What is an alternative to the jobs.ch 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.

What the jobs.ch estimator does well

Start with what we do not offer. The jobs.ch salary estimator asks for no account, costs nothing, and returns a figure for a typed-in occupation across Switzerland or for a single canton. Below that come breakdowns no other freely available Swiss tool matches for density: pay by age and gender, pay by years of experience in six bands, a trend across four periods, and a ranking of the best-paying industries for that occupation.

For software developers on 24 August 2026 it showed CHF 85 433 at entry and CHF 120 000 after more than twenty years, with banking as the best-paying industry at CHF 112 240. If you are preparing for a pay conversation and want to know whether your experience band moves the number at all, you have it in thirty seconds. Our calculator cannot do that, because we hold no wage data per occupation and do not pretend otherwise.

Volume is a real argument too. On the same day, the nursing figure rested on more than eleven thousand entries and the software figure on some seven thousand. Recommending an alternative does not mean talking that down — it means being precise about what those entries are.

The unit trap, and why it matters most to people who moved here

If you arrived in Switzerland recently, the single most expensive misreading is the unit. jobs.ch answers in annual gross including bonuses and the 13th month. The federal survey answers in monthly gross for a standardised full-time job. A contract offer, meanwhile, is usually quoted as a monthly figure times twelve or thirteen. Three conventions, one currency, and nothing on either site tells you that you are converting between them.

The 13th month is the part that catches people out. Swiss law does not require it — it applies when the employment contract or a collective agreement provides for it. An annual figure that silently contains a 13th salary is therefore not comparable to a contract that does not include one, and the difference is roughly one month of pay.

The second trap is gross versus net. Every calculator named here works in gross. What actually reaches an account is lower by pension-fund contributions, non-occupational accident insurance and tax — and for many newcomers, tax is withheld at source, so the gap between the advertised figure and the payment is visible from the first payslip.

What self-reported data can and cannot tell you

jobs.ch is open about the source: the wages come from what registered members have entered, and the site invites visitors to add their own anonymously. That is what makes the breakdowns possible. It is also what produces the edges. On every occupation we checked, the typical range started at exactly CHF 10 000 a year — a stop in the data rather than a wage anyone earns full time.

Time is the second issue. The headline is an average over all entries, and the site's own trend chart shows those entries reaching back to the 2015-2017 period. Old entries are not wrong, but averaging them with current ones produces a number that belongs to no particular year.

Third, an average is not a median. A handful of very high entries pulls an average up; a median is unmoved by them. The federal office publishes medians for that reason, jobs.ch publishes averages. Both are correctly computed and they answer different questions.

The official calculators, and when they are the better answer

Salarium is the Federal Statistical Office's statistical wage calculator. You pick an industry, a region and an occupational group, refine with age, education, level of responsibility and a few more attributes, and get an estimated monthly gross wage with its dispersion, exportable as a PDF. It runs on the complete private-sector records of the 2024 Swiss Earnings Structure Survey — 1.7 million employees — through a model with 14 explanatory variables.

What makes it citable is how plainly it states its own limits: the estimates are a simplified representation of reality, they are not wage recommendations, and interactions between the variables are not modelled. Those sentences sit on the front page of the tool, not in a footnote. If you need a number that will survive being quoted in a letter, this is the one.

The SECO national wage calculator is the other official option. It was developed for the flanking measures on free movement and is aimed at firms posting staff to Switzerland; it returns a median and an interquartile range for a profile. The statistical office explains the difference itself: both rest on the same wage survey and both use a wage-equation method, but they weigh different attributes and report on different geographical levels — major regions in one case, cantons in the other — so their results diverge.

Where the coverage runs thin

jobs.ch publishes how many salary entries it holds per canton, which makes the shape of its dataset checkable. Converted to shares, it is steep: Zurich 24.2 percent, Vaud 11.2, Bern 11.0, Geneva 8.5, Aargau 7.4 — and at the far end Ticino at 0.4 percent, Uri and Appenzell Innerrhoden at 0.2 percent each. Three cantons carry close to half of everything.

That is a property, not a flaw. A calculator built on member self-reports is dense exactly where the platform is strong. On the same day, jobs.ch listed some thirty-six thousand openings in German-speaking Switzerland, around four thousand in the French-speaking part and 282 in Ticino; the salary data follows the same footprint.

The practical consequence: in Zurich, Bern or Vaud the estimate rests on a broad base. Filter to a small canton and it may rest on very little. There, an official calculator is the better tool — not because it is more precise, but because its basis does not depend on how many people in that canton happen to hold an account with a job board.

No job board can read wages off its own adverts

It would be reasonable to assume a job board could simply extract pay from its own listings. It cannot, and that applies to jobs.ch exactly as it applies to us. In the short descriptions of the open adverts in our index, roughly one in a thousand mentions a franc amount at all, and the structured pay field is effectively never filled. Swiss adverts do not state pay.

That is precisely why jobs.ch fell back on member self-reports and the Confederation runs a survey of employers. Two different detours around the same hole. We state explicitly that we do not derive wages from adverts, and no figure on our salary pages comes from one.

One consequence gets lost in the middle: all of these calculators speak in full-time terms. In our index 82.8 percent of adverts are flagged full time and the rest are part time, temporary or internships. If you are applying at 60 percent, every figure here needs scaling down by you — nobody does it for you.

Which calculator fits which question

You want the going rate for your occupation in a large canton: use the jobs.ch estimator. The breakdown by experience and industry is the densest available and it costs nothing.

You need a figure that holds up in front of an authority, a court or an HR department, or you work in Ticino or a small canton: use Salarium. Official, available in four languages, with the model documented — and where self-reported data thins out, that is the whole difference.

You have a number and want to know what it is worth: use our calculator. It shows where the amount sits nationally, what AHV and ALV deduct, what it deliberately does not compute — pension fund, accident insurance and tax — and which jobs are open at that level right now. Free, no account, in German, French, Italian and English. And if what you really want is take-home pay after tax, a dedicated gross-to-net tool such as lohncomputer.ch handles canton of residence, marital status, children and cross-border status, which we do not claim to know.