Switzerland work visa: which permit you need, and what your employer has to do

L goes with a contract of three to twelve months, matches the contract's length and tops out at 364 days. B is the ordinary residence permit, for a contract of at least a year or an open-ended one, issued for five years to EU and EFTA nationals. C is settlement — five continuous years of residence for EU-15 and EFTA nationals, ten for most others — and it ends the question entirely, because it carries free access to the labour market and needs nothing from an employer.

G is the one people forget: the cross-border commuter permit, for someone living in an EU or EFTA state who works here and goes home at least weekly. Geneva, Basel and Ticino run substantially on it.

Then the split that decides everything else. Under the free movement agreement, an EU or EFTA national with a job offer is entitled to the permit — a registration, not a decision. For a third-country national the same offer starts a real application, and the employer carries it.

The free-movement side is light. The new arrival registers with their commune within 14 days and before starting work. For short jobs there is not even that: work of up to three months in a calendar year runs through an online notification the employer files on day one. Worth saying plainly in an application, because plenty of hiring managers still assume a foreign passport means months of waiting.

The third-country route is a different animal. The employer has to show nobody suitable could be found in Switzerland or the EU/EFTA, that the role is a qualified one — managers, specialists, skilled professionals with a degree and experience — that pay and conditions match what is customary for the region, profession and sector, and that a quota place is free. The canton decides first, the State Secretariat for Migration approves.

That route is built around durable full-time work, which is less of an obstacle than it sounds: where an advert states a contract type, about nine in ten are full-time. The barrier is the priority test, and the only way past it is being the person the employer could not find here.

German is the majority language of the market by a wide margin, English second, French a solid third, Italian a small slice. That English quarter is not a translation service for foreigners — it is what a company writes in when its working language is English, which in practice means international staff and an HR function that has filed permit applications before.

Use it as a filter, not as a promise. An English-written advert tells you the permit question will at least be understood when you raise it. A German-written advert from a twelve-person Sanitärfirma in Aargau may be a perfectly good job whose owner has never filed anything. Neither is a verdict on your chances — it is a difference in how much you have to explain.

An advert written in English reads like an invitation. Then the first interview is in English, the second is in English, and the team meeting on day four is in Swiss German. About a quarter of English-written adverts state a German requirement outright; a smaller slice names French; the rest mostly name English and stop.

There is a trap in that last group. An advert that does not mention German is not an advert that does not want German — it is one that did not write it down, and a job description is what somebody had time to type, not a full list of what a team needs.

So put your actual levels on the CV, in the standard European scale, near the top rather than in a skills box at the end. An honest B1 beats an unexplained gap — the recruiter finds out in week one anyway.

In Zurich nearly six adverts in ten are written in English, with Zug and Geneva just behind. Basel-Stadt is about a third, and by Bern it is closer to one in seven. That is not a ranking of job quality. It is a map of where the internationally staffed employers sit — which is the same as a map of where the permit conversation is routine rather than novel.

The catch is that everybody else has worked this out, and a Zurich advert in English collects applications from across Europe. Cantons further down the list have less competition per advert and a narrower door: worth walking through with the local language, worth skipping without it.

Write it flat, as a fact, in the block with your contact details. “Italian citizen, EU/EFTA — registration procedure, no quota.” “B permit, canton of Zurich.” “G permit, resident in Annemasse.” “Indian citizen, Swiss master’s degree, available from 1 November.” No apologising, no explaining the law back to the reader. A recruiter who sees the answer in two seconds stops thinking about it and starts reading your last job.

If you already hold a permit, check what is written on it before you resign anywhere. B permit holders can generally change job without further authorisation, but a permit granted for one specific role can carry a labour-market condition — and then a change of employer is an application to the cantonal authority rather than a formality.

Last thing, and nobody warns you about it: Swiss adverts do not state salaries. We look for a stated figure in every advert we read and effectively none carries one. Yet for a third-country hire the employer has to prove your pay matches the local, professional and sector norm — so there is a number in the file you never get to see. Do not guess it into a covering letter. Ask when an offer is being shaped, and let the employer name the range first.