In the Republic of Austria, the municipality (German: Gemeinde, sometimes also Ortsgemeinde) is the administrative division encompassing a single village, town, or city. The municipality has corporate status and local self-government on the basis of parliamentary-style representative democracy: a municipal council (Gemeinderat) elected through a form of party-list system enacts municipal laws, a municipal executive board (Gemeindevorstand) and a mayor (Bürgermeister, fem. Bürgermeisterin) appointed by the council are in charge of municipal administration. Austria is currently (January 1, 2020) partitioned into 2,095 municipalities, ranging in population from about fifty (the village of Gramais in Tyrol) to almost two million (the city of Vienna). There is no unincorporated territory in Austria.

The existence of municipalities and their role as carriers of the right to self-administration are guaranteed by the Austrian constitution (B-VG Art. 116 (1)).

The constitution means for municipalities to be autonomous (eigenverantwortlich) in any matter that a village, town, or city can presumed to be both interested in handling and best capable of handling. Municipal authorities are required to comply with national and provincial legislation and can be held accountable by courts for failure to abide by the rule of law, but they are not politically answerable to national or provincial administrators and do not take orders from them. (B-VG 118)

All real estate in Austria falls within a municipality's borders, meaning that there are no unincorporated areas and no way for either the government or any resident to sidestep the requirement that each permanent resident be part of a municipal community. (B-VG 116 (2)).

All municipalities are corporations and have the right to own property, run businesses, levy municipal taxes, and generally manage their own financial affairs. (B-VG 116 (3)). Municipalities have a right to form municipal associations, subject to supervision by the provincial administration (B-VG 116a) and enter into treaties with other municipalities (B-VG 116b).

Municipalities are miniature parliamentary democracies with a legislature elected by the people and an executive branch installed and supervised by the legislature:

Municipal governments do not have judicial branches.

Larger municipalities are typically granted city status (Stadtrecht). The distinction, while important in medieval and early modern times, is purely symbolic today. City status does not currently confer any additional legal responsibilities. There exists a number of cities that are barely more than villages at present and that are labelled cities merely because they used to be regional population centers in the distant past. The city of Rattenberg, for example, has a population of about 400. The city of Hardegg has about 1200 inhabitants, although the historic city core − Hardegg proper without what used to be the surrounding hamlets − is home to just 80 people. Constitutionally, the main difference between municipalities that are cities (Städte, sing. Stadt) and municipalities that are not is that in cities, the municipal executive board is called not a Gemeindevorstand but a Stadtrat (B-VG 117 (1)).