commission ((German: Bezirkshauptmannschaft, also translated as district authority) The district governor (Bezirkshauptmann / -frau) is appointed by the provincial governor; the district civil servants are province employees.

In the provincial laws of Lower Austria and Vorarlberg, districts headed by district commissions are called administrative districts (Verwaltungsbezirke). In Burgenland, Carinthia, Salzburg, Styria, Upper Austria, and Tyrol, the term used is political district (politischer Bezirk). National law, including national constitutional law, uses all three variants interchangeably.

The district commission is the representative organ of the state administration, and through that of the national administration. Its tasks include, for example:

  • Issuing of identification documents, passports or driver's licenses
  • Registration and regulation of companies and associations

District commissions were first introduced in 1849 during the rule of Franz Joseph I. In their current form they were defined in 1868, in a decree that stated that every province had to be divided into political subdivisions – districts – headed by a district governor. The 1868 Act establishing districts in their modern form adds the terms "administrative district" (Amtsbezirk) and "political administrative district" (politischer Amtsbezirk).

The 1920 Federal Constitutional Law prefers "district" but occasionally uses "political district" to emphasize is it not referring to judicial districts. Over the course of the dozens of revisions the Law has undergone since 1920, all occurrences of either were excised; the version currently in force still mentions district administrative authorities but no longer mentions districts.

The 1955 Austrian State Treaty contains a reference to the "administrative districts" of Carinthia, Burgenland, and Styria, even though local legal documents would have called them "political districts".

Statutory cities

A statutory city is a city vested with both municipal and district administrative responsibility. Town hall personnel also serve as district personnel; the mayor also discharges the powers and duties of a head of district commission. City management thus functions both as a regional government and a branch of the national government at the same time.

Most of the 15 statutory cities are major regional population centers with residents numbering in the tens of thousands. The smallest statutory city is barely more than a village, but it owes its status to a quirk of history: Rust, Burgenland, current population 2000 (2021), has enjoyed special autonomy since it was made a royal free city by the Kingdom of Hungary in 1681; its privilege was grandfathered into the district system when Hungary ceded the region (later called Burgenland) to Austria in 1921.

The constitution stipulates that a community with at least 20,000 residents can demand to be elevated to statutory city status by its respective province, unless the province can demonstrate this would jeopardize regional interests, or unless the national government objects. The last community to have invoked this right is Wels, a statutory city since 1964. As of 2021, fifteen other communities are eligible but not interested.

The statutory city of Vienna, a community with well over 1.9 million residents, is divided into 23 municipal districts (Gemeindebezirke). Despite the similar name and the comparable role they fill, municipal districts have a different legal basis than districts. The statutory cities of Graz and Klagenfurt also have subdivisions referred to as "municipal districts," but these are merely neighborhood-size divisions of the city administration.

Naming quirks

Austria strictly speaking does not name districts but district administrative authorities. The German term for "district commission" and "city," Bezirkshauptmannschaft and Stadt, respectively, is part of the official proper name of each such entity. This means that there can be pairs of districts whose two proper names contain the same toponym. Several such pairs do in fact exist. There are, for example, two district administrative authorities sharing the toponym Innsbruck: the (statutory) city of Innsbruck and the Innsbruck district commission.

To avoid confusion, the names of the rural districts in these pairs are commonly rendered with the suffix -Land, in this context roughly meaning "region." The customary name for the city of Innsbruck is Innsbruck, the customary name for the district headed by the Innsbruck district commission is Innsbruck-Land. While this usage is nearly universal both in the media and in everyday spoken German and even appears in the occasional government publication, the suffix -Land is not part of any official, legal designation in Lower Austria.

History

Habsburg Monarchy and Austrian Empire

Voitsberg District district border sign

From the middle ages until the early nineteenth century, what would become the Austrian state – the Habsburg monarchy – was a large collection of formally separate feudal entities in a personal union under a single monarch of the house of Habsburg (Habsburg-Lorraine from 1780) rather than a single unified state. These entities were until the mid-eighteenth century absolute monarchies with no written constitution and no modern concept of the rule of law. Some of these entities lay within the Holy Roman Empire (the Erblande, the Lands of the Bohemian Crown, 1714–97 the Austrian Netherlands) while others lay outside it (the Kingdoms of Hungary and Croatia; from 1711 Transylvania; from 1772 Galicia and Lodomeria, among others). The modern state of Salzburg and parts of the surrounding states at this time belonged to the Prince-Archbishopric of Salzburg and numerous small enclaves belonging to other ecclesiastical principalities existed within the Erblande.

The states were ruled by the monarch, usually the emperor himself or a vassal of the emperor, supported by their personal advisors and the estates of the realm. The precise nature of the relationship between ruler and estates was different from region to region. Regional administrators were appointed by and answerable to the monarch.

The first step towards modern bureaucracy was taken by Empress Maria Theresa, who in 1753 imposed a system of 'circles'/districts (Kreise) and 'circle'/district offices (Kreisämter) throughout most of her realms. The 'circles' of Upper and Lower Austria and Styria were largely based on the pre-existing quarters of those realms. A major break with tradition, the system was unpopular at first; "in some provinces considerable resistance had to be overcome." The district offices never became fully operational in the Kingdom of Hungary or the Austrian Netherlands.

In 1804, in response to the declaration of the First French Empire and the ongoing Napoleonic Wars, Holy Roman Emperor Francis II declared himself Francis I, Emperor of Austria and unified the Habsburg realms into the Austrian Empire, while also remaining Holy Roman Emperor. The formerly separate realms became crownlands of this new Empire; those which were part of the Holy Roman Empire remained part of both. Francis dissolved the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. As a result of the German mediatisations and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, culminating in the 1815 Congress of Vienna, various territories, including Salzburg (until 1849 a 'circle' of Upper Austria), had become part of the new Empire, while other areas such as the Southern Netherlands and Further Austria (excluding Vorarlberg) had been lost.

Following the first wave of the revolutions of 1848, Emperor Ferdinand I and his minister of the interior, Franz Xaver von Pillersdorf, enacted Austria's first formal constitution. The constitution completely abolished the estates and called for a separation of executive and judicial authority, immediately crippling most existing regional institutions and leaving district offices as the backbone of the empire's administration. With Ferdinand having been forced to abdicate by a second wave of revolutions, his successor Franz Joseph I swiftly went to work transforming Austria from a constitutional monarchy back into an absolute one but kept relying on district offices at first. In fact, he strengthened the system.

His March Constitution retained the separation of judiciary and executive. It prescribed a partition of the empire into judicial venues, with courts to be headed by professional judges, and a separate partition into administrative districts, to be headed by professional civil servants. An 1849 Imperial Resolution fleshed out the details. The districts started functioning in 1850, many of them already in their present-day borders.

The March Constitution was never fully implemented and formally scrapped in 1851. Officially returning to full autocracy, the Emperor abolished the separation of powers. In 1853 Administrative districts were merged with judicial venues; district administrative authorities with district courts. During this period the Kreise were subdivided into Bezirke (or Amtsbezirke [de], 'office districts'), each with a Bezirksamt ('district office'). These were typically smaller than the modern districts; for example, Lower Austria, which is today divided into 24 districts, was divided into 70 Amtsbezirke. The crownlands of Carinthia, Carniola (now mostly part of Slovenia), Salzburg, Upper and Lower Silesia (now divided between the Czech Republic and Poland) and Bukovina (now divided between Romania and Ukraine) were not divided into Kreise but directly into Amtsbezirke. Vorarlberg was administered with Tyrol as Kreis Bregenz. This administrative structure did not apply to Lombardy–Venetia, Hungary (which at the time excluded Transylvania and the Voivodeship of Serbia and Banat of Temeschwar, which did use the system), or the Military Frontier; Croatia and Slavonia used the term Comitatus (contemporary German: Comitat, modern Komitat; Croatian: županija) in place of Kreis. Intellectuals aside, few objections were raised; the bulk of the population was still living and working on manorial lands and was still used to the lord of the manor being head of some form of manorial court.

Cisleithania

Following the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, Franz Joseph was forced to assent to the December Constitution, a set of five of Basic Laws that restored constitutional monarchy in Cisleithania. One of these Basic Laws, in particular, restored the separation of judiciary and executive. Pursuant to this stipulation, the merger of administrative and judicial districts was reversed the following year; the law in question established the districts in essentially their modern form. No attempt was made this time to impose the scheme on Hungary. The Kingdom of Hungary was now a separate country, fully independent in every respect save defense and international relations, and neither needed nor wanted to copy civil administration policies enacted in Vienna.

No significant changes were made between the 1868 restoration and the 1918 collapse of the Habsburg monarchy. Vienna was growing significantly during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, absorbing dozens of suburbs. Three districts disappeared between 1891 and 1918 due to their domains being incorporated into the imperial capital wholesale. Two other districts lost parts of their territories to Vienna. Eleven new districts were carved out of existing districts between 1891 and 1918 due to general population growth.

First Republic

Following the collapse of the monarchy, the 1920 constitution of the First Austrian Republic retained the district system.

At least one of the principal framers, Karl Renner, had suggested to endow districts with county-like elected councils and some degree of legislative authority, but could not gain consensus for this idea.

The 1920 constitution characterizes Austria as a federal republic and its provinces as quasi-sovereign federated states.

A 1925 constitutional reform, a broad revision of general devolutionary tendency, transformed districts from divisions of the national executive into divisions of the new "state" executives. The replanting had virtually no practical consequences; enforcing national law and handling applications to the national government remain every district's main activities. Province governments have the authority to redraw district boundaries but can neither create nor dissolve districts, nor change how they work, without the assent of the cabinet.

In 1921, Hungary ceded the German-speaking part in the western region to Austria, this was created a new province and became Burgenland. While part of the Kingdom of Hungary, the rural border region had been partitioned into seven wards (Oberstuhlrichterämter), clusters of small towns and villages headed by a magistrate who served as both the district judge and the supervisor of the local administrators. Austria simply transformed the seven wards into seven new districts. The region also included two royal free cities, Eisenstadt and Rust; these were made into statutory cities, thus also becoming districts.

Land Österreich

With the March 1938 annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany, Austria initially became a state (Land) of the German Reich. In May, Vienna was expanded to create Greater Vienna (Groß-Wien), absorbing another four districts. Two weakly populated rural districts were discontinued as well.

In October, Burgenland was dissolved, its northern half being attached to Lower Austria and its southern half to Styria.

Between May 1939 and March 1940, Austria was dissolved. Its eight remaining provinces became seven Reichsgaue, answerable not to Vienna but directly to Berlin. Several statutory cities lost their special status and were incorporated into the respectively adjacent rural districts; the city of Krems on the other hand was promoted to district status. The districts otherwise remained intact, but they were now German Kreise instead of Austrian Bezirke.

Second Republic

Reborn with the downfall of Nazi Germany in 1945, the Republic of Austria immediately restored the administrative structure torn down between 1938 and 1940, putting the districts back in place. The only exception were the districts that had been absorbed into Vienna.

Austria had been divided into four occupation zones and jointly occupied by the United States, Soviet Union, United Kingdom, and France. Lower Austria, the region surrounding Vienna, was part of the Soviet zone. The capital itself was considered too valuable to be left to any one power and was, just like Berlin, separately divided into four sectors. In drafting their plans, the allies worked from the city's pre-1938 borders.

The Nazi expansion of Vienna, however, had made some sense. A number of rural areas incorporated into Greater Vienna were inimical. Most of Lower Austria had been leaning conservative to nationalist for a century; Vienna had been a bastion of Social Democracy for decades. The bureaucracy steering Vienna, a city of industry and finance, was sociologically distant from the agricultural countryside. Some of the suburbs affected, however, had long had much closer ties to the capital than to the rest of their former province, both socially and in terms of infrastructure. Permanently ejecting these suburbs from Vienna would have been inadvisable. Reaffirming the Nazi border changes either entirely or in part, on the other hand, would have led to demarcation discrepancies between Austrian and allied administrative divisions. Disputes regarding communal debt added to the problem.

Hotly contested between the Social Democrats dominating Vienna and the People's Party ruling Lower Austria, the question was not resolved until 1954. One of the traditional districts annexed by the city in 1938 was restored. Parts of several other traditional districts annexed were united to form a second new district.

In 1964, the city of Wels was elevated to statutory city status.

Two other new districts were established in 1969 and 1982, respectively.

Effective January 1, 2012, Styria merged the districts of Judenburg and Knittelfeld to form the Murtal district. The merger was part of program aimed at streamlining the regional bureaucracy. On January 1, 2013, three more mergers followed: Bruck an der Mur was merged with Mürzzuschlag, Hartberg with Fürstenfeld, and Feldbach with Radkersburg.

Effective January 1, 2017, Lower Austria split the district of Wien-Umgebung into parts which were merged with the districts of Bruck an der Leitha, Korneuburg, St. Pölten and Tulln.

List of current districts

In Lower Austria only the suffix -Land is not part of the official name of the three districts using it. In cases where a statutory city and a rural district share the same toponym, the rural district has -Land or Umgebung attached to its name as a matter of customary usage to avoid ambiguity (officially in other parts of Austria). All 13 of these rural districts have their administrative centers located in the respective statutory cities, thus outside of the districts themselves.

M. = Municipalities (as of 2022); state capitals in bold
State # District
* Statutory City
Est. License plate(s) Administrative seat M. Area
km2
Population
1 Jan. 2021
Burgen­land 101 Eisenstadt* 1921 E * * 1 42.88 14,895
102 Rust* 1921 E * * 1 20.01 2,000
103 Eisenstadt-Umgebung 1921 EU Eisenstadt 23 453.14 43,861
104 Güssing 1921 GS Güssing 28 485.34 25,770
105 Jennersdorf 1921 JE Jennersdorf 12 253.34 17,109
106 Mattersburg 1921 MA Mattersburg 19 237.83 40,316
107 Neusiedl am See 1921 ND Neusiedl am See 27 1,038.64 60,397
108 Oberpullendorf 1921 OP Oberpullendorf 28 701.44 37,453
109 Oberwart 1921 OW Oberwart 32 732.58 54,209
Carin­thia 201 Klagenfurt am Wörthersee* 1850 K * * 1 120.12 101,765
202 Villach* 1932 VI * * 1 134.99 63,236
203 Hermagor 1868 HE Hermagor-Pressegger See 07 808.13 18,052
204 Klagenfurt-Land 1868 KL Klagenfurt am Wörthersee 19 765.64 60,503
205 St. Veit an der Glan 1868 SV St. Veit an der Glan 20 1,493.58 53,880
206 Spittal an der Drau 1868 SP Spittal an der Drau 33 2,764.99 75,628
207 Villach-Land 1868 VL Villach 19 1,009.29 64,920
208 Völkermarkt 1868 VK Völkermarkt 13 907.61 41,834
209 Wolfsberg 1868 WO Wolfsberg 09 973.65 52,488
210 Feldkirchen 1982 FE Feldkirchen in Kärnten 10 558.49 29,783
Lower Austria 301 Krems an der Donau* 1938 KS * * 1 51.66 24,837
302 St. Pölten* 1922 P * * 1 108.44 55,878
303 Waidhofen an der Ybbs* 1868 WY * * 1 131.56 11,134
304 Wiener Neustadt* 1866 WN * * 1 60.94 46,456
305 Amstetten 1868 AM Amstetten 33 1,187.73 116,592
306 Baden 1868 BN Baden 30 753.64 147,113
307 Bruck an der Leitha 1868 BL, SW Bruck an der Leitha 33 703.11 105,507
308 Gänserndorf 1901 GF Gänserndorf 44 1,271.40 105,824
309 Gmünd 1899 GD Gmünd 21 786.39 36,275
310 Hollabrunn 1868 HL Hollabrunn 24 1,010.88 51,332
311 Horn 1868 HO Horn 20 784.00 30,838
312 Korneuburg 1868 KO Korneuburg 20 661.84 91,777
313 Krems (Land) 1868 KR Krems an der Donau 30 923.92 56,559
314 Lilienfeld 1868 LF Lilienfeld 14 931.65 25,474
315 Melk 1896 ME Melk 40 1,013.56 78,281
316 Mistelbach 1868 MI Mistelbach 36 1,291.72 75,655
317 Mödling 1897 MD Mödling 20 276.99 119,240
318 Neunkirchen 1868 NK Neunkirchen 44 1,146.92 86,323
319 St. Pölten (Land) 1868 PL St. Pölten 45 1,286.88 132,064
320 Scheibbs 1868 SB Scheibbs 18 1,023.46 41,567
321 Tulln 1892 KG, TU Tulln an der Donau 22 734.42 105,762
322 Waidhofen an der Thaya 1868 WT Waidhofen an der Thaya 15 669.03 25,531
323 Wiener Neustadt (Land) 1868 WB Wiener Neustadt 35 969.84 79,033
325 Zwettl 1868 ZT Zwettl-Niederösterreich 24 1,399.99 41,827
Upper Austria 401 Linz* 1866 L * * 1 95.99 206,537
402 Steyr* 1867 SR * * 1 26.56 37,952
403 Wels* 1964 WE * * 1 45.92 62,654
404 Braunau 1868 BR Braunau am Inn 46 1,040.84 106,492
405 Eferding 1907 EF Grieskirchen 12 259.72 33,368
406 Freistadt 1868 FR Freistadt 27 993.96 66,922
407 Gmunden 1868 GM Gmunden 20 1,431.58 102,102
408 Grieskirchen 1911 GR Grieskirchen 33 579.06 65,137
409 Kirchdorf 1868 KI Kirchdorf an der Krems 23 1,240.01 57,163
410 Linz-Land 1868 LL Linz 22 460.41 152,391
411 Perg 1868 PE Perg 26 613.52 69,241
412 Ried 1868 RI Ried im Innkreis 36 584.96 61,850
413 Rohrbach 1868 RO Rohrbach-Berg 37 817.58 56,623
414 Schärding 1868 SD Schärding 30 618.44 57,438
415 Steyr-Land 1868 SE Steyr 20 971.73 60,936
416 Urfahr-Umgebung 1919 UU Linz 27 659.67 86,235
417 Vöcklabruck 1868 VB Vöcklabruck 52 1,084.85 137,993
418 Wels-Land 1868 WL Wels 24 457.71 74,574
Salz­burg 501 Salzburg* 1869 S * * 1 65.65 155,416
502 Hallein 1896 HA Hallein 13 668.35 60,992
503 Salzburg-Umgebung 1868 SL Salzburg 37 1,004.47 154,624
504 St. Johann im Pongau 1868 JO Sankt Johann im Pongau 26 1,755.37 81,392
505 Tamsweg 1868 TA Tamsweg 15 1,019.65 20,118
506 Zell am See 1868 ZE Zell am See 28 2,641.07 88,168
Styria 601 Graz* 1850 G * * 1 127.57 291,134
603 Deutschlandsberg 1868 DL Deutschlandsberg 15 863.47 60,871
606 Graz-Umgebung 1868 GU Graz 36 1,084.55 157,853
610 Leibnitz 1868 LB Leibnitz 29 749.97 85,294
611 Leoben 1868 LE, LN Leoben 16 1,053.49 59,151
612 Liezen 1868 GB, LI Liezen 29 3,318.72 79,592
614 Murau 1868 MU Murau 14 1,385.48 27,449
616 Voitsberg 1891 VO Voitsberg 15 678.18 50,947
617 Weiz 1868 WZ Weiz 31 1,097.94 90,916
620 Murtal 2012 MT Judenburg 20 1,675.81 71,356
621 Bruck-Mürzzuschlag 2013 BM Bruck an der Mur 19 2,156.93 98,054
622 Hartberg-Fürstenfeld 2013 HF Hartberg 36 1,224.28 90,619
623 Südoststeiermark 2013 SO Feldbach 25 982.96 83,841
Tyrol 701 Innsbruck* 1850 I * * 1 104.91 131,059
702 Imst 1868 IM Imst 24 1,724.96 60,922
703 Innsbruck-Land 1868 IL Innsbruck 63 1,990.17 181,698
704 Kitzbühel 1868 KB Kitzbühel 20 1,163.30 64,676
705 Kufstein 1868 KU Kufstein 30 969.97 111,080
706 Landeck 1868 LA Landeck 30 1,595.14 44,346
707 Lienz 1868 LZ Lienz 33 2,020.08 48,814
708 Reutte 1868 RE Reutte 37 1,236.67 33,054
709 Schwaz 1868 SZ Schwaz 39 1,843.18 84,456
Vorarl­berg 801 Bludenz 1868 BZ Bludenz 29 1,287.64 64,666
802 Bregenz 1868 B Bregenz 40 863.36 136,107
803 Dornbirn 1969 DO Dornbirn 03 172.36 90,860
804 Feldkirch 1868 FK Feldkirch 24 278.31 109,974
Vienna 901 Wien* 1850 W * * 1 414.82 1,920,949

Historical districts

This section only lists districts covering regions that are still part of present-day Austria. Districts lost following the dissolution of Cisleithania in 1918 are omitted.

Code District Years License plate Administrative seat Population 2011
Floridsdorf 1897–1905 Floridsdorf
Floridsdorf Umgebung 1906–1938 Floridsdorf
Gröbming 1868–1938 Gröbming
Groß-Enzersdorf 1868–1896 Groß-Enzersdorf
Hernals 1868–1891 Hernals
Hietzing 1868–1891 Hietzing
Hietzing Umgebung 1892–1938 Hietzing
Pöggstall 1899–1938 Pöggstall
Sechshaus 1868–1891 Sechshaus
Urfahr 1903–1919 Urfahr
Währing 1868–1892 Währing
324 Wien-Umgebung 1954–2016 WU, SW Klosterneuburg 117,343
602 Bruck an der Mur 1868–2012 BM Bruck an der Mur 62,000
604 Feldbach 1868–2012 FB Feldbach, Styria 67,046
605 Fürstenfeld 1938–2012 FF Fürstenfeld 23,000
607 Hartberg 1868–2012 HB Hartberg 66,000
608 Judenburg 1868–2011 JU Judenburg 44,983
609 Knittelfeld 1946–2011 KF Knittelfeld 29,095
613 Mürzzuschlag 1903–2012 MZ Mürzzuschlag 40,207
615 Radkersburg 1868–2012 RA Bad Radkersburg 22,911

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