What is an alternative to the Comparis salary calculator?

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.

Why a comparison site has this tool and not the other one

Comparis compares health insurers, mortgages, car insurance, mobile plans and property, and calls itself on its own home page «der führende Online-Vergleichsdienst der Schweiz» — Switzerland's leading online comparison service. It does not compare wages and has no commercial reason to: it earns on quotes, not on pay data. The short-time-work calculator is the exception, and it is built for an exceptional situation — one that hits a company rarely, but hits everyone in it at once.

That also explains why no pay benchmark sits beside it. Comparis has never claimed to have one; its own calculator overview lists only a holiday-days calculator and an hours converter under «work». Search engines send people there anyway, because the German word can mean either thing.

If you are new to Switzerland, three pieces of vocabulary make the page readable. Kurzarbeit is short-time work: the employer temporarily cuts hours instead of making people redundant. Lohn is pay, and Swiss usage says Lohn rather than the German Gehalt. Pensum is your workload expressed as a percentage — 100% is full-time, 60% is three days a week — and short-time work is a temporary cut to it that does not change your contract.

Where Comparis beats anything we have

If your question is how much less will land in my account next month, Comparis is the right address and we are not. We have no competing tool and no plans to build one.

Three things it does notably well. First, it asks for the pension-fund (BVG) deduction and states plainly what happens if you do not know it: enter 0, and your actual pay will be lower than the result shown. A calculator that tells you which direction it is wrong in is worth more than one that returns a clean number.

Second, it accepts the reduction in hours as well as in per cent. That matches how a reduction is actually announced inside a company — lost hours, not percentages. Third, the page exists in four languages with the same calculator and translated explanatory text: «Chômage partiel : calcul du salaire», «Lavoro ridotto in Svizzera: calcolo dello stipendio», and the English «Short-time work — salary calculation for Switzerland». Four-language coverage is rare in this market and it costs real effort.

And the legal figures check out. The values Comparis states — 80 per cent, a CHF 12'350 ceiling, at most twelve monthly payments within two years, at most four accounting periods with a loss above 85 per cent, no entitlement for fixed-term staff, apprentices, or anyone whose contract has already been terminated — match Art. 31, 34 and 35 AVIG. We read the statute rather than assuming.

If what you actually want is what your job pays

Then Comparis is not a candidate at all, and the right alternative depends on how precise you need to be.

Salarium, from the Federal Statistical Office, is the official route. You enter occupation, region, age, education and requirement level, and get an estimated gross monthly wage with its spread — free, in four languages, method published. The SECO national wage calculator returns a median and an interquartile range and exists to support enforcement of the accompanying measures on the labour market. Both are better than we are when you need a figure for one occupation in one canton.

Comparis does have an article on the subject rather than a calculator: «Durchschnittsgehalt in der Schweiz». It gives regional medians from Federal Statistical Office data — Zurich CHF 7113 a month, Northwestern Switzerland CHF 6789, Lake Geneva region CHF 6731, Central Switzerland CHF 6585, Eastern Switzerland CHF 6274, Ticino CHF 5546 — and a rule of thumb for people moving here: multiply a German or Austrian salary up to EUR 70'000 by 1.6 to 1.7, and by 1.5 above that, against living costs it puts around 43 per cent higher than Germany's. Useful, but the article is dated January 2024 and therefore predates the 2024 wage structure survey the federal office has since published.

That survey puts the median full-time gross wage at CHF 7024 a month, against CHF 6788 in the 2022 round. The lowest-paid tenth earn under CHF 4635; the best-paid tenth earn over CHF 12'526. Those are the numbers every serious Swiss salary calculator stands on, ours included.

What our calculator does, and what it does not

Our salary calculator uses the same federal figures and does three things with them. It shows where a wage sits in the Swiss distribution — below the tenth percentile, around the median, above the ninetieth. It computes the two statutory deductions that are fixed nationwide: AHV/IV/EO at 5.3 per cent and ALV at 1.1 per cent up to the CHF 148'200 annual ceiling. And it states what it does not compute — the pension fund, non-occupational accident cover and income tax, because those depend on your plan, your employer, your canton and your commune.

The limitation we have to say most plainly: we hold no pay data of our own. The wage fields on the adverts in our index are almost never filled in, and we do not pretend otherwise. Every figure on our salary page comes from the federal statistics and is linked there. If you need an occupation-specific estimate, Salarium serves you better, and that stays true for as long as we have no wage data.

What we do have, and neither Comparis nor a statistics office has, is the open jobs behind the number. Each section carries the live lists, refreshed daily, in four languages, with no account required. Wage statistics tell you what gets paid; an advert tells you who is hiring for it right now.

Which calculator is right for whom

Your company is on short-time work and you want to estimate next month's payslip: Comparis. Have the last payslip in front of you, and expect one waiting day per accounting period to come off on top.

A binding answer about your own case: the unemployment fund your employer named in its notification, and the cantonal authority. Comparis states on the page that the calculation is «nicht rechtsverbindlich» — not legally binding. The same caveat applies to our page.

What is normal in my occupation, in my region, with my education: Salarium, or the SECO national wage calculator.

Where do I sit nationally, what comes off by law, and who is hiring at that level: our calculator.

Relocating or commuting from Germany or Austria and wanting a rough conversion of your current salary: the Comparis article on average pay, knowing it is dated January 2024.

One group is served by none of these: cross-border commuters trying to work out the tax consequences of a period of short-time work. Impôt à la source is deducted at the Swiss end and settled under a treaty, and that is a question for your cantonal tax administration, not a calculator.

If short-time work is what got you looking

Short-time work is not unemployment. The contract continues, you register nowhere, and under Art. 31 para. 1 lit. c AVIG the entitlement falls away as soon as the employment has been terminated. Anyone who resigns during Kurzarbeit, or is given notice, moves into a different system — the RAV, registration, and documented job-search efforts, which only count where the RAV requires them to be recorded.

If you do start looking, a reduced Pensum is very unevenly available. Among the adverts in our index, fewer than one per cent in construction state a workload below 100 per cent, against roughly a fifth in nursing and care and a good third in education. Someone coming out of short-time work who wants to work permanently less is searching in a completely different market depending on the field.

Adverts are also shorter-lived than people assume: the median age of an open advert runs from around two to around six weeks depending on the occupational field. Waiting until the short-time work is over means looking at a different market than today's.