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SummaryAustria has two medicine price references, and they answer different questions. One is free, machine readable and does not contain the manufacturer price. The other contains it and is available only under a licence, in a special product variant that a buyer has to name explicitly when ordering. Getting Austria wrong is rarely a matter of arithmetic. It is a matter of ordering the wrong product.
The reimbursement code, the Erstattungskodex, is the list of medicines reimbursable by the social insurance system. It is free, published monthly and genuinely machine readable, with the national pharmaceutical number, the authorisation number, the quantity and the unit type as separate fields.
The product directory of the pharmacists' publishing house, the Warenverzeichnis, is the commercial reference. It carries the ex-factory price and the depot delivery price, with the national pharmaceutical number as the key and a structured pack size. It is licence bound.
| Property | Reimbursement code | Product directory |
|---|---|---|
| Price level | Sickness fund selling price | Ex-factory and depot delivery price |
| Access | Free, monthly, machine readable | Licence |
| Fields | National number, authorisation number, quantity, unit type | Price, pack, national number |
| Manufacturer price | Not included | Included, in one specific variant |
| Usage rights | Restricted to a defined circle of users | Contractual, redistribution restricted by default |
The manufacturer selling price sits exclusively in a special variant of the licensed product, designated 16H. A buyer who orders the standard variant does not receive it.
That is the single most expensive ordering error in this source, and it is entirely avoidable: it is a line item on a purchase order, not a negotiation. Anyone specifying an Austrian data purchase should name the variant explicitly and confirm in writing that the manufacturer selling price is included in what will be delivered.
The standard terms prohibit passing the data on. They also state expressly that separately agreed licence terms take precedence.
That wording changes the nature of the conversation. You are not asking for an exception to the rules, you are using a route the rules themselves provide for. For a data platform that intends to deliver Austrian prices to its own customers, this is the difference between a negotiation that starts from a refusal and one that starts from a defined mechanism.
What is genuinely open is whether a data module for system houses exists at all. Only a login based research front end is documented, with no raw data route and no interface. That is the first question for the sales contact, and it should be asked before price.
The publishing house is owned in equal halves by the pharmacists' professional association and the association of employed pharmacists. It is not owned by the chamber, a point where several secondary descriptions are wrong.
More relevant commercially: the same publisher also operates its own pharmacy software. A data customer is therefore potentially buying a critical input from a competitor in an adjacent market. That does not make the deal impossible, but it belongs in the risk assessment and it shapes which contractual protections are worth asking for.
The reimbursement code looks like an answer and is not, for two independent reasons.
It carries no manufacturer price. It publishes the sickness fund selling price, which sits at the other end of the chain.
The circle of authorised users is defined conclusively, and a commercial data platform is not part of it. Technical availability and permission are different things, and here they point in opposite directions.
The pattern is familiar from Germany: the identity layer is free, the price column costs money. Austria states it more plainly than most, because the free file is genuinely good at everything except the price.
Austria publishes or licenses four distinct levels, and a comparison that names only one of them is incomplete.
The distance between the first and the last of those is the whole Austrian distribution and reimbursement system. Comparing an Austrian sickness fund price against a German or Belgian manufacturer price measures that distance, not a difference in what medicines cost.
Even without the price, the reimbursement code earns its place in a pipeline. It gives you the national pharmaceutical number, the authorisation number, the quantity and the unit type as separate fields, monthly. That is a complete identification layer for the reimbursed segment, and it is exactly the layer that is expensive to build from scratch.
The practical design that follows: build Austrian identification on the free file, and attach the licensed price layer to it later. That way the licence covers only the price column, which keeps the negotiation small and the dependency narrow.
The manufacturer selling price in Austria is a value reported by industry, obtainable only through a private law route. There is no public register of it and no statutory publication obligation that produces one.
That has a consequence for how the figure should be described in any dataset. It is not an authority price, it is a notified commercial price collected by a private publisher, and the distinction matters to a reader who is deciding how much weight to give it in a cross-country comparison.
One Austrian source is open, useful and often overlooked: the supply restriction and shortage register of the national authority. We retrieved it on 5 September 2026 at HTTP 200 and 1,098,954 bytes.
For anyone working on availability rather than price, that file answers the operative question directly, and it does so without any licence. Austria is therefore a country where the shortage layer and the price layer have completely different access conditions, and a project that needs only the first one needs no contract at all.
For a DACH product, Austria is the second market and behaves very differently from the first. The German and Austrian identity layers are both free, but Austria adds a structured pack size and a clean national number in its free file, which makes the identification work lighter.
The price layer is where they converge: in both countries the manufacturer level is commercial, held by a private publisher, and delivered under terms that restrict redistribution unless a separate agreement says otherwise. A DACH price product therefore has two licence conversations, not one, and they should be started in parallel because the lead times are long.
Does a raw data module exist? If the answer is no and only the research front end is offered, the country cannot be automated at any price, and that changes the plan rather than the budget.
Is the manufacturer selling price in scope? Confirmed in writing, naming the variant, before signature.
What exactly may be passed on? Redistribution after your own processing, to named end customers, with or without prior approval per customer. The answer decides how your own delivery process has to be built.
Austria is a licensing exercise with one decisive detail. The free reimbursement code is well structured and carries the wrong price level. The manufacturer price exists in a specific licensed variant that has to be named on the order, and redistribution is a path the terms themselves describe rather than an exception to be argued for. Get the variant right and the rest is a normal commercial conversation, with one owner related risk worth naming out loud.
Related reading: European Drug Pricing Database: how cross-border prices work and Pharma pricing Germany: how the system works, plus ex-factory price.
pharmazie.com is the consolidated pharmaceutical data platform by DACON Datenbank Consulting GmbH that bundles 25+ specialist databases into a single search, exclusively for healthcare professionals. Price coverage focuses on the DACH region and a number of further EU countries, with more countries following in the coming months.
