How do I deregister from the RAV?

The word is missing from the law, and that is the answer

This is countable rather than arguable. In the consolidated versions currently in force on Fedlex, no form of Abmeldung, désinscription or cancellazione appears in the Unemployment Insurance Act (AVIG/LACI/LADI), its ordinance (AVIV/OACI/OADI) or the General Social Insurance Act (ATSG/LPGA), in any of the three official languages. The same search in the old-age insurance act returns nothing either.

Run the search the other way and the imbalance is stark. Setting aside short-time work, which is the employer's business and a different procedure, registration is mentioned eight times in the act, twenty-two times in the ordinance and four times in the General Social Insurance Act. The federal guide for insured persons, 2026 edition, explains registration thirteen times and deregistration never.

That is not sloppy drafting. Swiss unemployment insurance is built so that entitlement rises and falls with a checklist. Article 8 paragraph 1 lists it: wholly or partly unemployed, a qualifying loss of work, resident in Switzerland, the contribution period, fitness for placement, and compliance with the control rules. Remove one item and the entitlement ends by itself. Nobody has to apply for that and no decision pronounces an exit.

None of this exists in English, and that is worth knowing before you start

The federal portal arbeit.swiss publishes an English section for jobseekers, and its FAQ on unemployment benefit links six PDF documents. All six are German documents. Three of them are served from exactly the same file addresses as the German page uses; the other three carry English-looking addresses but are byte-for-byte identical to the German files — same content hash, same page count, same first line.

That includes the central one. «Arbeitslosigkeit — Ein Leitfaden für Versicherte», 2026 edition, is the twenty-four-page booklet that answers most of the questions on this page, and it exists in German, French and Italian. The document an English-speaking reader downloads from the English page is the German one. There is no English edition to download.

The practical consequence is not that you are without rights — the duty to notify is federal law and applies to you exactly as it does to everyone else. The consequence is that you will not find the instruction in your own language on an official site, which is precisely why the mechanics below are worth reading once rather than improvising. If you can read German, French or Italian at all, download the guide in that language: it is the same booklet the offices themselves hand out.

Two offices, and neither one tells the other

The RAV and the unemployment fund are separate bodies with separate jobs. The RAV advises, places and supervises; the fund examines your entitlement and pays. The federal guide therefore states the duty twice over: part of your duty to cooperate is to notify your unemployment fund and the RAV of any change connected to your entitlement.

There are two different channels for that, and this is where money gets lost. The fund is informed through the monthly form the ordinance calls «Angaben der versicherten Person» — the insured person's declaration, IPA in French-speaking cantons, AvP in German-speaking ones. The RAV is told directly, by the person who runs your counselling interviews. The canton of Geneva puts it in one sentence worth memorising: filling in the monthly form informs your fund of most changes automatically, but do not forget to inform your personal adviser first.

File only the form and you have served the fund and not the RAV. Speak only to your adviser and you have done the reverse. Either way it is half a notification, and article 30 paragraph 1 letter e of the act treats a breach of the duty to inform or notify as a ground for suspension days, whether it was deliberate or simply forgotten.

What the federal list of examples leaves out

The guide spells out what a notifiable change might be: earning an interim income, starting self-employment, illness, accident, the birth of a child, disability insurance proceedings. Six examples — and the single most common reason people leave unemployment insurance is not among them: starting a permanent job.

You can read that as an oversight or as something the Confederation thought too obvious to print. For anyone searching, it makes no difference. The booklet written for exactly this reader does not contain the case, and neither does the jobseeker section of arbeit.swiss, which runs to seventeen subpages. Two of them explain how to sign on. None explains how it ends.

The largest unemployment fund in the country phrases it the same narrow way. Its FAQ gives, as its example of a change to be reported immediately, having found a temporary job. Once again it is the fixed-term case that made it into the example, not the open-ended one.

The cantons fill the gap, and they fill it differently

Where the federal level is silent, cantons publish their own instructions, but not the same ones. The jobseeker information pages of twelve cantons were read for this answer. Six name the case explicitly; six do not name it on the page read.

Basel-Stadt sets a deadline and it is the earliest possible one: if you have found a new job or are starting an interim earning, report it before you begin work. St. Gallen puts taking up a job first on its list of events to be reported to the RAV immediately, and adds a rule that appears in print almost nowhere else — produce a written employment contract starting within thirty days and you are released from the obligation to keep applying.

Zug goes furthest and maintains a page actually titled «RAV Abmeldung». It is three sentences long and asks two things: report immediately if you have found a job or no longer want placement services, and hand your new employment contract to your personal adviser, who forwards it to the fund. Producing the contract is the one concrete documentary requirement written down anywhere.

In French-speaking Switzerland, Geneva lists starting a job first under «informing the ORP and the unemployment fund when your situation changes». The Vaud guide is the most precise of all because it spells out the variants: report it if you find a job, permanent or temporary, full-time or part-time. In Ticino, «you have found work» heads the whole list.

Zurich, Solothurn, Fribourg, Valais, Jura and Neuchâtel do not name the case on their respective information pages. That does not mean different rules apply there — the duty to notify is federal and identical everywhere. It means you cannot look up the local deadline and the local form, so in those cantons a phone call to your adviser is cheaper than a guess.

The last month still counts in full

The commonest mistake is to treat the signature on the new contract as the end of the matter. Legally it is not. Every calendar month is a control period under article 27a of the ordinance, and article 26 paragraph 2 requires proof of your job-search efforts for each control period by the fifth day of the following month at the latest. The provision makes no exception for your final month.

That is what makes the St. Gallen rule useful — and what makes its source worth knowing. A release from job-search efforts on production of a signed contract starting within thirty days appears neither in the act nor in the ordinance. It is cantonal practice, published by one canton. Another canton may apply the same thing, or may not, and you will only find out by asking. Until you have asked, keep applying and keep filing the evidence.

The same applies to the monthly form. You still owe the one for your final control period: it is the document that fixes the day your entitlement ends and how many daily allowances are still due for that month. Without it the fund cannot settle the final payment at all.

The deadline that expires if you simply vanish

Starting a job and then filing nothing does not claw back allowances you have already been paid. It can cost you the last month's. Article 20 paragraph 3 of the act is blunt: the entitlement lapses if it is not claimed within three months of the end of the control period to which it relates. The federal guide repeats it in a single line — claims not made within three months expire.

Three months sounds generous and is not, because a new job sits in the middle of it. Month one in the new role is the month nobody thinks about paperwork. Month two is the one where you assume it sorted itself out. In month three the deadline passes. The second sentence of the same provision — undeliverable payments expire three years after the end of the control period — covers a different situation: money the fund has awarded but could not transfer.

The mirror-image risk is a clawback. If a change is reported late and allowances keep arriving, those days were drawn without entitlement and must be repaid under article 25 paragraph 1 of the General Social Insurance Act. Good faith only helps in combination with undue hardship, and the fund has to accept both. Reporting on time is therefore not paperwork discipline; it is the difference between a clean final statement and a demand for repayment months later.

When you should not stop claiming at all

Not every job ends unemployment. Article 10 paragraph 2 recognises partial unemployment expressly: someone who holds a part-time job and is looking for a full-time one, or for a second part-time one, still counts as partly unemployed. Take a workload — a Pensum, in Swiss usage, always stated as a percentage — below the one you were insured for, and keep looking, and you are reporting a change rather than leaving the insurance.

Pay works the same way. The guide states that work is not deemed suitable if it pays less than seventy per cent of your insured earnings, unless compensation payments are made under the interim-earnings rules. Interim earnings are therefore the normal treatment for anything below your previous terms, not an exotic exception — and they are reported, not deregistered.

The practical rule is simple: always report, never decide for yourself whether the new situation «counts». Whether the notification turns into an offset, a compensation payment or the end of your entitlement is the fund's call, not yours.

Coming back: the threshold is six months

The framework period for drawing benefits keeps running whether or not allowances are being paid. If the new job ends within it, that matters for signing on again — and a second figure then decides how much paperwork lands on you.

Article 29 paragraph 1 of the ordinance distinguishes by the length of the interruption. For the first control period within the framework period, and whenever you become unemployed again after an interruption of at least six months, you file the whole dossier with the fund: the claim for unemployment benefit, employer certificates for the last two years, the monthly form and whatever else the fund requires. If the gap was shorter, paragraph 2 applies and the monthly form plus any interim-earnings certificates is enough.

That six-month threshold is one of the most useful sentences in the ordinance and appears prominently in no brochure. It answers the question that arrives the moment a probation period goes wrong: do I have to do all of it again? Under six months, no. Over six months, yes. With the RAV itself you register for placement again in either case, because article 10 paragraph 3 ties the status to that registration every time.

Leaving the country, and other reasons that are not a job

A job is the commonest trigger, not the only one. The Zug page names a second: giving up placement services. That is allowed, and the consequence is plain — without a registration for placement you no longer count as unemployed under article 10 paragraph 3, and without that status there is no daily allowance.

Leaving Switzerland removes a different condition. Article 8 paragraph 1 letter c requires residence in Switzerland, and article 12 adds that foreign nationals without a settlement permit count as resident here for as long as they are actually staying in Switzerland on a residence permit issued for gainful employment. If you move away, you report it and the fund settles up to the date of departure. Moving to another canton is an entirely different case: only the competent office changes, and the entitlement runs on.

Starting self-employment is the one case in this group that the federal list of examples does name — and the one where early notification pays off most, because separate rules attach to it. Here too: report before you start, not afterwards.

The portal is not the notification

A common misreading treats the online account as the procedure. It is only a channel. Article 19 paragraph 1 of the ordinance names the federal online-services platform as one of two ways to register for placement; the other is turning up in person at the competent office. For the end, the ordinance names no route, because it does not treat the end as a procedure.

Two things follow. A deleted or abandoned account notifies nobody. And conversely, an account that still exists cancels nothing: it does no harm if it is still there after you start work, provided the notification reached the RAV and the fund. What counts is the information at those two offices, not the state of a login.

If you want a written trail — and you do, because in a dispute you are the only person who can produce one — send the notification in a form that carries a date: through the same service you use for the monthly form, or by email to your adviser with the contract attached. Five minutes now replaces an argument later about who knew what and when.