Which Swiss canton has the most jobs? I counted all 20,777

Start with the raw count, because everything else in this article is a slice of it. Zurich 3,330. Bern 1,254. Geneva 1,231. Vaud 1,102. Basel-Stadt 939. Lucerne 863. Aargau 780. Fribourg 617. Valais 503. St. Gallen 489. Zug 435. Solothurn 365. Graubünden 334. Ticino 267. Neuchâtel 255. Thurgau 250. All 26 cantons appear, right down to Uri with two.

One in four openings is in a single canton. I knew Zurich was big; I did not expect it to outweigh the entire Romandie's two largest cantons put together. And Zug is the number that should stop you — 435 postings out of a canton of roughly 130,000 people, more than Ticino manages with nearly three times the population.

Now the caveat, because you should know what you're looking at. Of the 20,777 published postings, 13,580 carry a resolved canton. That's not a random two-thirds: the geocoding pass runs a few days behind the scraper, so 88.7% of postings older than a week have a canton and only 0.9% of this week's 5,521 arrivals do. The canton picture is drawn on the settled part of the index. When I look at the raw location strings on the unresolved rows, the most common ones are Zürich (810), Bern (505), "Switzerland" (448), Basel (297) and Genève (225) — the same centres, in roughly the same order. So the shape holds, but treat the absolute counts as a floor, not a census.

Second caveat, smaller: Basel-Landschaft shows 35 postings, which is nonsense as a description of Baselland's economy. Almost everything in that agglomeration advertises with a Basel address and lands in Basel-Stadt. Read the Basel bar as "the Basel region" and don't draw conclusions about Liestal.

I want to be exact about this, because it's the part people don't believe. Structured salary data on 20,777 live postings: none. Not a low share. Zero. Then I went looking in the free text — 16,149 of the postings have a summary of the advert, and 309 of those mention pay in words at all (1.9%). Of those, 12 attach an actual number.

Here's the entire visible evidence, more or less: one advert quoting a Lohnband of CHF 84'000–100'000, one at CHF 183,800–309,700 a year, one at CHF 25–30 an hour, a couple more in the same shape. Twelve data points out of twenty thousand. You could not build a canton ranking out of that if your job depended on it, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise by dressing up a guess.

So what do you do instead? Use the federal numbers. The Lohnstrukturerhebung is a proper survey of actual paid wages, it's free, and SECO wraps it in a calculator where you enter branch, region, age, education and Pensum and get a range for your exact profile. That's a far better answer than anything scraped off job boards, and it's the one I give people who ask me at parties.

One thing the silence itself tells you, though. In a market where no advert states pay, the salary conversation happens entirely in the interview, and the number is set by what you ask for. If you come from a country with published salary bands, this is the single most expensive habit to bring with you: waiting to be told. Look the range up beforehand, then name it.

This is the closest thing to a pay map the inventory gives you, and not because English pays more per se. Adverts in English come from employers running an international process — regional head offices, pharma, banking, tech, commodity trading — and those are the employers whose salary bands are set somewhere other than the local labour market.

The gradient is steep. Zug 57.7% of its 352 language-detected postings, Geneva 57.4% of 951, Zurich 53.1% of 2,667, Basel-Stadt 37.0% of 743. Then the drop: Bern 12.6%, St. Gallen 11.6%, Lucerne 10.4%, Graubünden 8.1%, Thurgau 6.3%. National average, 29.3% of the 16,221 postings whose language I can detect.

In Zurich the language requirement flips outright: of the canton's 3,330 postings, 1,727 name English as a required language and 1,607 name German. That's the first time I've seen that in this dataset, and it explains a specific frustration I hear a lot — people who moved to Zurich, learned German for two years, and then found the interviews were in English anyway.

Valais is the odd one out at 42.4%, which surprised me until I remembered what's in Visp and around Sion: a couple of very international industrial employers advertising in English into a canton that otherwise works in French and German. Small base too — 255 detectable postings out of 503. I'd treat it as an employer effect, not a canton effect.

Second proxy, same logic. I can't see salaries, but I can see titles, and a canton whose adverts are one-quarter senior-and-above is a canton full of head-office layers. I counted every posting whose title contains senior, lead, head, principal, chief, director, managing, Leiter/Leiterin, chef or responsable — crude, but consistent across all 26 cantons, so the comparison holds even where the absolute level is rough.

Zug 27.1%. Zurich 24.6%. Geneva 20.7%. Basel-Stadt 19.0%. Vaud 18.1%. National 14.3%. Then Bern 11.0%, Ticino 9.4%, Aargau 8.1%, St. Gallen 8.0%, Lucerne 6.8%, Graubünden 6.0%, Schwyz 3.7%.

Notice that Zug tops both this and the English list, off a base of only 435 postings. That's what a canton of holding companies and regional headquarters looks like in job-advert data: few openings, disproportionately senior, disproportionately in English. If you're a mid-career specialist, 435 postings in Zug are worth more of your attention than the raw count suggests. If you're two years out of university, they're worth much less.

Which is the honest inversion of the whole "where's the money" question. The cantons with the highest share of senior work are the hardest ones to enter at the bottom. Lucerne's 6.8% isn't a weakness — it's a market advertising a lot of ordinary jobs that ordinary applicants can actually get.

Every chart so far has had the same four cantons on top. This one doesn't, and that's why I like it. Solothurn 15.6%. Schaffhausen 12.7%. Schwyz 12.6%. Bern 12.2%. Graubünden 12.0%. Thurgau 11.6%. Aargau and St. Gallen 11.5%. National average across the whole inventory: 6.4%.

Then the bottom: Zurich 5.3%, Lucerne 5.3%, Vaud 4.8%, Zug 3.4%, Geneva 2.9%, Fribourg 2.3%. So the cantons with the most international, most senior, best-paying-by-proxy work are also the ones least likely to advertise anything under 100%.

There's a language split hiding in here too. Part-time shares run visibly higher across German-speaking cantons than French-speaking ones, which matches something anyone who has worked on both sides of the Röstigraben will tell you: an 80% Pensum is an unremarkable career choice in Bern or Aarau and still a slightly awkward conversation in Geneva.

If a reduced Pensum is non-negotiable for you, that changes the search order, not just the filter. Fewer than one in thirty Geneva adverts offers it. One in six in Solothurn does.

The practical read of these four charts is a search order. If you want senior and international, you're looking at Zug, Zurich, Geneva and Basel and you'll be competing with everyone else who ran the same numbers. If you want volume and a realistic shot, Bern, Aargau, Lucerne and St. Gallen advertise thousands of jobs that never appear in an English-language newsletter. If you need 80%, start in the German-speaking mid-sized cantons and stop wasting evenings on Geneva.

Then the part that actually decides whether anyone reads you. Your CV has to say where you can work and under what status, in the top third of page one. "Zurich, B permit" or "EU citizen, no permit required, relocating to Basel in October". I've watched this go wrong more times than any other single thing: strong candidate, no location line, screener can't tell in five seconds whether hiring them means a work-permit process, moves on. Nobody writes back to tell you that's what happened.

Languages, same paragraph, with levels: "German B2 · English C1 · French A2". Given the numbers above, if you're applying into Zurich or Zug, put English first and don't apologise for B1 German. If you're applying into Lucerne or Thurgau, the reverse, and be honest about the level — 89.6% of Lucerne's detectable adverts are in something other than English.

That top-third check is mechanical, which is why we automated it. Paste the posting, upload your CV, and our CV check tells you which of those lines a Swiss screener won't find. It has no opinion about which canton you should live in.