Should I state salary expectations in my application?

Where the official guide puts salary, and where it does not

arbeit.swiss is the public employment service's own guidance, and the regional employment centres work from it. It describes the application file first — cover letter, CV, work references with diplomas and certificates, references — and for the letter it says a cover letter «should usually contain the following information: your postal address, the company's postal address, date, subject heading, opening salutation, closing greeting and signature». Six items, no salary line.

Salary appears only once the guide reaches the interview, and then twice in quick succession. The preparation checklist tells you to «make a note of your professional ambitions, expectations of the future workplace and your salary expectations». A separate heading is given over entirely to the negotiation itself, advising you to prepare for it and to define your expectations in advance.

Read together, that is not a prohibition but a default sequence: have the number ready before you apply, say it when you are asked. A sentence in the letter is the exception to that sequence, and the advert is what creates the exception.

Why a written figure behaves differently from a spoken one

In conversation a figure is a move in an exchange. You hear what the role actually involves and calibrate. A letter has no exchange. It is read in a batch, often by someone working through twenty others that morning, and your figure becomes a sorting key sitting next to your name. It can remove you before anyone has asked what you can do — and it cannot lift you, because no employer offers more than the expectation a candidate has already written down.

The information gap is real and countable. The title names no level in 77.9% of cases, and the second-best source — the employer's other adverts — is usually unavailable: 45.4% of employers in our index have a single open advert, while the ten largest together account for 21.4% of all adverts. Everything between those two facts is a long tail of employers you know only through this one listing.

The application route is rarely familiar either. The adverts point at a very large number of different application destinations: the ten most common cover 32.2% of all adverts, the fifty most common about half, and 44.9% of destinations carry exactly one advert. Whether you will meet a free-text box, a mandatory numeric field or no salary question at all is therefore usually unknown until the form is in front of you. Write the sentence so it works either way — as the closing paragraph of the letter and, if required, as a number in a field.

There is a second-language dimension that catches newcomers. Applicants arriving from the United Kingdom, the United States or India are often used to a market where a recruiter asks for a number in the first message. In Switzerland that early ask is normal from intermediaries and unusual from employers hiring for themselves, which is most of the market. The habit travels badly; the advert, not the habit, should decide.

When the pay is already set before you write

For public-law employers, salary expectations are rarely a variable. The federal administration publishes its salary table: valid from 1 January 2026, referring to Art. 36 of the federal personnel ordinance, and split into a standard plan covering salary classes 1 to 23 and a management plan covering classes 24 to 38. For every class the table gives the maximum gross annual amount at 100% — from CHF 66'517 in class 1 to CHF 405'656 in class 38, with the location allowance and family allowance excluded. The same table names a floor of CHF 46'195 under Art. 7 para. 1 of the framework ordinance to the federal personnel act.

Cantons run comparable systems and are open about how a starting salary is set inside them. The Canton of Fribourg states that on engagement the salary is fixed between the minimum and the maximum of the class according to prior professional experience — that is, by your record, not by the sentence in your letter. Ticino describes a class system that takes account of tasks, competences, level of responsibility, experience and training, with the salary rising annually through as many as 24 increments.

For those 6.9% of adverts the practical move is to look for the class rather than invent a figure. If the advert names it, you have your answer. If it does not, asking which class the post sits in is a better question than offering a number of your own, and it is a question public employers answer readily because the tables are published anyway.

A second group of cases is covered by collective agreements. SECO maintains the list of agreements declared generally binding, together with the Federal Council decrees that extend them. On 1 July 2026 there were 84 in force nationwide: 46 at federal level covering more than a million employees, and 38 at cantonal level. SECO names the largest explicitly — the agreement for temporary staffing, the national agreement for hotels and restaurants, and the national framework agreement in main construction. Writing into one of those sectors means negotiating above a floor you neither have to find nor have to defend.

Who reads the letter decides when the figure is due

80.5% of the adverts we hold come from employers recruiting for themselves. There the expectation is information needed late, and volunteering it in a first letter is more likely to distract than to help — unless the advert asked.

12.5% run through an intermediary: recruitment consultancies, hiring platforms, executive search. Most of that share sits with one large platform; strip it out and 1.9% remains, spread across many smaller intermediaries. An intermediary has to know your expectation before proposing you, because otherwise they cannot tell which mandate you fit. With them the question is not whether to give a figure but whether to give it in writing or in the first call. Both are normal, and in writing it saves a round.

6.9% come from public-law employers, where the class replaces the expectation entirely. Those three kinds of reader cover almost every case, and they are the real reason the question has no single answer: it has three.

The sentence itself, and where it sits

When the advert asks, put the figure in the final paragraph, immediately before your availability line and the closing greeting. Not at the top, where it turns the letter into a price list, and not inside the argument, where it interrupts it. One sentence is enough: «My salary expectation is around CHF 95'000 gross per year at a 100% workload; I would be glad to discuss the details in person.»

That sentence has to carry three things. The unit first — year, gross, full workload — because a monthly amount in a letter cannot be queried. Then the word expectation rather than requirement, because at this point you do not yet know the true scope of the role. And finally an opening: a half-clause naming the interview as the place where the figure gets refined.

A range is acceptable in writing, but ranges are read from the bottom. If you give one, make it narrow, and make the lower end a figure you would genuinely accept. Round numbers read as guessed; a figure with visible internal logic reads as calculated, even when the calculation itself stays out of the letter.

That leaves the form with a mandatory field and a candidate who is not ready to commit. A field that cannot be left blank cannot be left blank, and an invented zero is worse than an honest number. In a free-text box write «negotiable, guide figure CHF 95'000 gross per year at 100%»; in a numeric-only field enter the guide figure. And where the advert contains neither a salary question nor a field for one, the answer to the original question is simply no — the figure belongs in your interview preparation, which is exactly where the official guidance puts it.