AGES, Austria's national health and food safety agency, confirms that Austria was declared free of terrestrial (classical) rabies in 2008, with the last confirmed wild case traced to foxes that had migrated across the border from Slovenia into Carinthia in 2002, and dog-to-dog rabies transmission in the country having ended around 1950. Two fox cases found in 2004 and 2006 both turned out to involve the oral vaccine virus used in wildlife vaccination campaigns rather than wild rabies itself.

That doesn't mean rabies is entirely absent from Austria's picture. AGES also confirmed the country's first-ever documented case of bat rabies (a different, unrelated infection) in September 2023, in a serotine bat that had died at a rescue station — out of more than 1,800 bats tested between 2006 and 2023, this was the only positive result, and AGES describes transmission from bats to other animals or humans as extremely rare, with none ever recorded in Austria. Separately, both Hungary and Slovakia recorded terrestrial rabies cases near the Ukrainian border in 2024, almost certainly introduced by animals crossing from Ukraine.

This context explains why the EU's rabies vaccination and 21-day waiting-period requirement, covered in the Documents section, still applies to every pet entering officially rabies-free Austria: it's a regional safeguard against reintroduction from elsewhere in Europe, not a sign that rabies is a live local threat. AGES itself frames regular dog vaccination as something that helps prevent human infection broadly, which is a reasonable way to think about why the rule exists even in a country this clean on the disease.