Cold Calling in Austria & Switzerland: 2026 Legal Landscape Compared to Germany

Three countries, three legal systems

Anyone running “DACH outbound” as a single campaign is making an expensive mistake: Germany, Austria, and Switzerland regulate cold calling in fundamentally different ways. What is allowed in Zurich can cost up to €58,000 in fines in Vienna. This article compares the 2026 legal landscape across the three core channels — phone, email, LinkedIn — and shows how to segment campaigns accordingly in practice.

Note: This article is editorial guidance, not legal advice. For binding statements about your specific setup, consult a lawyer in the respective country.

The 3-country comparison at a glance

Aspect	Germany	Austria	Switzerland
Phone B2B	Allowed with presumed consent (Section 7(2) No. 1 UWG)	Prohibited without consent (Section 174 TKG 2021)	Allowed, except for asterisk entries (Art. 3 lit. u UWG)
Email B2B	Impermissible without explicit prior consent (Section 7(2) No. 2 UWG), existing-customer exception under Section 7(3)	Consent required (Section 174 TKG 2021)	Allowed with correct sender identification + opt-out (Art. 3 lit. o UWG)
LinkedIn Outreach	No channel-specific UWG rule; GDPR + platform ToS	No channel-specific TKG rule; DSG/GDPR + platform ToS	No channel-specific rule; revDSG + platform ToS
Data protection law	GDPR	GDPR + DSG	revDSG (since 09/2023), GDPR when there’s an EU nexus
Enforcement	Cease-and-desist by competitors/competition watchdog	Fernmeldebüro (administrative fine), RTR complaints office	Civil action, criminal complaint; SECO for unfair practices
Typical sanction	Cease-and-desist costs €300-500 for a single email (more with a high amount in dispute), contractual penalties	Fines up to €58,000 per violation	Fines up to CHF 20,000

The short version: Germany is the middle ground for phone calls, Austria is the strictest country, Switzerland the most liberal. For email, both Germany and Austria are restrictive, while Switzerland allows B2B promotional emails under certain conditions.

Germany as the reference point

We’ve covered the German legal situation in detail in the Cold Calling Legal Guide and in the article Is B2B Cold Calling Allowed?. For the comparison, the essentials suffice:

• Phone B2B: permitted with presumed consent — the offer must fit the recipient’s line of business, and the factual connection should be documented.
• Email B2B: Section 7(2) No. 2 UWG requires explicit prior consent even in B2B; in practice, teams work with risk management rather than legal certainty.
• Enforcement: primarily civil, via cease-and-desist letters — no authority with fining powers for the UWG violation itself.

Austria: the strictest rules in the DACH region

Phone: effectively prohibited

Section 174 TKG 2021 prohibits calls for promotional purposes without the subscriber’s prior consent — with no distinction between B2B and B2C. The German bridge of presumed consent does not exist. A cold call to a Vienna-based company is therefore, as a rule, an administrative offense, even if the offer fits the line of business perfectly.

Exceptions are narrow:

• Existing business relationship: existing customers may be contacted about similar products.
• Explicit opt-in: for example, a number left at a trade fair with consent to be contacted.

Email: consent requirement

Electronic mail for promotional purposes also falls under Section 174 TKG 2021 and, as a rule, requires prior consent. An existing-customer exception analogous to the German rule exists (own contact data from a sale, similar products, opt-out notice). For classic cold emails to new contacts, the rule is: not legally secure — details on the channel-specific email situation in the DACH region are in the article B2B Email Compliance DACH.

Enforcement: one authority, real fines

The decisive difference from Germany: in Austria, it’s not the competitor who enforces, but the state. The Fernmeldebüro is responsible; complaints about unsolicited calls and messages go through the reporting channels at the RTR. Fines can reach up to €58,000 per violation. That fundamentally changes the risk profile — you can negotiate a cease-and-desist letter, but not an administrative penalty proceeding.

Practical consequence for AT

For the Austrian market, first contact shifts to channels without a TKG hurdle: LinkedIn outreach, trade fairs and events, inbound via content and ads. Email only with a very narrow factual connection and a deliberate risk assessment — or after an initial touchpoint that generates an opt-in.

Switzerland: liberal, but with clear rules

Phone: the asterisk registry decides

Art. 3 lit. u UWG declares promotional calls unfair if the person called has set the asterisk (*) entry in the phone directory or is not listed at all. In reverse: company numbers without an asterisk may be called cold — a liberal position by DACH standards.

The workflow before every call:

1. Look up the number on local.ch or search.ch
2. Asterisk present or no entry → do not call
3. No asterisk → call permitted

Practical detail: main numbers of larger companies are often marked, while direct extensions of individual contacts often aren’t. A “no” during the call also applies immediately and permanently (Art. 45c FMG).

Email: allowed with three obligations

Art. 3 lit. o UWG only allows bulk email advertising with consent — but a lived B2B practice exists: individually addressed, factually relevant business inquiries to company addresses are treated considerably more tolerantly than in Germany. Anyone emailing into CH must in every case: use correct sender identification, offer a simple and free way to decline (opt-out), and avoid deceiving the recipient about the commercial nature of the message.

revDSG since 2023: closer to the GDPR, but more B2B-friendly

The revised Data Protection Act (revDSG, in force since September 1, 2023) brings information duties, a register of processing activities, and duties to report data breaches. For B2B prospecting, it remains more pragmatic than the GDPR: processing business contact data doesn’t require general consent, as long as transparency and proportionality are maintained. Caution for EU senders: anyone processing Swiss contacts from Germany or Austria remains subject to the GDPR in parallel — the requirements from the GDPR Cold Email Guide then apply additionally.

What this means in practice for DACH-wide campaigns

1. Country segmentation in the sequencer is mandatory

A DACH list belongs in three segments — split by company headquarters (area code, commercial register, domain extension), not by language:

Segment	Phone	Email	LinkedIn
DE	Yes, with documented factual connection	Only with deliberate risk management, narrow lists	Yes, primary channel
AT	No (except existing customers/opt-in)	Very conservative or after opt-in	Yes, primary channel
CH	Yes, after asterisk check	Yes, with opt-out and correct sender	Yes

2. Channel choice per country instead of a one-size-fits-all sequence

Running the same sequence for all three countries means having to orient toward the strictest country (AT) — and forfeiting potential in DE and CH. Better: three sequence variants with identical messaging but a country-specific channel mix. In Switzerland, the call can sit early in the sequence; in Germany, as a qualified follow-up after an engagement signal; in Austria, not at all.

3. Suppression logic per country

Suppression lists need country context: the Swiss asterisk check before every call, the Austrian “no phone” rule as a hard system boundary, German opt-outs across channels. This belongs in the infrastructure (sequencer rules, CRM fields, validation steps), not in a training PDF. How to build an email sequence in a legally clean way is shown in the article on B2B Cold Calling by Email.

4. Documentation scales with it

Three legal systems mean three documentation requirements: factual connection per call (DE), opt-in evidence (AT), directory checks (CH), plus GDPR/revDSG legal bases. Anyone who logs this automatically per campaign can defend it in a dispute — anyone who maintains it manually will have lost track within three months.

Conclusion

Austria is the strictest DACH country for cold calling (Section 174 TKG 2021: consent required even in B2B, fines up to €58,000), Switzerland is the most liberal (calls allowed after an asterisk check, B2B email with opt-out is feasible), and Germany sits in between (phone with presumed consent, email restrictive). A DACH campaign that ignores this risks administrative fines in Vienna and forfeits legal reach in Zurich. The solution isn’t to abandon outbound, but to segment by country with channel-specific rules — anchored technically in the system.

DACH outbound with built-in country logic

CegTec builds GDPR-compliant outbound systems that map country segmentation, suppression lists, and channel-specific rules directly into the infrastructure — DE, AT, and CH each with the right channel mix instead of a one-size-fits-all sequence. If you want to work the DACH market systematically and in a legally clean way: Start your free trial · 4 weeks free, no credit card. Prefer to see it running first? Book a demo.