Editorial standards
Last updated: 4 November 2026
This page explains how Health Insurance Austria, an English-language information site about health insurance for an Austrian residence permit, researches, checks, dates and corrects its guides. Every rule, fee and price on the site comes from an official source or from the provider’s own policy terms and published tariff pages. Each is recorded with a verbatim quote and a check date and goes through our review rounds, and before publication automatic scripts also check wording, links and euro amounts. Who we are is on our about us page; who writes the guides is on our author page.
Which sources do we use?
Health Insurance Austria takes legal rules, fees and income thresholds only from official sources:
- Austrian law, for example the Settlement and Residence Act (NAG) and the General Social Insurance Act (ASVG), comes from the federal legal information system RIS (ris.bka.gv.at).
- Official portals and authorities are Austrian government sites under *.gv.at, including the Interior Ministry (BMI), oesterreich.gv.at, migration.gv.at, the Foreign Ministry (bmeia.gv.at) and the City of Vienna (MA 35); for EU or UK rules, we use the EU’s own sites (europa.eu) and GOV.UK.
- The health insurance and study bodies are the Austrian Health Insurance Fund (ÖGK, oegk.at) and the OeAD, Austria’s agency for education and internationalisation (oead.at).
- Insurance facts come only from the providers’ own documents. For Care Austria, these are the policy terms and consumer information of HanseMerkur Versicherungsgruppe (Advigon Versicherung AG) and the published tariff pages of Care Concept AG, with the document name and edition; on our comparison pages, they are each other provider’s own published pages and terms. Where the binding terms and marketing text disagree, we follow the binding terms and say so.
- We do not guess. If we cannot find a rule in an official source, the page says so and tells you whom to ask.
Links from our guides to other websites go only to a fixed list of official and public sources (Austrian and EU authorities, social insurance bodies, Statistik Austria and similar public bodies), the Creative Commons licence text, the insurance intermediary register and Care Concept AG’s own pages. An automatic check runs before every publication of the site and blocks any other external link.
How is each fact recorded?
Each guide is backed by a facts file, and closely related pages can share one. In it, every number and rule is recorded with its value, the verbatim wording of the official source (with an English translation where the source is German), the source address, the date we read it and our confidence. The review rounds check every fact on the page against this file. A fact without such a row is either verified and added to the file, or softened or removed from the page. Prices of Care Austria are stored once, in a central price registry, and the page texts take them from there. The automatic build checks described below check every euro amount that is not marked as an official or calculated figure against that registry.
How do you know a page is current?
Every guide shows the date it was last updated, and facts that change over time, such as fees, income thresholds and premiums, carry the year or an “As of” date. The site-wide facts check date is currently 30 October 2026. We re-check fees, income thresholds and premiums every quarter and whenever a law or tariff changes, and update the page date when we do.
Which checks run before a page goes live?
- In the automatic build checks, every internal link must lead to a built page, every euro amount must match the price registry or be marked as an official fee or a calculated amount, each page has exactly one main heading and a self-referencing canonical address, and external links must go to the official-source list.
- The claim checker is a script that scans every page for wording we do not allow, for example “officially approved”, “guaranteed acceptance” or a generalisation without a source.
- Each guide is read in fresh review rounds against its facts file and the official sources. Rounds are repeated until two rounds in a row find no error a reader could act on, up to a cap of five rounds. Anything still open is logged for the owner.
- Guides also get review rounds by a separate AI model, which checks the legal and factual precision of each claim. Its findings are verified on the official source before we change the page.
What do we not do?
- We do not give personal insurance, legal or immigration advice, and we do not recommend a plan for your situation.
- We publish no star ratings, scores, testimonials or invented customer stories.
- We do not claim that a policy is accepted by an authority unless the authority’s own wording says so, and only the authority decides an application.
- We are not a government office and not an insurer, broker or adviser.
How are we paid?
Health Insurance Austria earns money from referral links to Care Austria: if a contract is concluded through one of them, we receive a commission from the insurer, paid through Care Concept AG, at no extra cost to you. Payment never changes the facts we publish, and comparisons put published facts side by side without picking a winner. Details: how we are paid (affiliate disclosure).
Can you reuse our data?
Our open data files (CSV files on health insurance costs, visa fees and the cost of living) are published under the Creative Commons licence CC BY 4.0, with the sources named on the page that offers each file. The rights to the page texts themselves are described in our imprint.
How do we handle corrections?
If you find an error, tell us through our contact page: name the page, the statement and, if you can, the official source. We check it against the source, correct confirmed errors and update the page date. Messages are handled as described in our privacy notice.