Municipality (Austria)

In the Republic of Austria, the municipality (German: Gemeinde, sometimes also Ortsgemeinde) is the administrative division encompassing a single village, town, or city.

Austria is currently (January 1, 2020) partitioned into 2,095 municipalities, ranging in population from about fifty (the village of Gramais in Tyrol) to almost two million (the city of Vienna).

The existence of municipalities and their role as carriers of the right to self-administration are guaranteed by the Austrian constitution (B-VG Art.

The distinction, while important in medieval and early modern times, is purely symbolic today.

A similar distinction, meaningful in the past but symbolic today, is that of market town (Marktgemeinde).

A statutory city (Stadt mit eigenem Statut or Statutarstadt) is vested, in addition to its purview as a municipality, with the duties of a district administrative authority.

The status does not come with any additional political autonomy: district administrative authorities are essentially just service centers that citizens use to interact with the national government, for example to apply for driver licenses or passports.

The national government generally uses the provinces to run these points of contact on its behalf; in the case of statutory cities, the municipality gets to step up.

(B-VG 117 (1)) Informally, municipalities that are neither cities nor market towns are sometimes called Landgemeinden, lit.

The cities of Vienna, Graz, and Klagenfurt are divided into municipal districts (Stadtbezirke, colloquially just Bezirke).

For the other eight states, the numbers are as follows (Statistik Austria 2018): With respect to population, there is wide variation within each class of municipalities: With respect to area, the smallest municipality is Rattenberg at 0.11 square kilometres (0.042 sq mi); the largest is Sölden in the thinly populated mountain territory of Tyrol at 466.78 square kilometres (180.22 sq mi).