Austrian employees will soon be asked to give up a capital guarantee on their retirement savings, yet almost none of the country’s life insurers can show them what that trade-off could cost.

That is the central warning of a new report from Kidbrooke, which assesses how ready Austria’s life insurance market is for the country’s 2027 pension reform.

The reform, according to the Kidbrooke report, marks a significant shift in responsibility. From 2027, workers can move the severance capital they have accumulated since 2003 into a fund-based retirement product with no capital guarantee. These savings may grow faster, but they can also fall in value, and once a product is chosen the money remains locked in until retirement. For the first time, one of the routes opened by the reform leads into a life-insurance policy chosen by the employee herself. Kidbrooke’s report points out that this places the decision to abandon a guarantee with the individual rather than the employer, which makes what an insurer can actually show a customer critically important.

To examine this, Kidbrooke designed what its report calls a “couch test”. The scenario imagines a 34-year-old in Vienna, late at night, who has read that the state pension will replace less of her salary than it did for her father’s generation. She picks up her phone, opens an insurer’s website and asks two simple questions: how much might she end up with, and could it go down?

Kidbrooke put that question to eleven Austrian life insurers in July 2026, including the three largest by premium share and together representing an estimated 70% of the Austrian life market.

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