How do I end a cover letter?

Three blocks, and only one of them is a sentence

Switzerland does not publish an official English-language cover-letter template. What it publishes is a list of formal elements on arbeit.swiss — postal address, company address, date, subject heading, opening salutation, closing greeting and signature — and a full worked template on berufsberatung.ch and its French and Italian siblings. The template is the more detailed of the two, and it splits the ending into three named parts: closing sentence, sign-off, enclosures.

The split is the useful part. The closing sentence says what you want the letter to produce. The sign-off is the greeting, the signature and your printed name. The enclosures line sits below all of that, outside the letter proper, and simply lists what travels with it.

People who do not keep the three apart write four sentences where one belongs: a summary of the letter, a thank-you for reading, a vague statement about availability and a request for an interview. Three of those repeat what came before. The one item nobody can supply for you — the date you could actually start — is usually the one left out.

That date is the only part of a Swiss ending that requires work. Everything else is prescribed: the greeting is fixed, the signature is fixed, the enclosures line has an approved short form. The date has to be calculated, and the calculation is not difficult.

The closing sentence asks; it does not promise

The official template is narrow about what may go there: write that you look forward to a reply and/or that you would be glad of an interview. Two permitted contents, both phrased as requests, neither conditional on anything. That is the entire specification, and it is enough.

It rules out three popular English formulations. «I look forward to your positive reply» takes the outcome as given and turns a request into an expectation. «Should you have any questions, I remain at your disposal» is empty, because your telephone number is already in the letterhead where the same guidance requires it. And a third restatement of «I would welcome the opportunity to discuss this further» only repeats the sentence before it.

It also rules out the announcement you will not honour. «I will call you next week» is a legitimate closing line — but only if you call, and next week is too early. A call seven days after sending reaches a process that, for an English-language advert, has in half of all cases been running for more than five weeks already.

What the closing sentence does carry well is one concrete fact: the date you are free from, and, if the advert asked for it, your salary expectation. Both answer questions the reader actually has. Nothing else at the end of the letter answers a question at all.

The start date: calculate it, do not estimate it

Article 335c of the Code of Obligations sets the notice period after the probation period: one month during the first year of service, two months from the second to the ninth year of service inclusive, three months thereafter — and in every case the notice expires at the end of a calendar month. The periods may be varied by a written individual, standard or collective employment contract, but reduced below one month only by a collective contract and only in the first year of service.

Applied to a letter written in late August 2026, that becomes arithmetic. In your second to ninth year of service, giving notice by 31 August ends the employment on 31 October, so you start on 1 November. With a one-month period it is 1 October; with three months it is 1 December. In practice you will not sign the new contract in the same month you send the letter, which moves each of those dates a month later.

So the usable formulation is neither «immediately» nor a bare «by arrangement», but both together: a specific date and an opening behind it. «Available from 1 December 2026, earlier by arrangement» tells the reader exactly what they need in order to plan, and still leaves room to negotiate.

The probation period is the exception worth knowing. Under Article 335b, during the probation period either party may terminate at any time on seven days’ notice, and the probation period is the first month of employment unless a written agreement extends it — to a maximum of three months. If you are still inside it, your date is a week away rather than a quarter away, and that is worth stating plainly at the end.

One caution on sources: the English text of the Code of Obligations published on fedlex is a translation provided for information. The German, French and Italian versions are the authoritative ones, and any contract or collective agreement that applies to you can set different periods within the limits above.

Following up: the official advice gives no deadline, our adverts do

arbeit.swiss devotes a section to following up. If you have had no response for some time, it says, get in touch and politely ask about the status of your application; this shows the employer you are interested and makes you stand out. It never says how long «some time» is, which is precisely the part applicants get wrong.

The live adverts supply the missing number. The median advert open on SwissJobs.app today was posted 19 days ago. Only 14.4 percent are a week old or less; 22 percent are between eight and fourteen days old; 26.3 percent are between two weeks and a month. At the far end, 27.2 percent have been open for more than 60 days and 16.1 percent for more than 90.

Two consequences for the ending. First, a call three or five days after sending is not early, it is out of step: it reaches a process that in the usual case started before your letter existed. Ten working days is the earliest sensible threshold. Second, a start date two or three months out is not a disqualifier — more than a quarter of these employers have already lived with the vacancy for longer than that.

How long to wait also depends on the language the advert is written in, and the spread is large. German-language adverts are a median of 18 days old, Italian-language 22, French-language 30, English-language 37. For English-language adverts 53.4 percent are older than 30 days and 36.5 percent older than 60. If you applied in English, ten working days is if anything early.

Greeting and signature — the part with nothing to invent

Three lines: the greeting, the signature, your printed first and last name. Swiss practice keeps the greeting to a single short formula; the German template prints «Freundliche Grüsse», the French «Meilleures salutations», the Italian «Cordiali saluti», and «Kind regards» is the working English equivalent. No comma after it, no further sentence below it.

The three language versions of the same official template describe the signature slightly differently, and the difference is instructive. The German version asks for a digital signature, the Italian for an electronic one, and the French one is the most concrete: a handwritten signature that you scan and insert before saving the letter as a PDF, if you are applying entirely online.

In practice: a scan or a clean photograph of your signature, cropped, about one line high, sitting between the greeting and your printed name. A handwriting-style font is not a substitute, because it shows exactly the thing a signature is not meant to show — that it was typed.

The printed name stays under the signature image regardless. It is the line that gets read when the scan is poor, when the file is converted, or when the letter is pulled into an application form as plain text.

The enclosures line, and when it stops earning its place

Below the signature comes the enclosures line. The template asks for a list of what accompanies the letter and, where space is short, explicitly permits the short form: the words «application documents» alone. Both are correct, and the short form is a sanctioned variant rather than a fallback.

What is notable is that this line does not appear in the federal list of formal elements at all. There, the letter ends at the greeting and the signature. The enclosures line is a convention of the careers-service template, not a requirement of the Confederation — which is why it appears in many good Swiss letters and is missing from just as many without anyone objecting.

There is one case where it genuinely stops earning its place: when the letter is not sent as a document but uploaded into a form that takes each file separately and displays them as a list. Your reader can already see what you attached. The line does no harm there, but it does not replace naming the files properly.

It earns the most in the opposite case, when the whole dossier is a single PDF — which is what arbeit.swiss asks for with work references, diplomas and certificates. In a twenty-page PDF, the enclosures line on page one is the table of contents nobody else writes.