How many job applications does the RAV require per month?

How many applications the RAV requires

The law names NO figure. AVIG art. 17 requires efforts reasonable in the circumstances; your specific target is in your counselling agreement. In practice it is usually between 8 and 12 a month. Yours is the one that counts, not the one from a forum.

Why the statute is silent, and what it says instead

Looking for the number in the law is a dead end, and the dead end is intentional. Article 17 paragraph 1 sets a standard of conduct rather than a quota: anyone claiming benefits must, with the support of the competent employment office, do everything that can reasonably be expected to avoid or shorten unemployment, must in particular look for work — if necessary outside their previous occupation — and must be able to prove what they did.

Article 26 paragraph 1 of the ordinance narrows that without counting it: the insured person must seek work in a targeted way, as a rule in the form of a proper application. Paragraph 2 sets the filing deadline and paragraph 3 requires the office to review the efforts monthly. Across all three paragraphs there is no quantity.

The gap is filled by SECO's binding guidance to the cantonal implementing bodies. Its margin note B316 records that the responsible office has a certain margin of discretion in judging whether efforts are sufficient in quality and in quantity, that all the circumstances of the individual case must be taken into account, and that the type and required number of efforts depend among other things on the labour market and on the insured person's personal circumstances — the guidance lists age, education, geographic mobility and language barriers by name.

That is the real answer to the question. There is no nationwide figure because the guidance deliberately declines to set one. It asks for a judgement, and your adviser makes it. Anyone hunting for the number is looking in the wrong document: not the statute, but the record of their own first interview.

What the cantons put in writing

Because the federation is silent, the cantons write. Not all of them do, and those that do disagree. Bern's unemployment FAQ names a minimum of eight applications per month and repeats the figure in three places, including as grounds for a sanction: anyone who cannot show at least eight per month for the three months before unemployment should expect suspension days.

St. Gallen is both the strictest and the most precise: as a matter of principle at least twelve written, targeted and verifiable efforts every month. The canton restates that figure specifically for people on temporary contracts, and adds that an enquiry to a private placement agency counts as a single effort.

Zurich states its range almost in passing, in the instructions for the form: enter all your efforts, as a rule ten to twelve, in full each month. Uri names the same range on its own services page. The most candid is Schaffhausen, whose RAV leaflet exposes the whole mechanism — the required number depends on the labour market and your personal circumstances in that control period, the number of applications per month is agreed between you and your adviser, the normal case is ten to twelve, and fewer than ten must be specially agreed and justified.

The cantons that publish no figure are just as informative. Basel-Stadt's summary of your duties only tells you to apply often, and substitutes a weighting for a count: written applications with an individual covering letter carry far more weight than short phone calls. Vaud's official guide for job seekers lists the duty to apply and to prove it, with no quantity anywhere. Ticino's general information sheet for job seekers does the same. In those cantons the target agreement is not a formality — it is the only binding source there is.

What counts as one application

The figure is only half the requirement. Margin note B315 states that with personal job-search efforts it is not only quantity that matters but also their quality, and the examples it gives regularly surprise people. Relying exclusively on a placement firm is not a sufficient personal effort. Salary expectations belong to the quality test too: they have to match current labour-market conditions and your own qualifications, and asking far too much can itself be a culpable breach of the duty to mitigate.

The blunt sentence comes at the end of the same margin note: efforts are to be regarded as insufficient where the insured person does apply for work, but drafts the letters so superficially and rudimentarily that they cannot be described as serious applications. Twelve rows on a form are therefore not automatically twelve efforts.

The cantons turn that into concrete rules. Schaffhausen asks for written and complete application dossiers — a covering letter that refers to the specific vacancy, a CV, copies of reference letters and qualifications — and records that registering with a private placement agency counts once as one effort, after which only applications to specifically advertised positions at those agencies can be credited. St. Gallen applies the same once-only rule. Bern, by contrast, explicitly accepts applications by telephone, in person and through social networks, while asking you to apply to advertised vacancies as a matter of principle and to use speculative applications as a supplement.

There is also a floor that is rarely thought through. Article 16 paragraph 2 exempts from the duty of acceptance, among other things, work that requires a journey of more than two hours each way without suitable accommodation at the workplace, and work paying less than seventy per cent of your insured earnings. That is not a licence to apply less. It is the boundary of the search area inside which your number has to be reached.

What falling short costs, in days

The price of missing the number is not discretionary; it sits in a table. Article 30 paragraph 1 letter c requires suspension of the right to benefits where the insured person does not make sufficient personal efforts to find suitable work. Article 45 paragraph 3 of the ordinance grades the duration by fault: one to fifteen days for slight fault, sixteen to thirty for medium, thirty-one to sixty for serious fault.

Inside that frame SECO's suspension scale operates, and its stated purpose is to secure equal treatment nationally. For insufficient efforts during a control period it sets three to four suspension days the first time, five to nine the second time, and ten to nineteen the third — accompanied by a warning that the next occurrence triggers a review of your fitness for placement. On the fourth occasion the file goes to the cantonal authority for decision.

Doing nothing at all is dearer than doing too little: five to nine days the first time, ten to nineteen the second, referral the third. Filing late carries exactly the same first-time price of five to nine days, even though the work was done. Article 26 paragraph 2 explains why: let the deadline pass without an excusable reason and the efforts are no longer taken into account, and a month that is not taken into account is a month without efforts.

A suspension day is a day without a daily allowance, and it is charged against the maximum number of allowances you are entitled to. Three or four days is therefore not a reprimand; it is roughly a fifth of a month's compensation. That is why the number matters at all — not because twelve sounds more diligent than eight, but because the gap between the agreed figure and the delivered one is settled in days.

Whether twelve is realistic depends on your field

Twelve targeted applications a month means twelve adverts that actually fit you. Whether those exist is a question of supply rather than willingness — which is precisely what the guidance means when it makes the number depend on the labour market. Our own index of live Swiss vacancies lets that be measured. The median advert in engineering has been online for fifteen days; in commercial and administrative roles, retail, hospitality and finance for sixteen; in IT and logistics for eighteen; in marketing for twenty-two; in nursing and care for twenty-four; and in construction for forty-one.

A field whose visible stock half-renews every fortnight offers a control period roughly two fresh cohorts of adverts. A field with a median age of forty-one days offers less than one. In the first case twelve targeted applications are a matter of diligence; in the second they are a matter of arithmetic, and that difference is exactly the argument worth putting on the table at your advisory interview.

The workload you are looking for narrows the field again, very unevenly. In education, 34.9% of the adverts in our index mention a part-time option, in nursing and care 19.7%, in retail 12.3% — against 0.5% in construction and 1.8% in IT. Someone looking for part-time construction work is searching a fraction of an already slow market.

Language and location behave the same way, and both are named in B316 as personal circumstances. In IT, 28.0% of adverts can be worked in English alone; in retail that is 0.3% and in construction 0.2%. Concentration is occupation-specific too: one in five IT adverts in our index sits in Zurich, whereas nursing and care has its strongest location in Lucerne, with Zurich behind it. Bringing those figures to the conversation turns it from a debate about motivation into a debate about supply.

The count starts before you are unemployed

The most expensive misunderstanding is not about the size of the number but about when it starts. Margin note B314 states that every insured person is in principle obliged to look for work before claiming, in particular during the notice period, and for a fixed-term employment relationship for at least the final three months. What matters is the moment from which you know you are objectively threatened with unemployment; if that moment is more than three months before you register, the last three months are the ones examined.

The Federal Supreme Court has confirmed this repeatedly, including for the notice period running from the day notice is served, and for fixed-term contracts where efforts must be proven not merely for a short notice period but for at least the last three months before the claim. An older judgment supplies the lower bound in figures: two job-search efforts by a teacher before resuming work were held to be not enough.

The suspension scale grades this period separately. Insufficient efforts during a one-month notice period cost three to four days, during a two-month period six to eight, and from a three-month period nine to twelve. No efforts at all during a notice period longer than three months cost twelve to eighteen days. Waiting until you have registered before you start applying is therefore a decision that is invoiced on the day you register.

The guidance does recognise situations where the evidence is waived — the last two months before childbirth, the last six months before ordinary retirement age, days exempt from control, periods of incapacity through illness or accident, and cases where efforts can no longer reduce the loss because a suitable job already has a start date. Those exceptions are narrow, none of them is automatic, and none of them touches the filing deadline: the evidence for the control period must reach your RAV by the fifth day of the following month, even when it holds only a couple of lines.