How Many Employees Does One 24/7 Post Need in Austria?
Holding one position every hour of 2026 in Austria takes 8,766 staffed hours. One full-time employee is genuinely available for about 1,636 of them, so the post needs 5.36 employees, which is 6 whole people.
One ring per person, one year each
Each ring is one employee's year, broken wherever they are on holiday, on leave, or off sick. No single ring closes, which is the whole problem: one person cannot hold a post that never stops.
Stack 6 of them and the picture closes. Trace any line out from the center and it crosses at least one solid arc, so every hour of 2026 has somebody on it. That is the relief factor, drawn rather than asserted.
Where the number comes from
- 1
Staffing one position 168 hours a week comes to 8,766 hours across the year.
- 2
Austria has 261 weekdays in the year, the starting point for one employee.
- 3
Take out 10 public holidays that fall on a weekday, 25 days of statutory paid leave, 10.5 days of average sickness absence, and 3 days of training: 48.5 days lost.
- 4
That leaves 212.5 working days per employee, and at a 38.5-hour week that is 7.7 hours a day, so 1,636 available hours a year.
- 5
8,766 coverage hours divided by 1,636 available hours is a relief factor of 5.36, so the post needs 6 people.
| Weekdays in the year | 261 |
| Public holidays on a weekday | −10 |
| Statutory paid annual leave | −25 |
| Average sickness absence | −10.5 |
| Training and onboarding (assumed) | −3 |
| Working days available | 212.5 |
| At 7.7 hours a day | 1,636 hours |
Paid public holidays are a statutory entitlement in Austria, so they sit on top of annual leave and are deducted separately here.
The training allowance of 3 days is a planning assumption rather than a sourced statistic, and it is deliberately low. Every other figure on this page carries a source. If your operation runs heavy certification cycles, raise it and the relief factor rises with it.
What the usual rule of thumb gets wrong here
The common shortcut is to divide coverage hours by contracted hours and add a quarter for absence. In Austria that gives 5.45 against a derived answer of 5.36, so the shortcut is high by 1.8 percent. A flat buffer travels badly because the things it stands in for, statutory leave and the length of the contracted week, are set nationally.
Nobody ever away. Not a real answer.
The usual shortcut, over by 1.8%.
From Austria's own leave, hours, and absence.
Other coverage shapes
The same availability figure answers any coverage window. Only the hours the post must be staffed change.
| Coverage | Hours a week | Relief factor | People |
|---|---|---|---|
| Round the clock, every day | 168 | 5.36 | 6 |
| Round the clock, weekdays only | 120 | 3.83 | 4 |
| Two shifts, every day | 112 | 3.57 | 4 |
| Extended day, weekdays only | 60 | 1.91 | 2 |
If your contract is more generous
25 days is the statutory floor in Austria, and most employers sit above it. Every extra week of leave is another week the post has to be covered by somebody else.
| Annual leave | Relief factor | People per post |
|---|---|---|
| 25 daysstatutory floor | 5.36 | 6 |
| 28 days | 5.43 | 6 |
| 30 days | 5.49 | 6 |
| 33 days | 5.57 | 6 |
The inputs, and what they do not say
How the leave figure is defined
Austrian law states leave in WERKTAGE, not working days. UrlG section 2(1): 30 Werktage per Arbeitsjahr, rising to 36 Werktage after 25 years of service with the same employer. Werktage are Monday to Saturday inclusive (a 6-day week), so 30 Werktage is 5 calendar weeks. Converted to a 5-day week that is 25 working days (30 / 6 x 5), which is exactly how the official government portals state it: "25 Arbeitstagen bei einer Fuenf-Tage-Woche (bzw. 30 Werktagen bei einer Sechs-Tage-Woche)". The figure of 25 EXCLUDES public holidays: Austria's 13 statutory public holidays are separate paid work-free days under the Arbeitsruhegesetz and are not deducted from the leave entitlement.
Why the contracted week is not the legal maximum
This page divides by a 38.5-hour week, the typical full-time contract in Austria, not by the 40-hour statutory figure. That larger number is a legal ceiling on how much someone may be asked to work, not a description of what a full-time employee is contracted for, and using it as capacity would understate the headcount a post needs.
What these figures cannot be used for
Not a ranking. The sickness figure here comes from a national statistical source, while other countries in this library use the OECD labour force survey. Those systems define absence differently, and self-reported survey figures undercount short spells that administrative records capture. Each number is the best available answer for planning inside its own country, and the gap between any two of them is partly a gap between statistical methods rather than between workforces.
A relief factor also says nothing about whether a roster is legal or humane. It sets how many people the post needs across a year; it does not check rest periods between shifts, consecutive nights, or weekend distribution. Those constraints decide whether the pattern you build on top of this headcount is one anybody can actually work.
Research notes on Austria
LEAVE, THE MAIN AUSTRIA ERROR: the statute says 30, and a planner who copies that number into a 5-day-week model overstates leave by 5 days. 30 is Werktage (Mon-Sat); the 5-day-week equivalent is 25. Both official portals publish the pair side by side, so the 25 is not my arithmetic, it is the government's own conversion. Watch for the reverse error too: 30 IS correct in working days, but only after 25 years of service (36 Werktage), which is a seniority tier and not the statutory minimum.
SICKNESS UNITS, SECOND BIGGEST RISK: the published national headline is 14.7 CALENDAR days per employee for 2025, because the social-insurance statistic counts calendar days and does not distinguish weekends or public holidays. Feeding 14.7 into a working-day model would overstate absence by about 40%. WIFO supplies the conversion in the report itself: "die Zahl der verlorenen Arbeits- bzw. Werktage etwa fuenf Siebtel der Gesamtsumme der verlorenen Kalendertage" (Biffl, 2002). 14.7 x 5/7 = 10.5 working days, which is what I returned. Independent cross-check: WIFO puts the same absence at 4.0% of annual working time, and 4.0% x 261 weekdays = 10.4, consistent with 10.5. If you ever want the raw headline instead, it is 14.7 calendar days, but do not mix it with the working-day leave figure.
COLLECTIVE HOURS, THE WEAKEST FIGURE HERE: 38.5 is Eurofound's estimate of the average collectively agreed normal weekly hours for Austria, and Eurofound's own note flags it as "an estimate based on the most important collective agreements. No official calculations are available" - Austria publishes no official aggregate. Two caveats. (1) Vintage: this is the 2022 value. Eurofound has a 2024 dataset but its site blocked every access route I tried (429 / Cloudflare and Vercel challenges), so I did not verify a 2024 number rather than guess one; Austrian collectively agreed time has been drifting down slightly, so 38.5 may be marginally high for 2025-26. (2) Dispersion: 38.5 is a national average over sectors that genuinely differ. Metal industry, retail, banking and IT sit at 38.5, but construction is around 39 and hospitality and much of the public sector remain at 40. For a single-sector calculator, the sector's own KV beats this average.
DO NOT USE 41.6: Statistik Austria's Mikrozensus reports full-time "Normalarbeitszeit" of 41.6 hours for 2024. That is usual hours ACTUALLY worked including regular overtime, not the contracted week, and it is the wrong input for a contracted-hours field. I checked it and deliberately excluded it.
STATUTORY 40 IS THE NORMAL WEEK, NOT THE CEILING: AZG section 3(1) caps normal working time at 8 hours a day and 40 a week. Since the 2018 reform the absolute maximum is 12 hours a day and 60 a week in exceptional cases, and collective agreements can average the normal week over a reference period rather than applying it uniformly. Use 40 for planning; 60 is an outer legal limit, not a schedulable target.
SCOPE EXCLUSIONS: construction workers fall under a separate leave regime (BUAG) with partly different rules. The sickness statistic covers roughly 94% of dependent employees and excludes marginally employed (geringfuegig) staff and some tenured public servants, so it is a private-sector-weighted number.
PUBLIC HOLIDAYS FOR THE MODEL: 13 statutory holidays, of which the weekday-falling count varies by year. Add them separately; they are already excluded from the 25.
Sources
Every figure above except the training allowance was checked against one of these.
statutoryWeeklyHours = 40 (AZG s3(1): daily normal working time max 8 hours, weekly normal working time max 40 hours)
Rechtsinformationssystem des Bundes (RIS), Austrian Federal Chancellery - Arbeitszeitgesetz s32026
statutoryWeeklyHours = 40, corroboration plus explicit statement that numerous collective agreements provide shorter weekly working time
collectiveWeeklyHours = 38.5 (Figure 2, average collectively agreed normal weekly working hours, Austria; EU27 average 38.1). Eurofound notes the Austrian value is an estimate based on the most important collective agreements as no official calculation exists.
Eurofound (EU agency), Working time in 2021-2022, Publications Office of the European Union2022
statutoryAnnualLeaveDays: UrlG s2(1) primary text - 30 Werktage, rising to 36 Werktage after completing 25 years of service
Rechtsinformationssystem des Bundes (RIS), Austrian Federal Chancellery - Urlaubsgesetz s22026
statutoryAnnualLeaveDays = 25 working days - official conversion: '25 Arbeitstagen bei einer Fuenf-Tage-Woche (bzw. 30 Werktagen bei einer Sechs-Tage-Woche)', rising to 30 Arbeitstage / 36 Werktage after 25 years
oesterreich.gv.at, official portal of the Republic of Austria - Urlaubsanspruch2026
statutoryAnnualLeaveDays = 25 working days - 'fuenf Wochen (30 Werktage bei einer 6-Tage-Arbeitswoche bzw. 25 Arbeitstage bei einer 5-Tage-Arbeitswoche)'
Werktage defined as the 6 weekdays Monday to Saturday inclusive, confirming the 30 Werktage to 25 Arbeitstage conversion basis
Wirtschaftskammer Oesterreich (WKO), statutory Austrian Economic Chamber - Urlaubsanspruch2026
sicknessDaysPerYear source figure: 14.7 CALENDAR days average sickness absence per employee in 2025 (4.0% of annual working time; 69.1% of employees affected). Report also states the official conversion: lost working days are about five-sevenths of lost calendar days. 14.7 x 5/7 = 10.5 working days.
13 statutory public holidays under the Arbeitsruhegesetz, separate from annual leave entitlement
Arbeitsinspektion (Austrian Labour Inspectorate), Federal Ministry of Labour - Feiertagsruhe2026
Common questions
- How many people does one 24/7 position need in Austria?
- 6 people. One position staffed every hour of the year is 8,766 hours, and one full-time employee in Austria is actually available for about 1,636 of them once 48.5 days of holidays, leave, sickness and training come out. That is a relief factor of 5.36, which rounds up to 6 whole people.
- What is a relief factor?
- The number of employees needed to keep one position filled continuously, once the days nobody works are taken out. It is coverage hours divided by the hours one employee is genuinely available. In Austria that is 8,766 divided by 1,636, or 5.36. A factor below the headcount you actually employ means the post runs on overtime.
- Why is a flat 25 percent absence buffer not enough for Austria?
- Because it overshoots here. A raw hours calculation gives 4.36 employees, and adding a flat quarter takes that to 5.45, against a derived answer of 5.36. That is 1.8 percent too high, because the rule of thumb assumes more leave and sickness than Austria actually loses.
- Does the statutory leave minimum reflect what employers actually give in Austria?
- It is a floor, not a norm. This page computes on the statutory minimum of 25 working days because that is the figure the law fixes and a source can be attached to. Most employers sit above it, and the sensitivity table on this page shows what the relief factor becomes at more generous entitlements, so a planner can find their own contract rather than taking the floor as the answer.
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