You unlucky Austria

As of November 1, 2025, the first part of the very quickly passed new Weapons Act in Austria will come into effect. The rest is expected to follow between April and September 2026. On November 1, two reforms will take effect: first, there will now be better data exchange between the military commission and the weapons authority when applying for a firearms ownership card (WBK).

The second change also affects existing WBK holders, as § 41 f (waiting period) will come into force:
Legal text:

Waiting period
§ 41f. (1) In the case of the first acquisition of a firearm, it may only be transferred to the purchaser after a period of four weeks has elapsed…. 
(2) An acquisition is considered the first acquisition… if there is currently no firearm of this category registered in the Central Information Collection (ZWR) for the purchaser.
(3) During the waiting period, the firearm must be stored with a dealer… An appropriate fee is due to the dealer for this.

This means in plain language, if you already own a weapon in a category (A, B, or C), you can purchase additional weapons of the same category without a waiting period.
Otherwise, you must wait 4 weeks and during this period, store the sold weapon with a dealer. As a small example: if you have had a WBK for years and have also owned a pistol and a semi-automatic (both category B) for years, you will need to wait a 4-week waiting period when purchasing a bolt action rifle (category C).

The rest of the shooting festival

The rest of the new Weapons Act will not come into effect until the 2nd/3rd quarter of 2026, as the implementing regulations still need to be written to clarify how the individual paragraphs must be applied by the authorities. A lot is coming for gun owners, both old and new. In a very good video from our friends at AUSTRIA ARMS, they discuss all the (in)consistencies of the new law and the contradictions contained within.

As a small but very important point of the new law, we want to address the new definition of "essential firearm components." Essential firearm components, such as barrels, receivers, and bolts, count as weapons and must be registered to the authority. Now, pistol grips have been included in this definition, but unfortunately only very vaguely under the term "grip components." The authority could of course interpret this to mean that all types of grip components are essential firearm parts, such as a stock, a foregrip, or even an AR-15 stock. So, all these parts, of which one usually has several lying around, would have to be reported to the authority, since they are now considered weapons. This whole process is intended to run similarly to normal 30-round magazines in the case of old stock.

What exactly will happen will only be known next year when the implementing regulation is released. We will keep you updated.