What is an alternative to the trade-union salary calculator?
Updated:
In short
The trade-union salary calculator is a single tool run by the Swiss Trade Union Confederation at lohnrechner.ch, and it has no English version at all: the language switch offers German, French and Italian, and salary-calculator.ch simply redirects to the German site. If you need the same answer in English, use SECO’s national wage calculator, which is built for posting staff to Switzerland and reports by canton. For the freshest figures use Salarium from the Federal Statistical Office. Checked 24 August 2026.
This answer is orientation and may contain errors. What applies to you is in your employment contract and in the collective agreement covering your sector; binding information comes from the relevant joint commission, the cantonal labour-market authority or a union.
That language gap is the whole reason this page exists, because the union tool is otherwise the most useful of the three for one specific question: am I being underpaid? It is the only Swiss salary calculator that puts the minimum wage from the applicable Gesamtarbeitsvertrag (the sector-wide collective agreement, GAV) next to the statistical range. In a country with no across-the-board statutory minimum wage, that line is often the only enforceable number on the screen.
It is free, needs no account, and asks eight things in sequence: occupation, industry, place of work, age, years with your current employer, whether you manage staff, education, and hours per week. Back come three monthly gross figures — a low usual wage, a middle one and a high one — plus the possible collective-agreement minimum, a curve showing how that profile’s pay develops with age, and a map of Switzerland with the same profile region by region. The confederation describes the band on its own site as usual wages with the bottom and top 25 per cent removed.
Queried in the union calculator on 24 August 2026 with an identical profile each time: cook, hospitality industry, age 37, ten years with the employer, no staff responsibility, Swiss vocational certificate (EFZ), 42 hours a week. The full band across the four runs was CHF 4054 to CHF 5457.
- The data is the Swiss Earnings Structure Survey (LSE) 2022, stated inside the tool and repeated under every result. Salarium, the Federal Statistical Office calculator, now pre-fills its fields from the 2024 survey — read on both sites on 24 August 2026. Between those two survey years the national full-time median moved from CHF 6788 to CHF 7024 gross a month, about 3.5 per cent.
- Results are computed for your ISCO occupational group, not your job title. The occupation list is fine-grained — close to eight thousand titles — but the tool says plainly that the wages shown are the usual wages for every occupation in the group you belong to, within your industry and your labour-market region.
- Geography is 15 labour-market regions rather than 26 cantons: Region Zürich, Region Basel, Zentralschweiz, Ticino, Région Genève, Jura-Neuchâtel, Westalpen and so on. SECO’s national calculator, by contrast, reports canton by canton, which matters if you are being posted to one specific place.
- The industry list depends on the occupation you picked. Choose "Koch / Köchin" (cook) and the tool offers exactly five industries: hospitality, hospitals, private care homes, public care homes, and primary and secondary schools — checked 24 August 2026.
- The last screen before the result asks for first name, surname and e-mail, noting that giving your address means agreeing to receive further information about pay and work. None of the three is required: the calculation returns a result with all of them left empty.
- SECO’s national wage calculator is English-capable, uses the 2022 survey for the private sector only, and rests on a wage-equation method developed at the University of Geneva in 2003. SECO also runs a separate Mindestlohnrechner that tells you whether a binding minimum applies to your assignment at all.
Where Swiss salary data comes from
| Source | Kind of data | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Salarium (Federal Statistical Office) | official salary structure survey | free |
| Union salary calculators | based on collective agreements and surveys | free |
| Portal salary calculators | user submissions and adverts | free, basis often unclear |
| International salary sites | self-reported, thin for Switzerland | sometimes paid |
| What to check | survey year, region, sector, experience | — |
| What no source can do | tell you the salary for this one role | — |
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 we measured, and why the spread is the point
We ran one profile through four regions on 24 August 2026: a cook with an EFZ vocational certificate, 37 years old, ten years with the same employer, no staff responsibility, 42 hours a week, hospitality. Region Zürich returned CHF 4958 as the middle monthly wage inside a usual band of CHF 4513 to CHF 5457. Région Genève returned CHF 4922, Région Lausanne CHF 4793, Ticino CHF 4424.
Ticino sits 10.8 per cent below Region Zürich for the same person doing the same job. If you are relocating or weighing an offer in a different part of the country, that spread is the single most useful thing this calculator does, and no national average will show it to you.
Two cautions. These are gross figures, and in hospitality the tool multiplies by thirteen rather than twelve, because the sector pays a 13th month salary — it prints "x13, brutto" under the result. And the number describes what people with that profile earn; it is not an entitlement.
The collective-agreement floor is the part nothing else shows
Alongside the statistical band, the union calculator displays a second field: the minimum wage under the collective agreement that might cover you, with a pointer to gav-service.ch. This is where Switzerland works differently from most countries an English-speaking reader will have come from. There is no single national minimum wage covering everyone; the binding floors come from sector agreements, and SECO organises its own guidance exactly along that line — sectors with mandatory minimums from a GAV declared generally binding, and sectors without, for which it offers the national wage calculator instead.
The cook example shows the gap between statistics and entitlement. Hospitality’s social partners published the 2026 minimums on 20 October 2025: CHF 3713 without vocational training, CHF 4070 with a federal certificate (EBA), CHF 4528 with the federal diploma (EFZ), CHF 4635 with EFZ plus further training, CHF 5293 with a professional examination.
In Ticino the middle usual wage for our profile, CHF 4424, sits below the CHF 4528 floor that applies to EFZ staff nationwide. That is not a bug: the statistic covers the whole occupational group in that industry, including unqualified kitchen help, while the minimum attaches to a training category. It is precisely why the union tool prints both lines — and why reading the band alone can talk you into accepting less than the contract guarantees you.
Cantonal statutory minimum wages are a separate layer again and do not appear in the result. Geneva has set CHF 24.59 an hour gross since 1 January 2026; Ticino sets CHF 20.00 to 20.50 depending on the economic sector, under a decree of 11 December 2025.
What a Swiss dossier assumes that a foreign one does not
If you moved here from an English-speaking country, three Swiss conventions will make the numbers on any of these calculators read oddly. Workload is expressed as a Pensum in per cent, not in hours — "80%" is a normal thing to see in a job advert and in a contract. Many sectors pay a 13. Monatslohn, so an annual figure is not simply twelve times a monthly one. And if you hold a B permit without settled status, income tax is deducted at source as Quellensteuer, which means the gross number and what arrives in your account diverge more than you may expect.
The union calculator handles the first two of those cleanly: it asks for weekly hours and converts a full-time collective-agreement wage down to a part-time Pensum. What it will not do is speak to you in English. That is the practical limit for a large share of people working in Switzerland in English-language roles, and it is the one place where the official tools are ahead of the union one.
What our own salary page can and cannot answer
Honest first: we have no wage figure per occupation. Swiss job adverts almost never state pay, and we do not invent a number. For "what does my occupation pay", the union calculator and Salarium are the right tools and we are not.
Our page answers the second half of the question. It carries the three federal reference points from the 2024 survey — CHF 4635 separates the bottom ten per cent, CHF 7024 is the median, CHF 12 526 separates the top ten per cent — and computes exactly the two deductions that are fixed nationwide by law: AHV/IV/EO at 5.3 per cent and ALV at 1.1 per cent up to an annual gross of CHF 148 200. It also states what it does not compute: occupational pension (BVG), non-occupational accident cover (NBU) and taxes, all of which depend on your plan, employer, canton and household.
And it attaches the thing no statistics office has: the jobs that are open right now. The median advert in our index is 20 days old; in hospitality it is 16. A pay figure with nobody hiring behind it is half an answer.
Which calculator fits which reader
You already have a job in a sector covered by a collective agreement — hospitality, construction, retail, cleaning, building services — and want to know whether you are underpaid: use the union calculator, and read the GAV line, not just the band. Nothing else shows it.
You want the most current estimate, or a figure you can quote in a letter: use Salarium. It runs on the 2024 survey, discloses its model of 14 explanatory variables, exports a PDF, and says in its own words that the estimates are not wage recommendations.
You are being posted to Switzerland, commute across a border, need the figure per canton, or need it in English: use SECO’s national wage calculator, and its separate minimum-wage checker to find out whether a binding minimum applies at all.
You have a number and want to know what it is worth here and who is hiring at that level: use our salary page. Median, distribution, the two statutory deductions, four languages including English, and the open positions next to it — with the missing pieces named on the same page.
Everything stated here about the union calculator was read in the tool itself on 24 August 2026, and the four example calculations were run that day with the profile described; the wage figures are the tool’s output, not ours. The hospitality minimum wages come from the social partners’ announcement of 20 October 2025, the cantonal minimums from the cantons of Geneva and Ticino, and the survey figures from the Federal Statistical Office. Figures about our own index are shares and ages of open adverts — we do not publish absolute index sizes.
Sources
- Swiss Trade Union Confederation — the salary calculator itself
- SGB/USS — what the calculator does and what it is based on
- L-GAV hospitality — 2026 minimum wages agreed by the social partners
- Federal Statistical Office — Salarium statistical wage calculator
- FSO — Salarium: data basis, method and limits of the model
- SECO — national wage calculator
- SECO — posting of workers and the minimum-wage checker
- Canton of Geneva — minimum wage from 1 January 2026
- Canton of Ticino — cantonal minimum wage from 1 January 2026
- FSO — Swiss Earnings Structure Survey 2024, initial findings
Related questions
What our job index says about the Swiss market
Computed live from our own index, not quoted from a study. Shares only, as of today.
Language the advert is written in
- Deutsch
- 60%
- English
- 23%
- Français
- 13%
- Italiano
- 3%
Of adverts that state a language requirement, the share asking for
- Deutsch
- 70%
- English
- 43%
- Français
- 21%
- Italiano
- 3%
19% posted in the last 7 days · Largest markets: Zürich 18% · Bern 10% · Genève 5% · Basel 5%