Do I have a right to work from home in Switzerland?

Home office: no right, but consequences once agreed

There is NO right to home office in Switzerland. It comes from a contract, a policy, or established practice. Once agreed, it creates employer duties that are routinely overlooked. As of 7 September 2026.

The word is not in the law — and the federal authority says so itself

Search Swiss federal law for «home office», «telework» or «remote work» and you will not find an article. Neither the Code of Obligations (OR/CO) nor the Labour Act (ArG/LTr) contains one. That is not an oversight; it is how this body of law is built. The Code of Obligations regulates what the two parties owe each other and leaves the place of work to them.

The State Secretariat for Economic Affairs, SECO, puts the consequence in one sentence on its home-office page: the Labour Act does not mention home office explicitly, but the provisions of the Act and health protection apply regardless of the place of work. That sentence contains the whole split this question turns on. Whether you may work from home is not answered by statute. What applies once you do is answered in detail.

One practical note for readers who work in English but live under Swiss rules. SECO publishes that guidance, and the brochure of 12 February 2024 behind it, in German, French and Italian. Fedlex publishes the Labour Act in the same three languages and Romansh, with no English edition; the Code of Obligations does have an English text, but it carries the standard warning that it is not an official publication and only the German, French and Italian versions are authentic. Where this answer quotes the Labour Act, it is quoting a translation of an authentic text, not the text itself.

If not the statute, then the agreement — and it needs no particular form

Art. 319(1) CO defines the individual employment contract as an undertaking to work in the employer’s service for a salary. There is no place in it. Where the work is done therefore follows from what the parties agreed and, where they agreed nothing, from the employer’s directives.

Art. 321d(1) CO grants that power: general directives on the performance of the work, plus specific instructions in the individual case. Paragraph 2 obliges the employee to comply with them in good faith. What the statute does not settle is whether the place of work belongs to the agreed content of the contract or to the sphere of directives. The individual contract settles that — and it settles the question in both directions. An employee with no claim to home office because nothing was agreed is, by the same logic, not automatically obliged to work from home either where a place of work was agreed.

A detail that matters more than it looks. Under Art. 320(1) CO the individual employment contract requires «no particular form» to be valid unless the law provides otherwise. An agreement about the place of work therefore does not have to appear in the signed document in order to be an agreement. What follows from a practice lived for years is a question of evidence and interpretation in the individual case; the statute says only that writing is not the condition.

Switzerland has a Home Work Act. It is not about your flat.

There is a federal act about working at home, and almost nobody who says «home office» today falls under it. The Home Work Act of 20 March 1981 defines its subject in Art. 1(4): home work means any commercial and industrial work by hand or machine that a home worker performs, alone or with family members, in their dwelling or in another workroom of their choosing, for a wage.

Craft and industrial work by hand or machine — assembly at the kitchen table, not a spreadsheet on a laptop. For that form of work its own rules follow, such as Art. 5(1), under which the employer must reimburse the necessary expenses, in particular for tools, material and their transport, and Art. 5(2), which forbids charging the worker for tools the employer supplies.

Why the boundary matters for screen work is Art. 3(f) of the Labour Act: the Labour Act does not apply to home workers. If working from home made you a home worker in the sense of the Home Work Act, maximum hours, daily rest and the prohibition on night work would fall away for you. It does not — and that is why a definitional line that looks like hair-splitting is the reason the Labour Act’s protection reaches your flat at all.

An undertaking is not a building — which is why the Labour Act travels

The Labour Act attaches its scope to the undertaking, not to premises. Art. 1(2) states that an undertaking exists where an employer employs one or more workers permanently or temporarily, irrespective of whether particular installations or premises are used. The French text is blunter still: «même sans faire usage d’installations ou de locaux particuliers.» An undertaking is a relationship between people, not an address.

So SECO’s sentence is not merely a recommendation but the obvious reading of the Act: an employment relationship subject to the Labour Act in the office remains subject to it when the same work is done from a flat. Who is outside was already outside in the office — Art. 3(d) excludes employees exercising «a higher managerial function», for whom Art. 3a nevertheless keeps the health-protection provisions in force.

Ordinance 3 to the Labour Act requires the employer, in Art. 2(1), to issue all directives and take all measures necessary to safeguard physical and mental health, with ergonomically sound working conditions named explicitly. Its vocabulary, however, is visibly that of a building: Art. 24 speaks of protective walls, of separation from «neighbouring installations or stores», and requires permanent workstations to have a view outdoors. That is where the written law lags behind the practice: the duty is there, its wording was drafted for company premises — which is why SECO had to write a brochure rather than amend an article.

What applies at the kitchen table: 6 a.m. to 8 p.m., eleven hours of rest, and the 11.30 p.m. email

The working-time rules contain no location, so they operate unchanged at home. Art. 9(1)(a) sets the maximum working week at 45 hours for office staff, technical and other employees. Art. 15 requires breaks of a quarter of an hour after more than five and a half hours, half an hour after more than seven, and an hour after more than nine. Art. 15a grants a daily rest period of at least eleven consecutive hours, reducible once a week to eight if the eleven-hour average holds over two weeks.

The article most often broken at home without anyone noticing is Art. 10. It draws the lines: day work from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m., evening work from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m., both free of authorisation. What comes after that is night work under Art. 16 and prohibited unless Art. 17 carries an exception — and exceptions require a permit from SECO or the cantonal authority. Art. 17(6) adds that the employer may not assign an employee to night work without their consent. The reply typed at 11.30 p.m. on the sofa is, in the language of the Act, not commitment but night work.

It also has to be written down. Art. 46 requires the employer to keep records for enforcement, and Art. 73(1) of Ordinance 1 lists what must be visible in them — under (c) the daily and weekly hours actually worked, including compensatory and overtime work and when they fell, and under (e) the timing and length of breaks of half an hour or more. Art. 73a permits a waiver only through a collective agreement signed by the representative employee organisations, combined with genuine autonomy, an income threshold and a written individual agreement revocable each year. Art. 73b allows simplified recording of the daily total only — but with the start and end of night and Sunday work still documented. Without one of those bases, full recording remains the rule, in the office and at home alike.

Who pays: the one rule that cannot be contracted away

Two articles sit side by side in the Code of Obligations and behave completely differently. Art. 327 obliges the employer to provide the tools and materials the work requires — but only «unless otherwise provided by agreement or custom». Where the employee supplies them with the employer’s consent, appropriate compensation is due, again «unless otherwise provided by agreement or custom». Both sentences carry the same reservation. This rule can be bargained.

Art. 327a(1) requires reimbursement of «all expenses necessarily incurred in the performance of the work». Paragraph 3 declares void any agreement under which the employee bears all or part of those necessary expenses. And Art. 362 lists Art. 327a(1) among the provisions from which no agreement, standard contract or collective agreement may derogate to the employee’s detriment. Art. 327 is not on that list. The difference is the most practical sentence on this page: the office chair is negotiable, the necessary expense is not.

The Federal Supreme Court applied that to a home workplace in judgment 4A_533/2018 of 23 April 2019. An employee had been given no suitable workplace by the employer and used a private room as office and archive. The lower court found in Art. 327a CO a basis for the employer to contribute to his rent and held that the duty to compensate exists ex lege, without any agreement to that effect. The Federal Supreme Court upheld it: where the employer offers no suitable workplace, the working infrastructure at home is in any event necessary for performing the job and reimbursable under Art. 327a CO. The objection that the employee would have had the flat anyway was expressly rejected as inappropriate — it makes no difference whether the expense arose directly or indirectly, and the court drew the parallel to a private vehicle used for business trips, which Art. 327b regulates expressly. Note what that decides and what it does not: the employee had no claim to work from home, he worked at home because nothing else was available. The reverse case, where an office desk exists and the employee prefers the flat, is not settled by it.

One Swiss employer has regulated it: the Confederation, for its own staff

There is one place in federal law that comes close to an entitlement, and it applies only to the federal administration. Art. 64a of the Federal Personnel Ordinance, headed «Flexible working arrangements» and in force since 1 July 2021, obliges line managers in paragraph 1 to promote flexible arrangements as regards working time and place of work, so far as operationally possible. Paragraph 2 goes further: managers agree with employees the places where the work is performed, and grant them the greatest possible freedom of choice while taking the interests of the service into account.

That is a duty to agree with a direction of travel, not a unilateral right — but it is more than the Code of Obligations ever says. Two further paragraphs, in force since 1 January 2023, draw the boundary: where the employee’s place of work is in Switzerland, mobile working abroad is in principle not permitted; heads of administrative units may authorise it in justified exceptional cases, taking possible legal and security obstacles into account. Paragraph 4 names working at the place of residence of cross-border commuters as a possible exception. The Confederation also created a reimbursement category of its own: expenses for mobile working were added to the list of allowances the Finance Department regulates, with effect from 1 July 2021.

If you work for a canton or a commune, neither this nor the Code of Obligations answers you. Art. 342(1)(a) CO expressly reserves federal, cantonal and communal rules on public-service employment. Your own public employer’s personnel law governs, and it differs from canton to canton — the ordinary Swiss pattern, and the reason a national answer to this question can only be a federal one.

What Swiss job adverts promise — and how differently they promise it in each language

Because the claim comes from the agreement, the useful next question is what employers say before the agreement exists. Across our stock of open Swiss adverts carrying descriptive text, 4.1 per cent mention home office, telework, hybrid or remote work in any of those words. English-language adverts name it more often than the German-, French- or Italian-language ones — but that gap is the smaller half of the story.

The interesting part is not the share but the grammar, and here the four language segments of the same country behave like four different markets. Of the German-language adverts that mention it, 57.1 per cent attach a word of mere possibility — Möglichkeit, Option, nach Absprache, bei Bedarf. Of the French-language ones, 45.0 per cent do. Of the English-language ones, 2.1 per cent do. An English-language advert says «hybrid» or «remote work environment» as if it were a property of the role; a German one says it is possible, by arrangement. If you are arriving from abroad and reading the English adverts, that difference is worth knowing before you assume it is settled.

Neither version puts a number on it. Of all adverts that mention the subject, 7.7 per cent name a figure at all — a number of days or a percentage — and of those, 38.3 per cent phrase it as «up to», which is a ceiling rather than a floor. Across occupations the spread is a cliff rather than a gradient: measured over adverts in all four languages, 5.7 per cent of software and IT titles mention it, 5.5 per cent of finance titles, 4.7 per cent of sales, 4.6 per cent of commercial and administrative roles, against 2.4 per cent in engineering and in care, 0.6 in construction and the trades, 0.4 in logistics and transport and 0.3 in production. These figures measure what is advertised, not what is agreed; they are read from title and short description, so every share is a lower bound.

If you are used to a legal framework for this, do not assume it travelled with you

A large share of the people asking this question in English live in Switzerland but formed their expectations somewhere else, or are still abroad and negotiating a first Swiss contract. Two Swiss specifics are worth stating plainly. First, there is no Swiss framework act on telework — nothing that sets a maximum share, a right to request, or a duty to justify a refusal. Where you have met such a mechanism elsewhere, the equivalent here is the contract, the staff regulation and the collective agreement, in that order.

Second, the cross-border case is a different question with a different answer. Working from a home in France, Germany or Italy while employed in Switzerland raises questions of taxation and social security that this page does not answer and that are governed by treaties rather than by the Code of Obligations. The Confederation’s own rule for its staff — mobile working abroad in principle not permitted, with cross-border commuters named as the possible exception — is a fair signal of how carefully Swiss employers treat it. Ask before you assume, and ask about the country you would be sitting in, not only about the number of days.

Where to get a binding answer: your own contract first, then any staff regulation and any collective agreement covering your sector. For working time, rest and health protection at home, the cantonal labour inspectorate enforces the Labour Act; for questions on the Act itself, SECO’s Directorate of Labour, Working Conditions. For a disputed claim under the employment contract, the route is the cantonal conciliation authority for employment disputes and then the labour court.