What is an alternative to Glassdoor for Swiss salaries?

Where Swiss salary data comes from

On salary the best source is public. Salarium, from the Federal Statistical Office, rests on the official salary structure survey; commercial calculators are usually an interface over it, or rest on self-reported figures.

What Glassdoor is genuinely better at, and we are not

Glassdoor is an employer-review site with salary estimates attached, not a wage statistic with reviews attached. For what it was built to do there is no federal substitute in Switzerland: employee reviews of a named company, interview reports listing the questions actually asked, a sense of management and culture. No statistics office collects that, we do not collect it, and we have no plans to.

That matters more than it sounds. By the time you are choosing between two offers you usually have the salary in writing; what you do not have is everything else. For that question Glassdoor is the obvious place to look, with the same caution that applies to its pay data — you are reading self-selected accounts, not a survey.

There is a second case where it is the better starting point: comparing across a border. If you are weighing Munich or London against Zurich or Geneva, Glassdoor shows the same role in several countries in one consistent format. Federal statistics stop at the Swiss frontier. For a first rough sense of whether a move is worth exploring, that international comparability is a real advantage — just not for the number you eventually negotiate with.

Where Glassdoor has Swiss figures at all depends on who submits them, and people submit where working life is already international. Our own index shows how unevenly that part of the market is spread: among adverts that state a language requirement, English is the only language asked for in around 30% of marketing roles and around 28% of IT roles, against under one per cent in construction and in retail sales. Outside that slice, expect to meet an empty page — as with the Zurich estate agent above.

Where the number comes from, on both sides

Glassdoor states its method on the page. The archived Swiss version puts it this way: its salary figures come from a proprietary machine-learning model that combines salaries submitted by its users with the most recent official figures. That is an honest description, and it is also the limitation — the output is an estimate from voluntary submissions, smoothed by a model whose weighting is not published.

The federal survey works the other way round. It surveys establishments rather than individuals, participation is compulsory, pay is standardised to a full-time equivalent so that figures are comparable, and the method is published. That is why it can state things self-reported data never could: that in 2024 a low-pay job meant a full-time gross below CHF 4683 a month, and that 10.8% of all jobs fell below that line.

Both have a weakness, and both deserve saying. Self-reported data is skewed because people with a reason to report are the ones who report. Official data is slow: the 2024 results were published on 25 November 2025. So you negotiate today with figures from the year before last — but with a method you can inspect, rather than an estimate you cannot.

For placing yourself that is good enough, because the shape of Swiss pay barely moves. Between 2008 and 2024 the lowest-paid tenth gained 18.1%, the highest-paid tenth 16.8%, and the middle least of all at 15.4%. A survey from last year still tells you where you stand.

The Swiss things a payslip has that an international estimate does not

Pensum. Swiss contracts state a workload as a percentage, and a salary quoted without one means nothing — the same figure at 80% is a different job from the same figure at 100%. Federal statistics convert everything to full-time precisely so the comparison holds. Job adverts state the Pensum; international salary estimates rarely say what they assume.

Quellensteuer. If you do not hold a C permit, income tax is generally withheld at source by your employer at a rate that depends on your canton, your marital status and your children. There are no tax classes in the German sense and no annual return in the usual case. So the gap between a gross figure and what lands in your account is a cantonal question, not a national one.

Health insurance. It is compulsory, you buy it yourself, and it does not appear on the payslip. Anyone comparing a Swiss gross figure against a German, French or British one is comparing packages that draw the line in different places — which is why gross-to-gross comparisons across the border mislead in both directions.

And the deductions that are fixed nationwide are smaller than newcomers expect: AHV/IV/EO at 5.3% of gross from the employee, and ALV at 1.1% up to an annual gross of CHF 148'200. Pension (BVG), non-occupational accident cover and tax sit on top and vary by plan, employer and canton — which is exactly why our calculator computes the first two and says plainly that it does not compute the rest.

Industry moves the number more than job title does

A single national figure hides how far apart Swiss industries sit. In 2024 the median gross monthly wage was CHF 5214 in retail, CHF 4744 in restaurants and CHF 4715 in accommodation, against CHF 10'723 in banking, CHF 10'159 in pharmaceuticals and CHF 9139 in research and development. Construction sat near the middle at CHF 6616.

The share of low-pay jobs makes the same point more sharply: 48.7% in accommodation, 47.8% in restaurants and 24.6% in retail, against 0.6% in banking and 1.4% in public administration. The same work in a different industry is a different wage.

Within the same education level, the role decides. A university degree brought a median of CHF 10'533 a month in 2024, a university of applied sciences degree CHF 9288 and a federal VET diploma (EFZ) CHF 6390. But a university graduate in a job with high responsibility earned CHF 14'409 against CHF 8645 with none — and an EFZ holder CHF 8252 against CHF 6162. Reading one number off a job title throws that entire range away.

Which tool answers which question

What does my occupation pay in my canton, at my education level: Salarium, which runs in English.

Is this offer normal for the industry and the place: the SECO national salary calculator — German, French or Italian only.

Where does this figure sit nationally, what comes off it by law, and what is currently open at that level: our salary calculator.

What will actually reach my account, given canton, children and cross-border status: a gross-to-net calculator such as lohncomputer.ch, which asks for all of them.

What is this employer like, and what do they ask at interview: Glassdoor — reading it as testimony rather than measurement.

One limit we have to state, because it bounds our own page: we hold no salary data of our own. Advertised salary fields are almost never filled in, and we do not pretend otherwise. Every figure on our salary page comes from federal statistics and is linked there. What we add is the placement, the statutory deductions and the openings behind the number.