Austria's parcel tax (Paketsteuer): who pays the €2

Austria's parcel tax, the Paketsteuer, started on 1 October 2026. It charges €2 for every parcel delivered to a consumer in Austria from an online, phone or catalogue order, or €2 per order if the seller chooses that method for a whole quarter. Only one kind of seller owes it: one whose Austrian distance sales passed €100 million in its previous financial year. Marketplaces count the sales they handle for their sellers as their own, so Amazon, Zalando, Temu and the other large platforms owe it on almost every Austrian order. That is why Amazon now shows €2,40 at checkout: the €2 tax plus 20% Austrian VAT on it. Almost every Shopify store is far below the line and owes nothing at all. This guide walks through the whole law in plain words, what it changes for a store that does not owe it, and how to put the cost into your profit and loss if you do.

• The tax is €2 per parcel, or €2 per order, on deliveries to consumers in Austria where the payment was accepted on or after 1 October 2026.
• Only sellers with more than €100 million of Austrian distance sales in their previous financial year owe it, and a marketplace counts the sales it facilitates as its own.
• Below that threshold there is nothing to register, file or pay, so a typical Shopify store should not add any parcel tax line to its checkout.
• It falls due at checkout, not at delivery; a return never cancels it; it is declared and paid every quarter through FinanzOnline.
• For Austrian shoppers the large platforms are now up to €2,40 more expensive per order, and that difference is largest on small baskets.

01The law in one table

The law is the Paketsteuergesetz, PakStG for short, sometimes called the Paketabgabe in the press. Parliament passed it as article 44 of the Budgetbegleitgesetz 2027-2028, and it was published in the Federal Law Gazette as BGBl. I Nr. 62/2026 on 29 July 2026. It is seventeen short sections long, and you can read the full text of the law in the official legal information system. The practical questions are answered in the Ministry of Finance's FAQ, last updated on 5 August 2026 and available in German and English. Everything on this page comes from those two sources, read on 1 October 2026. The table is the short version; every row has its own section further down.

02Who owes it: the €100 million test

The law calls the person who owes the tax a Versandhändler, a distance seller, and then defines that word narrowly. You are one only if your distance sales of goods shipped in parcels to consumers in Austria exceeded €100 million in your previous financial year. If your financial year is not the calendar year, your own financial year is the one that counts. Below that line the law does not apply to you at all: there is nothing to register, no return to file and nothing to pay.

The €100 million is measured the way VAT measures a sale: everything the customer pays to receive the goods, without the VAT. Shipping charged to the customer counts, and returns that reduce your VAT base reduce this figure too. Only deliveries to consumers in Austria count. Your sales in Germany, your wholesale orders and your shop counter do not. Where you are based makes no difference either. A seller in Vienna, one in Munich and one in Shenzhen are measured the same way, and so are goods shipped from an Austrian warehouse and goods shipped from abroad.

To put the number in proportion: a Shopify store selling €4 million a year, a quarter of it to Austria, has roughly €1 million of Austrian distance sales. That is one percent of the threshold. Even a store at €10 million a year with every single order going to Austria would sit at a tenth of it. The Austrian retail association, the Handelsverband, counts sixteen businesses above the line, among them Amazon, Temu, Zalando, eBay, Otto, Shein, AliExpress, MediaMarkt, IKEA, Apple, Shop-Apotheke, XXXLutz, Best Secret, Universal and Refurbed. The Ministry of Finance expects the tax to raise about €280 million a year.

The test is applied again every year to the year before. A fast-growing seller therefore starts owing the tax at the beginning of the financial year after the one in which it passed €100 million, never in the middle of a quarter. The law also requires the Ministry of Finance to evaluate the tax in 2029, including whether the threshold should change, and to report to parliament by 30 April 2029. That date is worth a note in your calendar: a lower threshold is the one change that could bring ordinary online shops into the tax.

03Marketplaces: when the platform counts as the seller

Many brands sell on Amazon, eBay or Zalando next to their own shop. For those sales the law uses what tax advisers call the deemed supplier rule: when a sale is facilitated by an online marketplace, platform or portal, it counts as the marketplace's own sale for the parcel tax. The marketplace adds your sales to its own total, and if that total is above €100 million, the marketplace owes the €2 on your orders. You do not.

Facilitating means the same here as in EU VAT law, in article 5b of Implementing Regulation 282/2011. Put simply, a platform facilitates a sale when it sets the terms of the sale, takes part in charging the customer, or takes part in ordering or delivery. A site that only shows your advert, like a classifieds page, does not facilitate anything, and private sales between two consumers are outside the tax altogether.

What happens to the money after that is a commercial decision rather than a legal one. Amazon charges its Austrian customers €2,40 per order at checkout, shown as its own line, once per order however many items or parcels the order contains. Otto Austria also charges per order. Zalando and Otto refund it to customers who send back a complete order in time, although the tax itself stays with them. Whether a platform also changes the fees it charges you as a seller depends on its seller terms, so read the notices in your seller account. The Handelsverband estimates that about 4.000 Austrian businesses sell through these platforms and feel the tax indirectly, through the price their customers now see at checkout.

One example shows how sharp the line is. Austrian Post runs its own marketplace, shöpping.at, which stays below the threshold, and it now promotes the site to shoppers and retailers as free of the parcel tax.

04Per parcel or per order

The basic rate is €2 for each parcel delivered. A seller can instead pay €2 for each order that leads to a taxable delivery, however many parcels that order ends up in. The choice is made for a whole quarter and then covers every order in it, so a seller cannot pick the cheaper method order by order. On a marketplace, one order that contains goods from several sellers still counts as one order.

The choice exists because of split shipments. A seller who regularly sends one order in two or three boxes would pay two or three times under the parcel method. It is the same mechanism as the label, the picking and the packaging, explained in what a split shipment really costs, applied to a tax. That is why Amazon and Otto chose to pay per order.

05What counts as a parcel and as a delivery

A parcel is an addressed item that a postal service would accept in that form; the law takes the definition from Austria's postal market act. It does not matter who carries it, whether Austrian Post, a private carrier or the seller's own van. Newspapers, magazines and catalogues count only when they travel in a postal parcel. Groceries and meals in packaging no postal service would take, such as pizza boxes and open bags, are not parcels at all.

Heavy freight is the one open edge. Asked by the Handelsverband in August 2026, the Ministry answered that because postal services accept parcels up to 31,5 kg, a shipment above that weight is currently not treated as a parcel. Under the per order method, though, an order still counts if at least one item in it travels in an ordinary parcel.

A parcel is delivered when it comes into the customer's power of disposal: handed over, or left where they can take it. A refused parcel is not delivered, but the seller has to prove that; without proof, the law assumes it was delivered. Click and collect is outside the tax, because a customer who collects an order from the seller's own shop, or from a pickup station right at the shop that belongs to it, is not buying by distance sale. That exemption is narrow. A parcel that a carrier takes to a parcel shop or locker was still shipped to the customer, so on the Ministry's reasoning it is a distance sale like any other.

The contract also has to be made at a distance: online, by phone or from a catalogue. Goods bought in a shop and then delivered to the customer's home are not covered, even though a parcel arrives at the door.

06When it is due: at checkout, not at the door

The tax becomes due the moment the seller accepts payment, and the law defines that moment the way VAT does: the earliest of the payment confirmation, the payment authorisation or the customer's commitment to pay. For an online order that is the end of checkout. The delivery date does not matter, and neither does the date the money actually arrives, so an order paid in instalments is taxed once, at checkout.

The same date decides which orders are covered at all. An order paid on 25 September 2026 is outside the tax even if its parcel arrives on 3 October, and one paid on 1 October is inside it. Subscriptions follow their billing: a subscription paid once in advance is taxed once, and one billed period by period is taxed at each billing.

Declaring and paying happens quarterly. The seller works out the tax itself, files one return per calendar quarter through FinanzOnline, Austria's online tax portal, and pays by the last day of the following month: 31 January, 30 April, 31 July and 31 October. The first quarter is October to December 2026, so the first return and the first payment are due on 31 January 2027. Records have to be kept for seven years. A seller with no seat or fixed establishment in the EU or the EEA must appoint a tax representative in Austria, who has to be a tax adviser or accountant, a lawyer or a notary based there. A seller that files late, files an incomplete return or gets the amount wrong is assessed by the tax office, with the usual penalties and interest.

07Returns, cancellations and replacements

Once a parcel has been delivered, the tax cannot be undone. A customer who sends the goods back, even under a full withdrawal from the contract, does not bring the €2 back with them; the Ministry is explicit that no correction is allowed after delivery. A replacement sent under warranty adds no second tax, and the tax on the first delivery stays.

The one correction is for a parcel that never arrived because it was lost, refused or undeliverable. If the seller learns of it before filing the quarter, the order simply stays out of that return; if it learns later, it corrects the next return. An order cancelled before it ships never leads to a delivery, so it ends up with no tax either.

So on a profit and loss the parcel tax behaves exactly like outbound shipping: it is spent the moment the parcel goes out, and a return does not give it back. A return already costs the label out, the label back and the handling, and for the largest sellers it now costs the €2 as well, one more reason that what a return really costs is never just the refund.

08Why the customer sees €2,40, not €2

The tax is owed by the seller, not by the customer. A seller who passes it on is simply charging a higher price, and VAT is charged on the whole price, because EU VAT law counts taxes and levies other than VAT itself as part of the amount VAT is calculated on. At Austria's standard rate of 20%, €2,00 becomes €2,40. A seller can show it as its own line, as Amazon does, or fold it into its prices or its shipping charge; the law only says who owes the €2, not how it is presented. To run the same arithmetic on your own prices, the net and gross VAT calculator works in both directions.

For a shopper the effect depends on the size of the basket. On a €100 order the line adds 2,4%; on a €10 order it adds close to a quarter. Small baskets feel it most, and small baskets are exactly the order profile of the low-price platforms.

09What it means for a Shopify store below the threshold

For almost every merchant reading this, the summary is short: you do not owe the parcel tax, you do not register for it, and you do not file anything. On your own Shopify store you are the seller, so the €100 million test is applied to your own Austrian sales, and they are nowhere near it. What does change is the market around you, and five things are worth doing about it.

• Do not add a parcel tax line to your checkout. You do not owe the tax, and charging customers an amount labelled as a tax you never pay would misrepresent your price. If your costs to Austria have genuinely risen, change your prices or your shipping rates and call them what they are.
• Read your carrier and fulfilment invoices. The law places no tax liability on delivery companies, so a carrier cannot owe this tax or pass it on as a tax. A new surcharge with a similar name is a price change, and it can be negotiated like one.
• Watch your marketplace seller notices. If you also sell on Amazon, eBay or Zalando, the platform owes the tax on those orders, and any change to your seller fees comes from its terms, not from the law.
• Look at small Austrian baskets again. The platforms' smallest orders just became up to €2,40 more expensive, and if shipping is what stops your small orders from converting, the free shipping threshold calculator shows what a lower threshold for Austria would cost you.
• Keep the 2029 review in view. The threshold can change after the evaluation due by 30 April 2029, and a lower one is what would bring smaller sellers in.

10If you owe it: where the €2 belongs in your P&L

For a seller above the threshold, or for anyone modelling what crossing it would mean, the parcel tax is a cost that moves with every Austrian parcel. That decides where it belongs: with fulfilment, in the logistics cost per order, above the CM2 line, next to the shipping label and the packaging fees, because it rises and falls with orders exactly the way they do. It is not overhead, and despite its name it has nothing to do with tax on profit.

It is booked on the day of the order, which is the day the law makes it due for an ordinary online order. A return never reverses it, because the law does not reverse it. It never applies to an order cancelled before shipping, an order collected at your shop, or a sale to a business that gave its VAT number.

If you pass it on to customers, two entries appear. The €2,40 the customer pays is revenue including VAT, so it adds €2,00 to net revenue once the 20% VAT is taken out, and the €2,00 tax is the cost against it. On paper the two cancel out above CM2, and what the tax really costs you is the orders that do not happen because the checkout total went up. If you absorb it instead, the full €2,00 comes out of your margin on every Austrian parcel, and the smaller the order, the larger the bite.

11How to add the parcel tax in nouz

nouz can carry the parcel tax today with no new feature, because its logistics rules stack: every active rule is charged on top of the others. A second shipping rate card that prices only the Austria zone adds the tax to every Austrian parcel and leaves your carrier rates exactly as they are. Austria is its own shipping zone by default. If your store merged it into another zone, first give it its own zone again with Add zone inside a rate card, and price that zone on your carrier's card too, so the label is still charged.

• Open Logistics in the sidebar and click Add rule.
• Name the rule so you will recognise it, for example Austrian parcel tax, and leave the component on Shipping rate card.
• In the AT column, type 2,00 in the open row and leave every other zone empty.
• Set Effective from to 1 Oct 2026, or to the first day of the financial year in which you owe it, and click Save rule.

From then on every parcel shipped to Austria carries €2,00 in Logistic Costs on the day of its order, with one exception described below, and the days before keep their old figures, because a cost in nouz applies only from its effective date forward. A return never credits it back, an order cancelled before shipping never gets it, and an order collected in person gets no rate card at all, which matches the law on all three. The cost shows inside the Shipping row when you expand Logistic Costs on the P&L, and it flows straight through to CM2, CM3 and EBITDA.

Three details decide how exact the rule is. It counts parcels, which is the law's basic method; a seller that chose to pay per order and often splits orders can set the price to €2 divided by its average parcels per order instead. A sale to a business that gave its VAT number is outside the tax but is still a parcel to the rule. And a parcel sent through Shopify's pickup point delivery, to a parcel shop or locker, is treated like a collection and carries no rate card, while the law taxes it. Your quarterly return counts each of these exactly, so compare the two once after your first quarter and adjust the price if they differ.

For the far more common case, a store below the threshold, the right entry is no entry. A Shopify profit tracker should show the costs you really carry, on the day you carry them, and nothing you do not; adding a tax you do not owe would only make your Austrian orders look worse than they are.

12Not to be confused with customs or packaging fees

The parcel tax is a national Austrian tax and has nothing to do with customs. Separately, the EU ended the customs duty exemption for low-value parcels from outside the union on 1 July 2026 and introduced a flat €3 customs duty in its place. The two can land on the same box: a cheap item from outside the EU, sold by a large platform to a consumer in Austria, can carry customs duty when it is imported and the parcel tax when it is delivered. Packaging fees are a third and unrelated cost on that box, explained in packaging EPR cost per parcel.

13Why Austria did it, and what could still change

The government gives two reasons: to help pay for the lower VAT rate on selected basic foods that started on 1 July 2026, and to address what it describes as the environmental and local-economy effects of fast-growing online trade. Retailers oppose it. The Handelsverband has announced a complaint to the EU together with the European trade body Ecommerce Europe, and several of the affected sellers have said they will challenge the tax in court. Until a court decides otherwise, the law applies as written, and the 2029 evaluation is the next scheduled moment it can change.

14Sources

This guide is built on two primary sources, both read on 1 October 2026: the Paketsteuergesetz as published in BGBl. I Nr. 62/2026, and the Ministry of Finance's own questions and answers, last updated on 5 August 2026, together with its answer to the Handelsverband on heavy shipments. The count of affected businesses, the platforms' choices and the expected revenue come from Austrian press reporting of the Handelsverband and the Ministry around the start date. It explains the rules; it is not tax advice. If you are close to the threshold, or a platform's notice leaves you unsure what you owe, ask an Austrian tax adviser.