What is an alternative to the BFS Salarium?

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 Salarium does well, and why it comes first

Salarium is the Federal Statistical Office's statistical salary calculator, currently in its 2024 edition. You pick an industry, a large region and an occupational group, then add age, education, years with the company, position in the hierarchy, company size, contractual weekly hours, nationality or residence status, and whether a 13th salary and irregular bonuses are paid. Out comes an estimated gross monthly wage as a median with the two quartile bounds, «25% earn less than» and «25% earn more than», and you can save it as a PDF.

Behind it sits a model with 14 explanatory variables. The office publishes the method, explains how the results are validated, and states in its own words that the estimates «do not constitute salary recommendations and are provided for information purposes only». It even names what the model cannot do: interactions between the variables are ignored, so the effect of education does not depend on the position you hold. That level of detail about a tool's own limits is rare.

Two things follow. First, if your industry-region pair carries four stars, use Salarium and stop reading — nothing here beats it for that question. Second, everything below is about the cases where it cannot help, which is where people arriving in Switzerland tend to land.

Regions, not cantons — and why that matters more here than at home

Switzerland has 26 cantons; Salarium has seven regions. If you are moving to Zug, the tool will give you a Central Switzerland figure that also covers Uri and Obwalden. If you are moving to Geneva, you get a Lake Geneva figure that includes Valais. Cantons differ in wage levels, in taxation and in cost of living far more than the size of the country suggests, and the region average washes that out.

The imbalance inside a region is visible in our own stock of live Swiss job adverts. Among the adverts whose location resolves to a canton, 54 per cent of Central Switzerland's postings sit in Lucerne and 33 per cent in Zug, with Uri almost absent; in the Lake Geneva region 52 per cent are in Geneva, 39 per cent in Vaud and 8 per cent in Valais. That is the distribution of our adverts rather than a measurement of the labour market, but it shows how heavily one city can weigh on a regional average.

The published federal figures point the same way: median gross monthly pay in the Zurich region was CHF 7502 in 2024 against CHF 5708 in Ticino. Two cantons inside one region can sit almost that far apart — nobody publishes that gap, which is exactly why the canton-level calculator matters.

Where the calculator tells you to go away

Salarium carries a one-to-four-star reliability rating for every combination of industry and region, with its own explanation attached. One star: «No data is available for the economic sector and region selected.» Two stars: «there are fewer than 3 companies and/or fewer than 30 employees». Three stars mean «Relative statistical reliability» — interpret with caution.

We read that rating for all 553 pairs. 6.0 per cent carry one star, 5.6 per cent two, 23.3 per cent three, and 65.1 per cent the full four. So in roughly one case in nine you get no figure at all, and in a good third a figure with a caveat attached. That is not a flaw; it is a survey being honest about small industries in small regions.

The gaps are not evenly spread, and they hit hardest where wages are lowest. In Ticino a fifth of all industries return nothing. Even in the centre of the map it thins out: financial services in the Zurich region carry only three stars, and tobacco processing — which the 2024 survey release names as the best-paid industry in the country at CHF 14 304 — returns nothing in six of the seven regions.

And one whole group of employees is outside the model by construction: anyone working for a canton, a commune or the Confederation. The survey itself covers public and private employers, but only the private part feeds the calculator. In our own stock of live adverts at least 3 per cent come from a canton, a city, a cantonal hospital, a university or a federal office — at least, because that test only reads the employer's name. For those jobs, cantonal salary scales and grading rules are the source, and they are usually public.

Sex and permit status are inputs, and that surprises people

The method page says it plainly: Salarium uses «all available explanatory factors», gender and nationality or residence status included. You can watch it happen by running one profile twice.

Our test profile on 24 August 2026: health sector, Zurich region, occupational group «health professionals», a higher vocational qualification, age 28, no management function, first year with the employer, company with 50 or more staff, 42 contractual hours, monthly salary with a 13th month, no irregular bonuses. For a Swiss woman the calculator returned CHF 6658 at the lower quartile, CHF 7411 as the median and CHF 8256 at the upper quartile. Change only the sex to male: CHF 7854 median, 6.0 per cent higher. Change only the status to cross-border commuter with a G permit: CHF 7092, 4.3 per cent lower.

Those differences describe what was paid in 2024; they are not a recommendation, and the office says as much. For context, the published gender pay gap for 2024 is 8.4 per cent across the economy, 5.2 per cent in jobs without a management function and 14.0 per cent at high levels of responsibility — our 6.0 per cent sits inside that range.

The practical consequence for anyone negotiating: check which sex and which permit status were set before you quote a Salarium figure, and run the other variant too. SECO's calculator omits both fields, because it was built to enforce the accompanying measures on posted workers, where distinguishing by sex or nationality would — in the federal office's words — not serve the purpose. For the question «what is normal for this job?», that omission is a feature.

SECO's national salary calculator: the canton-level alternative

It is the closest alternative because it draws on the same survey and still does something different. The statistical office compares the two itself: same data source, same wage-equation method, different models, different characteristics and different geographic levels.

SECO's tool starts at the canton. If no range can be computed for the canton you picked, it falls back to one of the 16 labour-market regions, then to the seven large regions, and the national level is always shown. For someone in Neuchâtel, Jura or Zug that is the decisive difference. The method was developed in 2003 by the University of Geneva for the accompanying measures on wage protection.

The cost is the vintage: the national calculator rests on the 2022 survey, Salarium on 2024. Between the two the national median rose from CHF 6788 to CHF 7024, so a 2022-based figure is not wrong, only older than it looks.

Both share the same blind spot. Both model the private sector, so neither helps for a public-sector job.

If what you actually want is net pay

Many people looking for an alternative to Salarium do not want a better estimate; they want a different number — what lands in the account. Salarium is deliberately not built for that, and neither are we, entirely.

For tax, the Federal Tax Administration runs a calculator that takes canton, commune, marital status and children into account. If you hold a B or G permit you will normally pay withholding tax deducted straight from your salary at cantonal rates, so the tax calculator matters more to you than any wage statistic. Commercial gross-to-net tools such as lohncomputer.ch cover canton, marital status, children, church tax and the cross-border case, and for that one question they beat us; the operator also sells relocation advice, which is worth knowing but does not make the calculator worse.

One deduction no tool can pin down for you is the occupational pension. The BVG contribution depends on your age and on the employer's pension plan, and it appears in no statistic — only in the plan rules or on your first payslip. Nor does a Swiss gross figure include the family allowances that are paid separately per canton.

Which calculator for which question

«What does my industry and occupation pay?» — Salarium, provided your combination carries four stars.

«What is normal in my canton?» — SECO's national salary calculator, keeping in mind that the data is from 2022.

«I work for a canton or a commune» — neither. Your employer's published salary scale is the answer.

«What will I take home?» — the Federal Tax Administration's calculator or a gross-to-net tool, plus your pension plan rules for the BVG deduction.

«Is this offer high or low for Switzerland, what do AHV and ALV take off it, and who is hiring at that level?» — that is what our calculator is for: the three published anchors of the 2024 survey, the two nationwide-fixed deductions computed exactly, the missing ones named openly, and the matching open jobs linked. Free, no account, four languages. What it will not give you is a number per occupation — for that this page sends you back to Salarium, and it means it.