The 13th month salary in Switzerland

The law does not answer the question, and that is not an oversight

We pulled the consolidated Swiss Code of Obligations (Obligationenrecht, OR) in the version applicable from 1 January 2026 straight from Fedlex and searched it. In the German text the word «Monatslohn» appears zero times. In the French text «treizième» appears exactly twice, both times in the heading of the thirteenth title of the code, which is about the contract of mandate. The Italian text has one such occurrence, in the same place. The English manifestation contains neither «thirteenth» nor «13th».

Article 322 paragraph 1 OR explains why. The employer owes the salary that is agreed, or customary, or fixed by a standard employment contract or a collective employment contract. Four sources — and statute is not one of them. So the answer to your question lives in your contract, in a collective agreement, or in what your employer has done consistently enough that it has become custom.

One further point matters for anyone reading Swiss law in English. Fedlex does publish an English text of the OR, and it opens with the standard notice that English is not an official language of the Swiss Confederation and that the translation has no legal force. In that translation, article 322d — the German marginal note reads «Gratifikation» — is rendered as «bonus». For a 13th month salary that is the wrong mental model in two languages at once: a Swiss 13th month salary, where it is agreed as a salary component, is not a bonus, is not discretionary, and does not depend on performance. It is the annual salary split into thirteen instead of twelve parts.

The common error: applying the Pensum twice

A 13th month salary is by definition one more monthly salary. On a 60 per cent Pensum the agreed monthly salary is already the 60 per cent figure; the 13th equals that amount, not 60 per cent of it. Apply the percentage a second time and you land at 36 per cent of a full-time monthly salary instead of 60 — a reduction of two fifths with nothing behind it.

The same logic is written down for holidays in the commentary on article 17 of the L-GAV, the collective agreement for the Swiss hospitality industry: part-time staff have in principle the same holiday entitlement as full-time staff, measured against their Pensum, and during their holidays they receive the same salary as during their working time. The reference point is your own workload, not a hypothetical full-time one.

In practice, check the franc amount rather than the percentage. If your contract states a monthly salary, the 13th is that amount. If it states an annual salary, the decisive question is whether that figure is twelve monthly salaries or thirteen. An annual salary that already contains thirteen parts is divided by thirteen; one that contains twelve is divided by twelve. That single line decides roughly eight per cent of your yearly income, and it is worth reading before you sign.

On an hourly wage the same entitlement is called 8.33 per cent

If you are paid by the hour there is no monthly salary to multiply. The entitlement is converted into a supplement instead. Article 12 of the hospitality L-GAV states it plainly: where the 13th month salary is paid at the end of each month or together with the hourly wage, the compensation amounts to 8.33 per cent.

That number is a fraction, not a convention. A thirteenth salary is one twelfth of the twelve ordinary ones, and one twelfth is 8.33 per cent, a recurring decimal that both collective agreements quoted here round to two places. The mirror-image mistake is dividing by thirteen, giving 7.69 per cent — a figure that answers a different question, namely what share one monthly salary is of a thirteen-part annual salary. As a supplement on an hourly wage it is simply too low.

The GAV Personalverleih 2024–2027, the collective agreement for staff leasing and temporary work and likewise universally binding, states the entitlement itself in a single sentence in article 18 paragraph 2 and then does the arithmetic in its annex 2. There too the rate is 8.33 per cent. Temporary work matters here because it is where hourly pay and irregular workloads are the norm rather than the exception.

Why 8.33 per cent can appear twice on the same payslip

Anyone working part-time on an hourly wage in Switzerland tends to see two percentage supplements on the payslip, and they are regularly confused with one another because one of them happens also to be 8.33 per cent. Article 13 paragraph 1 of the GAV Personalverleih sets the holiday entitlement at 20 working days, expressed as 8.33 per cent, for most employees, and at 25 working days, expressed as 10.6 per cent, for those up to the age of 20 and from the completed age of 50. The 13th month salary is then added separately.

In the hospitality L-GAV the two figures diverge, because that agreement grants five weeks of holiday: holiday compensation there is 10.65 per cent and the 13th month salary 8.33 per cent. Two supplements, two reasons, two lines on the payslip.

Annex 2 of the GAV Personalverleih also shows that the order of operations counts. Holiday compensation is calculated there as 8.33 per cent of the base wage plus the public-holiday compensation — and the 13th month salary is then calculated as 8.33 per cent of the base wage plus the holiday compensation plus the public-holiday compensation. The 13th is therefore computed on a base that already includes the holiday supplement. Calculate it on the bare hourly rate instead and you arrive too low.

What the 13th is calculated on, and what it is not

The base is where the money is decided for irregular workloads. The official commentary on article 12 of the L-GAV names it: in principle the AHV gross salary — AHV being the Swiss old-age and survivors' insurance, whose definition of gross pay is used as the reference — and that includes payments for rest days, holidays and public holidays. The enforcement body's own questions-and-answers page confirms it for hourly staff directly: the 13th month salary is owed on holiday and public-holiday compensation as well.

Its worked example shows the size of the effect. Where a final settlement pays out five untaken holiday days and three untaken rest days — CHF 1545.45 together in the example — a further 8.33 per cent is due on that sum as the share of the 13th month salary, CHF 128.75. For a part-time contract that has accumulated holiday over two years, this is not a rounding item.

The exclusions are just as explicit, and the commentary presents them as an exhaustive list: overtime that is paid out irregularly, and voluntary discretionary payments by the employer such as company anniversaries, parties, birthdays, engagements, marriages, births, passing professional examinations, or a further gratuity alongside the 13th month salary. Overtime that is paid out regularly does count. «Regularly» is therefore the word that disputes turn on.

In the other direction the entitlement continues when you cannot work through no fault of your own: the commentary states that the 13th month salary remains due during illness, accident, pregnancy and maternity, and military service, and is to be covered through the daily-allowance insurance.

A workload that moves: the average over the calculation period

Many part-time arrangements have no fixed Pensum at all but one that breathes with demand. Article 12 of the L-GAV resolves this in one clause: the basis for the calculation is the average monthly gross salary over the calculation period. Not the last month, not the best one, not December — the average.

That matters more than it sounds, because the 13th normally falls due in December. Someone who cut their workload in the autumn would, on a snapshot basis, be settled at the lower Pensum despite having worked more for most of the year; someone who increased it would gain in the same arbitrary way. The average reflects what was actually worked.

Two practical consequences follow. The calculation period belongs in the contract, and the payslips for the whole year are the evidence for it. Article 12 also requires that the 13th month salary be shown explicitly on the payslip at the moment it is paid — including where it is paid monthly, and where it has been agreed to be contained in another salary component. A payslip on which it appears nowhere is the first place worth asking about.

Starting or leaving mid-year

For an incomplete working year, article 12 of the L-GAV provides a pro rata temporis entitlement, independently of the Pensum. Part-time and a mid-year departure are two separate reductions: one sits in the monthly salary, the other in the fraction of the year.

One exception is written into the same article: the pro rata entitlement falls away if the employment relationship is dissolved within the probation period. The enforcement body's questions-and-answers page makes clear what turns on: not how long you were employed, but whether the termination happened within the probation period.

The same page answers the question that arises immediately at small workloads. Does a casual worker who works only single hours have a right to the 13th month salary? Answer: yes. A low Pensum does not exclude the entitlement, it only makes it smaller.

When the money falls due is governed for every employment relationship by article 339 paragraph 1 OR: on termination of the employment relationship, all claims arising from it fall due. The 13th is therefore not postponed to December. Article 12 of the L-GAV says the same thing for its own scope: at the latest each year with the December salary, or on termination of the employment relationship.

13th month salary or bonus: the classification decides everything

Because the Code of Obligations does not know the 13th month salary, what your contract makes of it decides which rules apply. If the payment is a salary component, the salary rules follow: it is owed, it is already proportionate at part-time because it sits inside the monthly salary, and it falls due on departure. If it is a gratuity within the meaning of article 322d OR, the entitlement itself depends on having been agreed — and so does the pro rata share when the relationship ends before the occasion arises.

The label on the payslip does not settle it; the design of the payment does. Where a payment is fixed, determined in advance and not dependent on the employer's discretion, it behaves like salary. The L-GAV commentary draws the line for its own scope by excluding «a further gratuity alongside the 13th month salary» from the calculation base: there, the two are different things that can exist side by side.

This gives you a simple reading rule for your own contract. A fixed quantity — «a 13th month salary», «8.33 per cent», «an annual salary in 13 parts» — is salary. A discretion clause, a voluntariness clause or a link to the company result leaves the classification open, and the wording becomes the starting point of any dispute. For anyone arriving from a country where a year-end payment is normally discretionary, this is the distinction worth learning first.

Where the rule actually lives, and why that depends on the canton

If statute does not answer, the contract or a collective agreement does. The Federal Statistical Office measures how many people that concerns: as at 1 March 2024 there were 201 sectoral and 362 company-level collective agreements in force, and roughly 2.1 million employees were subject to a collective agreement containing normative provisions. For those relationships the answer sits in a document you can look up rather than only in your individual contract.

A collective agreement binds only within its scope, though, and the declaration that extends it to non-members is issued either federally or by a canton. We counted the official SECO list dated 1 July 2025: 83 universally binding collective agreements in total, of which 47 rest on a Federal Council decision and 36 on a cantonal one.

Those 36 are not spread evenly. They sit in exactly seven cantons: Ticino 11, Vaud 8, Valais 7, Geneva 5, Basel-Stadt 2, Basel-Landschaft 2 and Zurich 1. Both agreements quoted in this answer — the hospitality L-GAV and the GAV Personalverleih — are in the federal part of the list and therefore apply nationwide within their scope. Whether any sector agreement reaches you at all is, in part, a question of geography.

So check in this order. Does your contract say anything about a 13th? Does a collective agreement apply to your employer, and has it been declared universally binding? And if both are silent: has the 13th been paid without reservation for years, so that a company practice may have arisen? Article 322 paragraph 1 OR calls that «customary» and places it deliberately alongside express agreement.

Swiss adverts, the Pensum, and what English-language postings leave out

Since everything about the 13th hangs on the Pensum, it is worth looking at how Swiss job adverts state it. We measured the live postings on SwissJobs.app: 22.1 per cent state a percentage in the title. Split by the language the advert is written in, that is 33.1 per cent of German-language adverts, 17.1 per cent of French-language ones — and 7.7 per cent of English-language ones.

That gap is the practical problem for anyone relocating. The English-language postings in our index are the least likely of the three to print the one number that determines your 13th month salary, your holiday accrual and the salary your pension contributions are calculated on. Reading an English advert about a Swiss job, you will usually have to ask for the Pensum rather than read it.

Where English-language adverts do state a figure, they cluster harder than the others: 48.2 per cent say «80–100%» and 37.9 per cent say «100%», and only 3.9 per cent have a lower bound of 50 per cent or less, against 16.3 per cent in German. Substantial part-time work is advertised in German far more than in English, which is worth knowing if you are looking for a reduced workload and searching only in English.

One more figure from the same data: even among adverts recorded as full-time, 70.8 per cent of the stated percentages have a lower bound below 100. The category and the advertised range regularly contradict each other. And the spread itself is not trivial for this question — the gap between the ends of an «80–100%» posting is a fifth, and a fifth less Pensum is a fifth less 13th month salary, every year. The number that decides yours is the one that ends up in the contract, not the one in the advert.

When the settlement does not add up

This answer explains how the calculation works rather than telling you what to do. What the rules provide can be summarised briefly: the contract is always the starting point; under the collective agreements quoted here the base is the AHV gross salary including holiday and public-holiday compensation; irregular overtime and voluntary extras do not belong in it; and the amount has to be shown on the payslip.

Two general provisions of the Code of Obligations complete the picture. Article 341 paragraph 1 states that during the employment relationship and for one month afterwards, an employee cannot waive claims arising from mandatory statutory provisions or from mandatory provisions of a collective agreement. Article 128 number 3 subjects claims arising from an employment relationship to a five-year limitation period.

Where you get further in an individual case depends on where your entitlement comes from. If a collective agreement applies, its enforcement body is the address — the L-GAV control office for hospitality, the corresponding body for staff leasing. Otherwise the cantonal conciliation authorities for employment disputes, trade unions and legal advice centres are the route. Bring the employment contract, the payslips for the whole year and the annual salary certificate; without those three the base cannot be recomputed.

Thirteenth salary or bonus — not the same thing

There is NO statutory right to a thirteenth salary in Switzerland. It arises from the contract, a collective agreement, or established practice. What decides it is not the label but the wording and what the employer has actually done for years. As of 7 September 2026.

Why the statute is silent, and what it says instead

The fastest way to answer this question is to search the law itself. We took the consolidated Code of Obligations of 1 January 2026 from the Fedlex file export and searched all four language versions. The German text does not contain the word "Monatslohn" once. The Italian text contains no "tredicesima". The English text contains neither "13th" nor "thirteenth". The French text contains "treizième" exactly twice, both times as "Titre treizième", the heading of Title Thirteen on the contract of mandate. Neither occurrence has anything to do with pay.

What the Code does contain is the bonus provision. Art. 322d describes a special payment made "on particular occasions, such as at Christmas or the end of the financial year" and makes it enforceable only where it has been stipulated. That condition is the whole answer. Without a stipulation — in the individual contract, in a collective agreement, or tacitly through the way the employer has behaved — such a payment stays voluntary.

This is also where the practical distinction lies. A 13th month salary agreed as a fixed component of pay is salary within the meaning of Art. 322 OR and is owed unconditionally. A bonus whose amount and payment the employer reserves to its own discretion is something else. Which of the two you have is determined by the wording of the agreement and by the practice actually followed, not by the label on the payslip.

The collective agreement is the real source

Where the statute is silent, the industry speaks. The Federal Statistical Office counted 563 collective agreements in Switzerland as at 1 March 2024, covering around 2.3 million employees — roughly 1.95 million of them under association-level agreements and the rest under company agreements. Some of those agreements are additionally declared generally binding, which under the Federal Act on the Declaration of General Application extends them to employers and employees who belong to none of the signatory associations. SECO reports that as at 1 July 2026 there were 46 generally binding agreements at federal level and 38 at cantonal level, and that the federal ones alone cover around 1.1 million employees.

We counted what those agreements actually contain. The SECO listing links, for every industry agreement, the base decree and every subsequent amending decree of the Federal Council; on 31 August 2026 there were 357 of them. We downloaded all of them, extracted the text and searched for a 13th month salary and its synonyms. Eight of the 46 agreements in force regulate only early retirement, pre-retirement or training and contain no pay clauses. Of the 38 remaining industry agreements, 35 carry a 13th month salary, or a year-end allowance defined in the same words, in the generally binding part.

The wording is refreshingly direct. Art. 12 of the national agreement for the hospitality industry — the one that covers hotels, restaurants and cafés — states that the employee is entitled to a 13th month salary amounting to 100 per cent of one gross monthly salary, pro rata for an incomplete year, with the pro rata entitlement lapsing if the relationship ends during the probation period; where it is paid out monthly, the compensation is 8.33 per cent. The agreement for staff leasing — which SECO names, alongside the hospitality and main-construction agreements, as one of the three most significant generally binding agreements, the three together covering around three quarters of a million employees — needs a single sentence in Art. 18 para. 2: there is an entitlement to a 13th month salary. In the national agreement for the main construction industry, Art. 45 grants it "from the start of employment".

The three industries where the extended text has none

The three exceptions are more informative than the thirty-five. In the agreements for hairdressing, for the contact and call centre industry, and for private security services, not one of the associated Federal Council decrees mentions a 13th month salary, a year-end allowance or any comparable special payment. In the hairdressing agreement the word "gratifications" appears exactly once, and it is in the rule that bonuses, sales commissions and gratifications are precisely not counted when calculating holiday pay. In the other two the concept is absent entirely.

All three are service industries with low entry-level wages. The 35 agreements that do carry a 13th month salary are overwhelmingly construction, finishing trades, crafts and manufacturing — scaffolding, metalworking, carpentry, the brick industry. So when you are told that a 13th is "standard in Switzerland", read the claim by industry: it is true where strong social partnership wrote it into the contract, and it is not automatically true anywhere else.

One limitation belongs with this count. Only part of a collective agreement is declared generally binding. Our reading therefore establishes exactly one thing — whether the part extended to the entire industry contains a 13th month salary. An agreement may go further in its non-extended part, which then binds only the members of the signatory associations.

Thirteen parts or twelve plus one: the same phrase, two different amounts

This is the point that costs people money, and it is arithmetic rather than law. A "13th month salary" can mean two entirely different things. In one version an annual salary is divided into thirteen parts: that is exactly how Art. 41 of the Federal Personnel Ordinance puts it, and it is how the Geneva salary act works, which fixes annual salaries expressly "13e salaire inclus". In the other version a thirteenth monthly salary is added on top of twelve; collective agreements usually express this as 8.33 per cent of the annual gross, because one twelfth is precisely that share.

The difference is real. For the same annual figure, the monthly salary is lower in the first version, because the same cake is cut into more slices. For the same monthly salary, the annual figure is higher in the second, because an extra slice is added. When you receive an offer, the useful question is therefore never the monthly salary alone, but how many times it is paid and whether the annual figure quoted already includes the thirteenth.

If you are relocating, this is the single most common misreading of a Swiss offer. A figure presented as an annual salary may cover twelve payments or thirteen, and the same number then describes two different jobs. How the 13th is calculated for a part-time workload — a Pensum, stated in per cent — is a separate question with its own answer on this page.

Public employers follow their own law

In the public sector the question is not answered by private law at all. Art. 342 para. 1 let. a OR expressly reserves the provisions of the Confederation, the cantons and the communes on employment relationships under public law. Federal employees are therefore covered by the Personnel Ordinance provision quoted above; each canton has its own salary act, and the differences are not merely editorial. Geneva pays the 13th in two halves, one with the June salary and one with the December salary. Ticino lets employees ask to convert part or all of the thirteenth month into days of leave.

Federalism weighs more heavily here than in private law: whether and how a thirteenth month is paid is set by the personnel or salary act of the body concerned, and the Confederation, the cantons and the communes each legislate for themselves. If you work for a public employer, or are applying to one, the answer is therefore in neither the Code of Obligations nor a collective agreement but in that act — which is normally published, with the provision sitting under a heading such as payment or components of salary.

What the advert tells you, and what it does not

We can measure how often the question is answered before you apply, and the answer is sobering. A summary of the advert text exists for 78.7 per cent of the live adverts in our index. Across all languages, 14.5 per cent of those adverts mention training, 3.3 per cent remote work, 2.6 per cent the pension fund, 1.4 per cent a specific number of weeks of holiday, 0.6 per cent any franc figure at all — and 0.1 per cent a 13th month salary.

For English-language adverts specifically the pattern is sharper still. Training appears in 13.9 per cent and remote or hybrid work in 7.2 per cent — the highest rate of any language in our index, which tells you something about who these adverts are written for. The pension fund appears in 0.9 per cent, a franc figure in 0.5 per cent, and a named number of holiday weeks in almost none. A 13th month salary appears in none of them at all.

That is a useful thing to know if you are applying to Switzerland from abroad. The English-language advert is the one most likely to be aimed at an international candidate and the least likely to state the Swiss-specific parts of the package. The 13th month salary, the Pensum in per cent, the weeks of Ferien, the split of the pension contribution: none of it is usually in the text. It appears in the contract, and Art. 330b OR gives you a right to have it in writing.

If no collective agreement applies and the contract is silent

Then the question becomes whether a stipulation under Art. 322d OR can also arise tacitly. The statute says only that the entitlement exists "where it is contractually stipulated". It names no number of years and no number of payments after which a voluntary payment would harden into an entitlement; we searched the text for such a rule and it is not there. Art. 322 para. 1 OR does, however, name the "customary" salary as one of the four sources, and in a dispute a court decides on the facts whether a practice has become a tacit agreement.

What matters in practice is how a payment is accompanied. A payment made every year in the same amount, without reservation and without reference to the business result, looks different from one that is set anew each year and expressly described as voluntary. That is a question of evidence rather than a formula, and it is one of the points on which advice is worth having before you sign anything.

Deductions, holidays and leaving mid-year

A 13th month salary is pay and is treated as such. Art. 7 of the AHV Ordinance expressly counts gratifications and loyalty and performance bonuses as part of the determining salary, so old-age, survivors and unemployment insurance contributions are levied on it. If you are taxed at source, it shows up in your employer’s withholding calculation as well; what Swiss withholding tax is and who pays it is answered separately in this collection.

For holidays, Art. 329d para. 1 OR provides that the employer must pay "the full salary due for the holiday entitlement". How a 13th month salary enters that calculation is handled very differently across the collective agreements: some add it expressly to the holiday compensation, others exclude particular allowances from it.

If you leave mid-year, the basis decides again. Art. 322d para. 2 OR gives a proportionate share only where the contract so provides. Industry agreements are usually more generous and more explicit — both the construction and the hospitality agreements provide a pro rata entitlement — but some attach conditions: in the tile-laying agreement it falls away where the employee did not terminate the relationship properly or was dismissed with immediate effect.

Where to get an answer for your own case

This page sets out what the rules say, not what you should do. The order of the sources stays the same in every case: the written contract and the notification under Art. 330b OR, then the collective agreement for the industry together with the question of whether and how far it has been declared generally binding, then, for public employers, the personnel law of the body concerned.

A binding answer about a specific contract comes from the joint commission of the industry, from a trade union or professional association, from the cantonal labour inspectorate or from a legal advice service. The SECO overviews of the federal and cantonal agreements name the enforcement body for each contract.