Take-home pay in Switzerland

Switzerland does not have one income tax, it has three

This is what catches out almost everyone arriving from abroad. Your salary is taxed at the same time by the Confederation, by the canton and by the municipality, and all three are worked out differently. The federal one is the only one that is the same everywhere in the country, and it is also the one that weighs least.

The cantonal and communal taxes work in a way that barely exists anywhere else: the canton first computes a «simple tax» using its own scale, and that figure is then MULTIPLIED by a cantonal coefficient and a communal one. In the city of Zürich those are 95 % and 119 %, so what you actually pay is 214 % of the simple tax.

The practical consequence is that the same salary pays very different amounts depending on which village you live in, inside the same canton and sometimes ten minutes apart by car. In Switzerland, moving house is a tax decision.

Your gross is not the taxable base, and there are two of them

Before any scale is applied, social contributions, professional expenses, insurance premiums and the social deductions for your family situation are all subtracted. What is left is your taxable income, and it is considerably less than your gross.

And there is not one, there are two: the amounts the Confederation lets you deduct and the ones the canton lets you deduct are different, so this calculator carries two taxable bases in parallel. Any table showing a single Swiss «taxable income» figure is simplifying something the law does not simplify.

Four contributions come out of the payslip: AHV/IV/EO at 5.3 % with no ceiling, unemployment insurance at 1.1 % up to 148,200 francs, non-occupational accident cover — negotiated by each employer, around 1 % — and the second pillar. All four reduce taxable income, so they are computed before any tax.

Health insurance is not a tax, which is why it is not here

This is the most expensive surprise of moving to Switzerland. Compulsory health insurance is not deducted from your payslip and your employer does not pay it: you take it out yourself with a private insurer and you pay it separately, every month, whether or not you look at this calculator.

The average adult premium in 2026 is 465.30 francs a month according to the Federal Office of Public Health, and it varies a lot by canton: Geneva is the most expensive in the country. That is between five and seven thousand francs a year that appear in no net-salary figure, ours or anybody else's. Which is why here it sits in the spending basket, where it actually belongs.

There is one exception, and it is Geneva: of the cantons this tool covers, it is the only one that lets you deduct the premium from taxable income on top of the general insurance cap. Everywhere else it falls inside that cap, and almost always uses it up.

On a B permit, more is withheld than you see here

These figures are ORDINARY TAXATION: the annual return filed by people with a Swiss passport or a C permit. Anyone on a B permit is taxed at source instead, a single percentage withheld from every payslip.

And it does not come to the same thing. Withholding scales apply smaller flat-rate deductions than the annual return does, so they withhold too much: in Geneva, on the order of two percentage points of gross. It is nobody's mistake, it is how the scale is built.

That is why so many people on a B permit file for a rectification or for subsequent ordinary taxation, usually before 31 March of the following year. If that is your case, read the figures below as what you might end up paying once you file, not as what January's payslip will show.

Where these figures come from

The scales and coefficients for the eight cantons this tool covers come from primary sources: the 2026 Kantonsblätter and Feuilles cantonales published by the Federal Tax Administration. Within each canton we always use the capital's municipality, and the interface says which one.

All eight are checked piece by piece against the Confederation's official calculator: the scale against the simple tax, the coefficients against the ratio of two official figures, and the federal tax separately. That is fifty-six checkpoints, frozen in the test suite and verified on every deployment.

What that check turned up

Two errors that no amount of reading the law had caught, both now fixed. We tell you about them because they are the best evidence that the check is real:

• In Geneva, the additional centime for home care does NOT fall inside the 12 % rebate. The correct coefficient is (1 + 0.475) × 0.88 + 0.01, not (1.485 × 0.88). The difference was 46 francs hiding inside the test's tolerance, and the test had to be rewritten piece by piece before they showed up.
• In Zug, the city charges 52 % in 2026. The 52.11 % that appears in the Federal Tax Administration's Steuerfüsse table is the 2025 figure: that row mixes the two years and is flagged with an asterisk that is easy to miss.

What that check does NOT validate is the deductions, because the official calculator is handed the taxable base already computed. Three judgement calls remain there, and they are worth knowing: in Vaud we apply the 2026 rebate of 5 % to the cantonal coefficient only and not the communal one; in Geneva we give a single parent the 50 % splitting of art. 41 al. 3 LIPP rather than the 55.56 % of al. 4, which requires shared custody; and in Lucerne the cantonal sheet elides the second per-child amount, so we use the under-six figure, which overstates the tax of anyone with older children.

What this calculator does not include

• Church tax, which is optional and which you can opt out of by leaving the register.
• The commuting deduction, which depends on each person's journey.
• The Zweiverdienerabzug, the deduction for a couple with two salaries, which would mean knowing what the other one earns.
• That the second-pillar rate rises with age — from 7 % between 25 and 34 up to 18 % from 55 on, split with the employer. Here we use the 35-to-44 band, the most common among working people, and many plans contribute above the legal minimum.
• Voluntary deductions: pillar 3a, pension buy-backs and donations.
• The eighteen cantons that are not here yet. The eight included cover most of the population, and each new one means doing the whole cross-check again.