Ill or injured while unemployed in Switzerland: the deadlines, the daily allowances and what comes after

Falling ill while unemployed

Under AVIG art. 28. Report it immediately — not at the end of the month. Missing that loses allowances, and it only surfaces when the statement arrives. As of 7 September 2026.

The one-week deadline, and what missing it costs

Article 42 paragraph 1 of the unemployment insurance ordinance is one sentence long: someone temporarily unfit for work, wholly or partly, who wants to claim the daily allowance reports that incapacity to the RAV within one week of it starting. Not to the fund, not to the doctor, not at the next appointment.

Paragraph 2 prices the miss. Report after the deadline without a valid excuse, and without having entered the incapacity on the monthly form «Angaben der versicherten Person» — the insured person's own declaration — and you have no entitlement for the days of incapacity before you reported. This is not a sanction with a scale of fault attached. The days simply drop out. Someone who spends three weeks in bed and calls afterwards does not lose three days; they lose the days up to the call.

The form is the second route, and it is why the deadline bites less often than it reads. Declaring the incapacity on the monthly form counts as reporting it. If you have already handed in that month's form, you report it to the unemployment fund instead. From the fourth day of incapacity, both offices want a medical certificate — the RAV and the fund, separately.

Illness and accident are two different insurers

In everyday English both are «being off sick». In Swiss social insurance they are two systems with two paying parties, and the split happens fast. For illness or pregnancy the unemployment insurance carries the first 30 days. For an accident it carries three days including the day of the accident, and then Suva — the Swiss national accident insurance fund — pays the daily allowances.

The reason sits in the accident insurance act. Under Art. 1a para. 1 lit. b UVG, people who meet the conditions of Art. 8 AVIG are compulsorily insured against accidents. As an unemployed person you are not less covered than you were in a job; you are covered by a different insurer. Art. 3 UVG sets the edges: for unemployed people the cover starts on the day the entitlement conditions are first met, and ends on the 31st day after the day they were last met. That same 31-day run-on applies when a job ends, which is what covers the gap between your last working day and your first daily allowance.

And it is two reports, not one. The accident goes additionally to your unemployment fund on the form «Meldung Unfall während Arbeitslosigkeit», and to the organiser if you are on a labour-market measure. In case anyone assumes one covers the other, Art. 53 para. 5 of the accident insurance ordinance says so explicitly: reporting the accident to Suva does not release you from the duty under Art. 42 para. 1 AVIV. An ordinance rarely spells that out for no reason.

30 and 44 measure different things

Article 28 paragraph 1 AVIG names both in one sentence, and they are routinely confused. The 30 is a duration per episode: the entitlement runs «at most until the 30th day after the beginning of the total or partial incapacity for work». The 44 is a budget for the whole benefit window: within that window there are at most 44 such daily allowances, however many episodes they are spread across.

So one month off consumes 30 of the 44. Four separate weeks over two years consume 28 and never touch the 30-day limit at all. The counter runs on your personal benefit window — the Rahmenfrist, the two-year frame in which you may draw benefits — and not on the calendar year. Nothing resets on 1 January.

It also helps to see what this rule is not. It is not sickness insurance bolted onto unemployment insurance. It is an exception to the control requirements. The statute describes insured people who are «temporarily not, or only partly, fit for work and for placement and who therefore cannot meet the control requirements». The unemployment insurance is not paying you because you are ill; it is paying so that being ill does not cost you your entitlement.

What happens on day 31

There is exactly one route back into the daily allowance, and it carries a condition many people do not meet. Article 28 paragraph 4 AVIG applies to unemployed people who have exhausted the entitlement under paragraph 1, remain temporarily and partially unfit for work «and draw benefits from a daily-allowance insurer». They get the full daily allowance at 75 per cent capacity or more, and a daily allowance reduced by half at 50 per cent or more, provided they are still placeable given that reduced capacity.

The condition is the clause in the middle. Without a daily-allowance policy, paragraph 4 does not open. And anyone who does draw such benefits meets paragraph 2 of the same article: daily allowances from health or accident insurance that replace lost earnings are deducted from the unemployment compensation. This is coordination between insurers, not two payments stacked.

If the restriction turns out not to be temporary, the case leaves unemployment insurance altogether. Then the question is placeability under Art. 15 AVIG, and paragraph 2 there points expressly at coordination with the disability insurance. That is a separate procedure with its own timelines, and it starts with a conversation at the RAV rather than with a downloaded form.

Sickness daily-allowance cover is voluntary here — and the window to keep it is short

This is the gap that catches people arriving from countries where statutory sickness benefit is automatic, and it is deliberate in Swiss law. Against accidents you are compulsorily insured as an unemployed person. Against illness there is no obligation at all: Art. 67 para. 1 of the health insurance act says that a person resident or gainfully employed in Switzerland, aged at least 15 and under 65, «may» take out daily-allowance insurance. May, not must.

Most employees in Switzerland are covered through an employer's collective policy and only discover the fact when they stop working there. For collective policies written under the health insurance act, Art. 71 governs the exit: a person leaving the collective policy has the right to transfer into that insurer's individual policy; as long as no higher benefits are insured, no new reservations may be attached, and the entry age from the collective contract is kept. The insurer has to inform you of this right in writing — and if it fails to, you stay in the collective policy.

The deadline is in the same paragraph, and it is the part worth knowing before you need it: the transfer right must be exercised within three months of receiving that notice. One caveat matters. Many Swiss collective sickness policies are written not under the health insurance act but under the insurance contract act, and then the transfer right follows the contract or the collective labour agreement rather than Art. 71. Which of the two applies to you is in your former employer's policy — a question that is far cheaper to ask on your last working day than on your 31st day of illness.

Who pays your premiums while you are ill

Social insurance contributions come off the unemployment compensation as it is paid, and Art. 22a AVIG lists them exhaustively: the employee's share of AHV, IV and EO — old-age, disability and loss-of-earnings insurance — in paragraph 2; the occupational pension contribution covering the death and disability risks in paragraph 3; and at most two thirds of the premium for compulsory non-occupational accident insurance in paragraph 4. The remaining third is carried by the insurance itself and paid to Suva.

The same arrangement appears from the other side in Art. 91 para. 4 UVG: the unemployment insurance owes the entire premium for unemployed people and deducts the insured person's share from the compensation. One footnote explains why statements look different in bad months: no premiums are levied for waiting days or suspension days.

What is missing from that list is the compulsory health-care insurance. Your Krankenkasse premium — the basic health insurance every resident must hold — keeps running and is not deducted from the daily allowance. It stays entirely yours. If money gets tight, premium reductions are administered by your canton, and the conditions differ from canton to canton; no federal figure substitutes for asking the office in your own canton.

What a medical certificate changes about which jobs you must take

In the unemployment procedure a medical certificate is not only evidence about the past; it moves a rule about the future. Article 16 paragraph 2 letter c AVIG takes work out of the duty to accept when it «is not appropriate to the age, personal circumstances or state of health of the insured person». A vacancy your certificate rules out is therefore not suitable work, and turning it down is not a refusal in the sense of Art. 30 AVIG.

Paragraph 3 of the same article handles pay. Where earning capacity is reduced, paragraph 2 letter a does not apply, and work is exempt from the duty to accept where the pay is lower than it ought to be given that reduced capacity. The benchmark moves with you rather than simply disappearing.

The other side of the rule is verification. Under Art. 28 para. 5 AVIG you must prove incapacity — and capacity — with a medical certificate, and the cantonal office or the fund may in any case order an examination by a medical examiner at the insurance's expense. Art. 15 para. 3 repeats this where there is substantial doubt about fitness for work. A certificate is evidence, not a self-declaration, which is also why a specific one («no night work», «no lifting above ten kilos») carries further in the procedure than a blanket one.

The advert will not tell you whether the job fits your certificate

This is where the law meets a practical limit we can measure in our own index. If state of health decides suitability, adverts ought to name the conditions that decide it — shift work, night duty, weekend cover, on-call duty, physical strain, a driving licence. Across the SwissJobs.app index, 3.4 per cent of adverts do. More than 96 per cent are silent about exactly the dimension a medical certificate restricts.

The distribution by field is as lopsided as the chart shows. In construction, trades and logistics 14.9 per cent of adverts name such a condition, usually the driving licence; in nursing and care it is 9.7 per cent, there almost always shift or night duty. In office and administration it is 0.3 per cent and in IT and engineering 0.5 per cent. And in hospitality, where shift work is the default, only 2.8 per cent say so — what is taken for granted does not get written down.

There is a sharper version of this for anyone reading in English. Among adverts published in English in Switzerland, 0.4 per cent name any of these conditions, against 4.8 per cent of German-language adverts, 3.8 per cent of French ones and 3.4 per cent of Italian ones. English-language hiring here skews towards office, pharma and engineering roles, and those adverts describe a role rather than a working pattern. So the search filter you want does not exist: the question about shift plans, on-call rotas and lifting belongs in the first conversation with the employer and in the agreement with your RAV adviser, not in a search box.

Do you still have to apply while you are ill?

Every person who falls ill asks this second, and the statutory text helps less than you would hope. Art. 17 para. 1 AVIG requires you to do everything that can reasonably be expected to shorten your unemployment, and to be able to prove those efforts. Art. 26 AVIV sets the monthly check. Neither article names an exemption for days of illness.

What the law does instead is put the word «reasonable» in, and applying it is the RAV's job rather than the ordinance's. How many job-search efforts are expected at which degree of incapacity is therefore cantonal practice and depends on your particular certificate, and we deliberately publish no number: there is no nationally valid one.

What can be said is that the conversation belongs before the end of the month, not after it. Agreeing in the counselling interview what applies for this month leaves you with a record on the fifth of the following month instead of an explanation. And partial incapacity is expressly foreseen — Art. 28 para. 1 AVIG speaks of insured people who are «not, or only partly» fit for work and for placement. At 50 per cent capacity the job search continues, at a different volume.

One thing about the sources, for readers outside Switzerland

The federal employment portal arbeit.swiss publishes its FAQ on unemployment benefits in German, French and Italian. There is no English version of that page, and no English text of the two ordinances quoted here either — the federal law portal fedlex carries the unemployment and accident insurance ordinances in the three official languages only. Everything on this page is taken from those, and the German pages are linked below so you can check the wording yourself.

That is worth knowing beyond this one question. If you are managing a Swiss benefit claim in English, the binding text is not in English at any point, and neither is the form your fund will send you. Two of the forms named above — «Angaben der versicherten Person» and «Meldung Unfall während Arbeitslosigkeit» — are worth memorising by their German names, because that is how the fund will refer to them however you speak to it.

The short version: report within a week; medical certificate to both offices from the fourth day; 30 days and at most 44 daily allowances per benefit window for illness and pregnancy; three days and then Suva for an accident, with a second report to the fund. And ask your own RAV before the week is out — only their guidance and your fund's decision bind anyone.