Your package has reached Austria and is going through customs processing — a normal stop, not a red flag. During this phase the Post or courier files the import declaration, customs may check the declared value or contents, and any VAT or duty gets calculated. Most packages pass through in a few days without you lifting a finger. Sometimes the Post needs something from you — an invoice, a payment — and will reach out by letter, email or a note in the tracking. Respond quickly: delays on your side can trigger storage fees. Keep your Parcel Monitor timeline open and you'll see the moment the status flips to the domestic delivery network. If nothing moves for well over a week, check post.at with your tracking number for an action waiting on you.

Your package lands somewhere convenient rather than boomeranging back — usually the nearest post office branch or a Post partner shop, sometimes an Abholstation (self-service pickup machine) if there's one nearby. You'll get a yellow card in your letterbox or a digital message with the pickup location and the date it's ready. Bring photo ID and the card or the code. DPD, GLS and Hermes work similarly through their own Paketshops. The one deadline that matters: pickup locations hold packages for a limited time before returning them to the sender, so treat the notice like a parking ticket — deal with it this week, not "sometime".

Yes — Austria makes this reasonably painless. The standard route is a Vollmacht: a written authorisation signed by you, which your helper presents together with their own photo ID. For one-off pickups, the pickup card plus a signed authorisation on it (or accompanying it) is usually enough; people from the same household often only need the card and their ID matching the address. If you travel a lot, the Post also offers standing authorisations so a partner or flatmate can always collect for you. Rules can differ slightly by branch, so when a pickup really matters, a quick call to the branch listed on your card saves a wasted trip. Either way, send the tracking number along — it's the first thing the counter asks for.

All the ones dropping cards in Austrian letterboxes. Österreichische Post carries the bulk of the country's packages, and we follow it scan by scan — alongside DPD Austria, GLS, DHL, Hermes and UPS, plus FedEx and TNT for express. Your Zalando order, your Amazon.de package crossing from Germany and your AliExpress find from China all land in one timeline here. In total we track more than 1,000 carriers worldwide, so the carrier lottery — where the shop picks the courier and you find out later — stops mattering. Paste in whatever number you got; we'll work out who's carrying it and keep following even if it changes carriers at the border.

IOSS moves the tax moment from your doorstep to the checkout — and that changes everything about how fast your package clears. When a non-EU shop is IOSS-registered, the 20% Austrian VAT is collected as you pay, and the package travels with an IOSS number that tells customs "tax already handled". Result: no clearance pause, no Post handling fee, no payment request before delivery. Without IOSS, the same package stops at customs, waits for VAT to be assessed, and picks up the Post's import fee on the way. Two identical €30 orders can arrive a week apart for exactly this reason. You can spot IOSS at checkout: if VAT appears as a line item when you pay, you're on the fast lane. Big platforms like Amazon, AliExpress and Temu use it as standard.

Since there's no minimum threshold anymore, every purchase from outside the EU owes Austrian VAT — 20% for most goods — from the very first cent. That's the Einfuhrumsatzsteuer on your invoice. And since 1 July 2026 there's a second line: the EU scrapped the old €150 duty-free allowance and replaced it with a flat €3 duty per item for low-value e-commerce packages. Whether you pay all this at checkout or at the door depends on the shop. Stores using IOSS collect the VAT when you pay, and your package clears without extra charges. Shops that don't leave the tax to be collected on arrival — with a handling fee from Österreichische Post stacked on top. The takeaway: a checkout that shows VAT is usually the cheaper, faster route.

That line is Österreichische Post charging for the work of walking your package through customs — presenting it, filing the declaration, fronting the taxes. The Post currently lists it as an import tariff, staggered by value: €7.20 for packages up to €150, €14.40 between €150 and €1,000, and €43.20 above that. If the Post has to contact you to sort out missing information, a processing and storage fee of €34.56 can apply on top — the expensive scenario worth avoiding by responding quickly. The good news: if the shop collects VAT at checkout through IOSS, there's usually nothing to clear and no fee at all. So the same €40 order can arrive free of charges or with €7.20 added, purely depending on where you bought it.

Usually yes, once the package is in the carrier's network. Österreichische Post lets you steer deliveries through its website or app — redirect to a branch, an Abholstation or a drop-off spot, or shift the delivery day — using the tracking number, with more options if you have a Post account. DPD Austria offers similar moves through its live tracking: change the day, divert to a Pickup parcelshop, or grant a drop-off permission. The realistic caveat: options depend on what the sender allows and where the package currently is; international packages usually become steerable only after clearing customs. Check your Parcel Monitor timeline first — once you see the first domestic scan in Austria, that's your window to open the carrier's page and pick your preference.

Ankunft im Zielland — arrived in the destination country — sounds like the finish line, but it's actually the start of the quietest stretch of the trip. After that scan, your package queues for customs processing and then waits to be injected into the domestic Post network, and neither step reliably produces public tracking events. Days of silence here are completely routine, particularly for packages from Asia and around peak shopping season. Nothing is lost; the timeline is just between narrators. The next scan usually comes from Österreichische Post once your package is in the delivery stream. We keep polling for you, so you don't need to refresh anything. If the silence goes well past two weeks, ask the seller to open an enquiry with the carrier — that request has to come from their side.

Act fast and you can usually rescue the situation — or at least your money. First, check your timeline for the reason: a missed pickup deadline at the branch, a customs payment that never happened, an address problem, or a refused delivery. That reason decides your next move. Message the seller immediately — while the package is still travelling back, they can often confirm a reshipment or refund the moment it arrives; the same tracking number keeps working here, so you can literally watch the return leg. If unpaid VAT was the cause, fix the root before round two: use a shop that collects tax at checkout, or respond to the Post's payment request the day it arrives. Returns to non-EU senders can take weeks, so patience on the refund is normal — but the seller conversation shouldn't wait.

You may also want to explore tracking for these other destinations:

• Check on your France delivery

• Your Germany orders, all in one place

• Waiting on something from Netherlands?

• Keep an eye on Belgium deliveries

• Tracking made easy for Switzerland

• See deliveries to and from Italy

These carrier pages are worth a look too:

• Waiting on DHL Express? Track it here

• Track your DPD parcels

• Following a TNT delivery?

• UPS tracking, step by step

• See where your FedEx package is

• Got a Asendia Germany number? Start here