How does temporary work function in Switzerland?

Three forms, and only one of them is temporary work

Article 27 of the ordinance opens the map: staff leasing "comprises temporary work, Leiharbeit and the occasional transfer of employees to hiring companies". Three forms under one heading — and in everyday Swiss speech all three get called "temporär".

The first is tightly drawn. Temporary work exists "where the purpose and the duration of the employment contract between the employer and the employee are limited to a single assignment at a hiring company". Both elements, purpose and duration. When the assignment ends, the contract ends; a further assignment needs a further contract. This is the model most people picture when they say Temporärbüro.

The second inverts it. Leiharbeit exists where the purpose of the contract "lies principally in transferring the employee to hiring companies" and where "the duration of the employment contract is independent of individual assignments". Here you are employed by the leasing firm on a continuing basis and the assignments rotate underneath. Between two assignments you remain employed — which changes almost everything that follows from being employed.

The third form is the ordinary case in companies that have nothing to do with the leasing industry. Occasional transfer exists where the contract is aimed at you working "principally under the employer’s power of direction", where you are transferred to a hiring company "only exceptionally", and where the contract’s duration is independent of any such assignments. An engineering firm sending a fitter to a customer for six weeks falls here.

Why the three-way split matters is settled by Article 28 in a single line: staff leasing "requires a licence only in the forms of temporary work and Leiharbeit". Occasional transfer does not, and paragraph 2 additionally exempts firms "which lease exclusively the owner or the co-owners of the business". A sole trader renting out their own labour is not running a licensable leasing operation.

Underneath that, Article 29 sets the threshold for doing it commercially: a firm leases commercially if it does so regularly and with the intention of making a profit, "or achieves an annual turnover of at least CHF 100’000 from its leasing activity". And "regularly" means concluding "more than ten leasing contracts within twelve months concerning the uninterrupted assignment of an individual employee or a group of employees". Two figures on which an entire firm’s licence obligation depends.

What makes it leasing in the first place: who may give you orders

Before any of that comes the prior question — is this staff leasing at all, or a service contract, a works contract, or two companies collaborating? Article 26 of the ordinance answers with a single criterion: a lessor is "whoever transfers an employee to a hiring company by ceding to that company essential powers of direction over the employee". Not where you work and not who invoices whom, but who is entitled to tell you what to do.

Paragraph 2 lists three indicators from which leasing "may also be inferred, in particular": that you are integrated into the hiring company’s work organisation "in personal, organisational, material and temporal respects"; that you perform the work "with the tools, material or equipment of the hiring company"; and that the hiring company "bears the risk of defective performance of the contract". Someone working in the client’s team, on the client’s machines, to the client’s schedule is very probably leased, whatever the contract is headed.

Paragraph 3 contains a prohibition that is rarely mentioned and that matters as soon as a chain of suppliers forms: onward leasing of already-leased employees — sub-leasing or intermediate leasing — "is not permitted". Two narrow exceptions survive. Either the first company assigns the employment relationship to the second for the duration of the assignment, so that the second becomes the employer, holds a leasing licence, and transfers you to the third company; or the first company stays your employer, concludes the leasing contract with the third company itself, and the second merely brokers the arrangement.

Paragraph 4 carves out consortia: where companies work together in a consortium and place staff at its disposal, "there is no staff leasing unless an essential right of direction is ceded". The power of direction is again the hinge — and on construction sites, where consortia are routine, that sentence decides whether a licence would have been needed.

The two-day notice period applies to one form only

What Swiss staff leasing is best known for is how fast it can end. Under Article 19 paragraph 4 of the Act, where an assignment is open-ended, either party may terminate during the first three months of uninterrupted employment on at least two days’ notice, and from the fourth to the sixth month inclusive on at least seven days’ notice. It runs in both directions and it is the real price of the flexibility.

Far less well known is the limit, and it sits in one sentence in Article 49 of the ordinance: "The notice periods of Article 19 paragraph 4 AVG apply only to the transfer of employees to hiring companies in the form of temporary work." They do not apply to Leiharbeit, and they do not apply to occasional transfer. There, the contract, any applicable collective agreement and the Code of Obligations govern instead.

So the classification in Article 27 has an immediate consequence for your income, and it cuts both ways. Someone engaged in the form of temporary work can be out of work in week twelve with two days’ warning. Someone permanently employed by a leasing firm whose assignments rotate is not exposed to that period — but is equally not free to walk off an assignment. Which of the two applies follows from the purpose and duration of the contract, not from the word on the letterhead.

The contract, and what governs if it is missing or incomplete

Article 19 paragraph 1 requires that the lessor "as a rule" conclude the contract with the employee in writing. Paragraph 2 lists what it must settle: the type of work, the place of work and the start of the assignment, the duration of the assignment or the notice period, working hours, pay with any expenses, allowances and social-insurance deductions, benefits for overtime, sickness, maternity, accident, military service and holidays, and the dates on which all of it is paid.

The provision that decides a dispute is paragraph 3: where the requirements as to form or content are not met, "the working conditions customary for the locality and the occupation, or the statutory provisions, apply, unless more favourable working conditions have been agreed orally for the employee". A missing or thin contract therefore does not leave the relationship undefined — it is filled in with what is locally and occupationally customary, and an oral promise of something better survives.

On the other side of the triangle sits the leasing contract between the lessor and the hiring company. Article 50 of the ordinance fixes its timing: it "must in principle be available before work commences, unless the urgency of commencing work no longer permits a written conclusion of contract", in which case it is "to be drawn up in writing at the earliest possible time". The emergency exception is expressly provided for — it is a deferral, not an exemption.

And if the licence is missing altogether? Article 19 paragraph 6 declares the employment contract invalid — but points expressly to Article 320 paragraph 3 of the Code of Obligations, which is the other half of the answer. In the official English translation: "Where an employee performs work in good faith for the employer under a contract which is subsequently found to be invalid, both parties must discharge their obligations under the employment relationship as if the contract had been valid until such time as one party terminates the relationship on grounds of the invalidity of the contract." Work already done in good faith is not unpaid work because the firm lacked a licence.

What the advert ought to say — and what our own index actually contains

One duty lands exactly where a job search begins. Article 18 paragraph 1 of the Act requires that when publicly advertising job offers, the lessor state its name and exact address, and "clearly indicate in the advertisement that the employee is being engaged for staff leasing". The disclosure belongs in the advert, not in the interview.

So we searched our own index of open Swiss adverts for any of the words the Act and the ordinance use for this relationship — Personalverleih, Verleiher, Einsatzbetrieb, Verleihvertrag, Einsatzvertrag, Rahmenvertrag, Leiharbeit, and their French and Italian equivalents including location de services, bailleur de services, entreprise locataire, travail en régie, fornitura di personale a prestito and impresa acquisitrice. The result is one advert. That one is not a leasing engagement at all: it is a back-office role at a home-care provider whose title lists Personalverleih as a field of duties. Across the French-, Italian- and English-language adverts, none of these words appears at all, and none appears in any sender’s name either.

The everyday word does barely better. Of the senders whose adverts we index, only 1.5 per cent have ever used "temporär", "temporaire", "temporaneo" or "temporary" in an advert. The English-language adverts are the least concentrated of the four: 1.5 per cent of the senders publishing in English have used it, and unlike the German, French and Italian segments — where in each case a single sender accounts for most of the hits — no single firm dominates the English ones. That is worth knowing for a reader arriving from abroad: even in the language you are searching in, this vocabulary belongs to a handful of firms rather than to the market.

Read that carefully, though. We index an advert’s title and a short summary of it, not its full text; a disclosure further down the body would not be visible to this count. What can honestly be said is narrower and still useful: in the part of an advert you see first when searching, the language of this legal relationship is effectively absent. If you need to know whether a position is staff leasing, the answer is in the contract and in the federal register of licensed firms, not in the results list.

Who is responsible if something happens on the assignment

This one is answered not by employment-services law but by accident-prevention law, and the answer is unambiguous. Article 10 of the Ordinance on the Prevention of Accidents carries the marginal note "Personalverleih" and consists of a single sentence: an employer who employs in its own business workers borrowed from another employer "has the same obligations towards them in respect of occupational safety as towards its own employees".

That briefly swaps the roles. The employment contract, the pay and the reference belong to the leasing firm. Instruction, protective equipment and safety at the actual workplace belong to the hiring company — to the same extent as for its own permanent staff. Being put on a machine on day one without an introduction is not a grey area.

In practice the two addresses answer two different sets of questions. Payroll, deductions, holiday entitlement and the Arbeitszeugnis, the Swiss employer reference, go to the lessor. Induction, protective equipment, workplace hazards and who instructs you on site go to the company you are standing in.

What the Confederation knows about this industry

Staff leasing is the one part of the Swiss labour market where every licensed firm has to file figures with the state each year. Article 18 paragraph 2 of the Act gives the licensing authority the power, and Article 46 of the ordinance sets it out: a lessor whose activity requires a licence "keeps a record of the assignments of the employees it leases" and reports to the competent cantonal authority, after the end of each calendar year, the total assignment hours worked and the number, sex and origin — Swiss or foreign — of the persons leased.

SECO ensures a uniform reporting procedure and may, in partial surveys, require additional anonymised characteristics. On its page on private employment services and staff leasing, read on 31 August 2026, SECO notes that these annual statistical returns can be filed through the EasyGov platform since January 2026.

The same page draws a distinction that matters to anyone commuting or relocating. Placement and leasing activity within Switzerland requires a cantonal licence, granted by the canton in which the firm has its registered office. If the activity is also carried on across the border, an additional federal licence from SECO is required. SECO is in addition the supervisory authority over the cantonal enforcement authorities — so the licence is cantonally granted and federally supervised.

That is also where a general answer has to stop. The competent office is the employment authority of the firm’s canton, and practice and contact points differ from canton to canton. Whether a given firm is licensed is recorded in the register of licensed placement and leasing businesses kept jointly by SECO and the cantons; which form of staff leasing your own contract establishes is recorded in that contract. Binding information on an individual case comes from the cantonal enforcement authority, a legal advice service or a trade union — not from a job board.