The probation period in Switzerland

Probation: length, notice and extension

Under CO art. 335b. During probation the protection against dismissal in case of illness, accident and pregnancy does NOT apply — the practically most important difference from the period after it. As of 7 September 2026.

Two paragraphs decide the answer

Art. 335b of the Code of Obligations has three paragraphs and the length is settled in the first two. Para. 1 makes two statements in a single sentence: one about the notice with which either side may end the job during this stretch, and one about how long the stretch itself is. For our question it is the second that counts — the default length is the first month of the job. It is a fallback, not a requirement: it applies exactly when nobody has agreed anything else. What the first half of the sentence means in practice is a separate topic with its own answer on this site.

Para. 2 draws the frame for everything that may be agreed instead. It names three instruments — an individual written agreement, a standard employment contract and a collective employment contract — and sets one number against them: the length may be extended to three months at most. A verbal understanding does not count, and neither does a line in the job advert. To know what applies to you, you have to look either at the contract you signed or at the sector agreement behind it.

SECO adds two readings that are not in the statute, and those are where disputes get settled. The first concerns the clause that goes too far: it does not void the contract, it is the clause itself that stops having effect from the third month on. The second concerns symmetry: both sides must have the same length, and a clause binding only the employee for longer is not valid. A third possibility is already in the statute but rarely used — the same three instruments can also delete the probation period entirely. Zero is a permitted length.

Why a Swiss contract can bind you to an agreement you never signed

This is the part that most surprises people arriving from outside Switzerland. A Gesamtarbeitsvertrag — convention collective de travail in French, contratto collettivo di lavoro in Italian — is a sector-wide agreement negotiated between employer and employee associations. Normally it binds only their members. But the Federal Council can declare one universally binding, and then it applies to every employer and every employee in that sector within the stated geographic scope, whether or not they belong to any association.

For the probation period this is decisive. If you take a job as a carpenter, a butcher, a cleaner, a scaffolder or a cook, the length of your probation is very likely fixed by an instrument you have never read and were never asked to sign. It is not hidden — every one of these agreements is published as a Federal Council decree — but nothing in the recruitment process points you to it.

We went through the federal collection of these decrees and looked for the probation clause in each. Of the agreements in force at the end of August, thirty set the length themselves. The rest are either single-purpose agreements — early retirement schemes, training funds, health and safety funds — or they leave the question to the Code. Among the thirty, thirteen set three months, five set two months, ten set one month, one sets four weeks and one sets fourteen days. Sixty per cent are longer than the statutory month.

What the sectors actually say

The joinery agreement puts the length in the same sentence as the notice period: the employment relationship may be terminated at any time during the probation period on seven days’ notice, and the first three months of an employment relationship count as probation. The butchery agreement sets three months "generally" and allows a shorter one in writing. The dental-laboratory agreement goes further and lets the individual contract waive the probation altogether. Contact and call centres, timber construction, network infrastructure, private security services and the two cleaning agreements all sit at three months as well.

Two agreements grade the length by contract type. The bakery, confectionery and patisserie agreement sets three months for open-ended contracts, three months for fixed terms of at least a year, and one month for shorter fixed terms. The network infrastructure agreement drops the probation entirely for fixed-term contracts of six months or less — the sensible principle that a probation should be proportionate to the contract it sits inside.

The construction agreements cluster at two months, and the national agreement for the main construction trade adds a limit worth knowing: the first two months count as probation for employees taken on by the firm for the first time, extendable in writing by at most one further month. Come back to the same employer after a break and you are not automatically back on probation. The tile-laying agreement carries the clearest version of that idea: if the firm keeps on its own apprentice after qualification, the probation period falls away entirely.

Fourteen days, three days’ notice — the shortest rule in Switzerland

Exactly one universally binding agreement sets a probation shorter than the statutory month, and it is the largest of them all. Art. 5 of the national agreement for the hotel and restaurant industry reads: the probation period is fourteen days; a different length may be agreed in writing; an extension is however permitted only up to three months; the notice period during the probation is three days, expiring on any day.

Three days is the shortest notice period anywhere in this body of rules — shorter than the seven days in the Code and shorter than any other figure in the universally binding agreements. It comes with the same delivery rule as the Code: the notice must reach the other party by the last day of the probation at the latest. The parties to the agreement say in their own commentary that where a longer probation is agreed, the notice period should be set above three days, for example at seven or fourteen.

If you are moving to Switzerland to work in hospitality, this is the single most useful number on this page. The first fortnight of the job is decided under a three-day notice period unless your contract says otherwise, in both directions. And, as everywhere in Swiss law, the short notice is not a sign that the job is precarious — it is the fallback, and management contracts in the same sector routinely agree the longer version.

Illness extends the probation instead of pausing it

Art. 335b para. 3 works in the opposite direction to what most people expect. Where the period that would normally constitute the probation is interrupted by illness, accident or performance of a non-voluntary legal obligation, the probation period is extended accordingly. Two weeks off sick means leaving the probation two weeks later: the absence is added at the end, not subtracted at the start.

SECO draws the conclusion that appears to contradict the cap in para. 2 and does not: the extension caused by illness may run beyond the maximum of three months. The cap limits what the parties are allowed to agree; the extension under para. 3 is not an agreement but a statutory consequence of an absence.

This is also where the Swiss and the Anglo-American mental models come apart hardest. In many systems a probationary period is an internal HR construct with little legal weight, and sickness during it is a matter of policy. Here the probation is a defined legal state that switches other statutory protections on and off, and the calendar of that state moves with your absences.

Where the three-month ceiling does not apply

Apply to a Swiss administration and the Code of Obligations is not the governing text. For federal employment the answer is in Art. 27 of the Federal Personnel Ordinance, whose first sentence is short: the probation period is three months. What follows is a list of eight categories of staff for whom it may be set contractually at up to six months — military personnel; trainee customs and border security specialists and staff of the precious metals control; tax inspectors of the Federal Tax Administration; people appointed by the Federal Council; intelligence service staff with regular access to sensitive information; audit and evaluation experts of the Federal Audit Office; staff of the foreign ministry subject to transfer duty or posted abroad; and police security assistants of the Federal Office of Police. The same article lets the parties agree by mutual consent to shorten the probation or drop it.

One federal rule inverts the private-sector logic entirely. Where an employee moves between administrative units and the new contract follows the old one without interruption, the protection of Art. 336c applies even during the agreed probation period. In the private sector that protection begins only after the probation ends; in the federal administration, for internal movers, it does not switch off.

The cantons go further still in both directions. The canton of Bern allows a probation of at most six months and provides that if no notice is given during it, the employment becomes permanent; the notice period is seven days in the first month and one month thereafter. The canton of Ticino sets six months for state employees and a full school year for teachers, with a one-month notice period that must be reasoned, and lets the appointing authority extend the probation to a maximum of one year in doubtful cases.

Geneva has two clocks with almost the same name

If you are being recruited by the canton of Geneva, be careful which term you are reading. Geneva’s general personnel act sets a temps d’essai of at most three months, with a notice period of fifteen days expiring at the end of a week. Alongside it sits the période probatoire, and under Art. 47 of the implementing regulation that lasts two years: appointment follows the completion of a two-year probationary period, subject to extension.

The two are different things. During the temps d’essai the short notice period applies. During the période probatoire you are an employé rather than a fonctionnaire, and it is the appointment at the end of it that changes your status. Reading a Geneva job description and mentally substituting the Code of Obligations rule will give you the wrong picture of how long you are provisional.

The general lesson holds beyond Geneva: for any job with a canton, a cantonal hospital or a public school, the figure from the Code of Obligations is useless both as a value and as a ceiling. What governs is the personnel law of that particular public body, and it varies not only in length but in what actually happens when the period ends.

How Switzerland compares with its two largest neighbours

A large share of the people asking this question are arriving from Germany or France and carry those systems’ assumptions with them. German law, § 622 para. 3 of the Civil Code, allows an agreed probation of up to six months with a notice period of two weeks. That is twice the Swiss ceiling, with a longer notice period. And in Germany the probation has to be agreed for the short notice period to apply at all, whereas in Switzerland the first month counts as probation automatically.

France works differently again. The official government guidance for a permanent contract sets the initial période d’essai at two months for an employee or manual worker, three for a technician or supervisor and four for a cadre. Each may be renewed once where an extended branch agreement provides for it, the contract or engagement letter says so, and the employee agrees in writing during the initial period — giving maximums of four, six and eight months. The period is counted in calendar terms, begins on the first day of work and cannot be deferred.

Set against those, the Swiss rule is the shortest and the flattest: one month by default, three at most, and the same figure regardless of whether you are a cleaner or a chief executive. What Switzerland does not have is the sliding scale by seniority that France uses, and what it does have instead is the sector agreement — which is why the real spread in Switzerland runs between fourteen days and three months by industry rather than by rank.

What our own board of Swiss adverts shows

We searched our own stock of live adverts for roles in occupations whose sector carries a universally binding agreement with its own probation rule. The match is made on unambiguous occupational names in the job title — cook, joiner, butcher, bricklayer, hairdresser and so on, across all four advertising languages. An advert counts only if the title names the occupation, so every share below is a lower bound rather than true coverage.

On that measure 2.51 per cent of live adverts fall into one of these sectors, plus a further 0.21 per cent that are apprenticeship postings in the same trades, where Art. 344a rather than the sector agreement governs. Within that group the weight sits clearly above the statutory month: 41.1 per cent of the adverts are in a sector with a three-month probation, 18.7 per cent in one with two months, 29.8 per cent in hospitality with its fourteen days — and only 10.5 per cent in a sector that keeps the statutory month.

Two independent measurements land in the same place. Counted by agreement, sixty per cent of the universally binding agreements exceed the statutory month. Counted by advert, it is 59.8 per cent. One number measures rulebooks and the other measures open jobs; that both come out at roughly six in ten is the strongest argument we can make that "one month" is the wrong thing to assume.

What to check before you sign

Three things, in this order. Does a universally binding sector agreement cover the employer? The scope is stated in the Federal Council decree itself, and some agreements are national while others cover only named cantons. Is the length in the contract the same for both sides? And does it exceed three months? Anything above that is, on SECO’s reading, effective only up to the third month anyway.

The one thing you cannot check from the advert is the length itself. In our own stock of live adverts the probation period is essentially never stated — it belongs to the contract, and in a covered sector to the agreement behind it. Asking about it at the offer stage is normal and is not read as distrust.

What happens during the probation period — which deadlines run, which protections are absent, and what is still owed at the end — is a separate question with its own answer on this site, on dismissal during the probation period. And if a job does end there, entitlement to unemployment benefit depends on your contribution months over the preceding two years, not on the probation. Registering with the regional employment centre works the same way however short the job was.