About

I'm Rob R. I'm American, my wife is Russian, and we've lived in Vienna since 2021. In that time I've been through most of Austria's residency process myself, and this site is where I've collected what I learned doing it.

How I got here

We arrived in late 2021. Initially, I lived here without a residence permit at all, on a long-stay visa plus the visa-free time a US passport allows, while my wife studied on a student permit. After we married in the US, I switched to a family residence permit tied to hers. That meant the usual rounds at MA35, Vienna's immigration office: the first applications at the Dresdner Straße location, then renewals at Zelinkagasse, each one a booked appointment and a backpack full of documents.

Most of it went smoothly, in large part because I stopped trying to cut corners early on and did everything strictly by the book. Some of it did not. There was the year a renewal ran late and we needed an emergency entry sticker to travel, which a border post then refused to honor on our way out, costing us our return flights. Still, I've been fortunate in that nothing much worse than that has happened.

Why I built this

When I started, nothing like this existed. The official pages are accurate enough, but they're fragmented across several offices and written by the institution rather than by anyone who has actually sat in the waiting room. A lot of them are only half-translated. I kept notes for myself as I went, partly just to stay sane, and over time those notes turned into something worth publishing.

So the articles here are the thing I wish I'd had: how the system actually works and what it's like to go through it, including the parts that trip people up, written by someone who did it rather than someone summarizing a government page they've never used.

What this site is

Everything here is my own experience and the public-record research I gathered around it. I check the procedural facts against the actual Austrian law rather than the simplified English summaries, which are often months out of date, and where an official German source and a convenient English page disagree, I go with the German one and say so.

None of it is legal advice. I'm not a lawyer, and your case is your own. If your situation is straightforward, most of what you need is probably here. If it's complex, nonstandard, or going wrong, talk to a licensed immigration lawyer, and I'll tell you so rather than pretend otherwise.

Who this is for

I'm American, the examples here lean American, and the pricing is in dollars, because that's the path I know firsthand. But the process is more or less the same for any non-EU national facing the Austrian system. If that's you, you're in the right place too.

If you're just getting your bearings, the overview of how Austrian residence works is the place to start. From there, follow whatever's relevant to you.