The Austrian National Bank published Austria’s results from the euro area Bank Lending Survey for the fourth quarter of 2025, showing that corporate loan demand increased in the third and fourth quarters of 2025 for the first time since the third quarter of 2022, while households’ demand for housing loans has been rising since the first half of 2024. Banks participating in the survey expect demand to strengthen further in the first quarter of 2026. The improvement in corporate credit demand was linked to lower interest rates, higher financing needs for inventories and working capital, and early signs of a turnaround in investment activity, while demand from energy-intensive industrial firms and from the automotive sector including suppliers continued to decline in the second half of 2025. On the supply side, banks continued to cite a strained risk environment and have tightened corporate lending policies since early 2022, with tighter standards particularly affecting real estate companies, especially commercial property firms. In housing finance, demand increases were attributed mainly to lower rates following European Central Bank policy rate cuts from 4% to 2% between June 2024 and June 2025, and the survey results were consistent with higher new mortgage origination, with the OeNB reporting average new housing loans of EUR 1.4 billion per month from January to November 2025, nearly 50% above the 2024 annual average. The OeNB noted that its monetary statistics in the coming months will show the extent to which higher corporate loan demand translates into increased new lending, and the survey itself was conducted from mid-December 2025 to mid-January 2026.

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