Suspension days: what triggers them, and how many

The three bands of suspension days

Under AVIV art. 45. The band is set by your RAV; within the band the individual case decides. Suspension days are days without an allowance, not a loss of entitlement — the framework period keeps running. As of 7 September 2026.

Three levels: the act names the grounds, the ordinance the bands, the directive the days

Article 30 paragraph 1 of the unemployment insurance act lists seven grounds for suspending entitlement: being unemployed through your own fault (letter a); waiving salary or compensation claims against the former employer at the insurance's expense (b); not making sufficient personal efforts to find suitable work (c); not following the control rules or the instructions of the competent authority, in particular not accepting suitable work or failing to start, or breaking off, a labour market measure without a valid reason (d); giving untrue or incomplete information or otherwise breaching the duty to inform and report (e); obtaining or attempting to obtain benefit unlawfully (f); and, after a paid project planning phase, failing through your own fault to take up self-employment (g).

The ordinance turns fault into time. Article 45 paragraph 3 sets the three bands — 1 to 15, 16 to 30 and 31 to 60 days. Paragraph 4 of the same article decides two situations in advance and classes them as serious fault where there is no valid reason: giving up a suitable job without the assurance of another one, and refusing suitable work.

The day counts live one level lower, in a SECO directive rather than in law. It carries two scales: point D75 for the unemployment funds and point D79 for the cantonal authorities and the RAV. Only the second states numbers. The first assigns a degree of fault to each situation and leaves the conversion into days to the bands of article 45.

The split between the two follows article 30 paragraph 2 of the act. The cantonal authority rules on letters c, d and g, and on letter e where the duty to inform was breached towards it or towards the employment office; the funds rule on everything else. Paragraph 4 closes the gap: if a fund does not suspend although a ground exists, the cantonal authority does it instead.

The catalogue the RAV applies

Section 1 of the scale covers job search, and it separates the period before registration from the period after it. During the notice period, insufficient efforts cost 3 to 4 days where the notice period is one month, 6 to 8 where it is two, and 9 to 12 from three months up; no efforts at all cost 4 to 6, 8 to 12 and 12 to 18 days respectively. During a control period, a first month with too few applications is 3 to 4 days and a first month with none is 5 to 9. Efforts submitted after the deadline sit at 5 to 9 days, level with having made none.

Section 2 covers refusing suitable work or an interim earning, and it is the expensive part of the scale. A fixed-term position is graded by its length: one week 3 to 5 days, two weeks 6 to 10, three weeks 10 to 15, four weeks 15 to 20, two months 20 to 27, three months 23 to 30, four months 27 to 34, five months 30 to 37, six months 34 to 41. A second refusal is increased by 50 per cent. A permanent position starts where the fixed-term rows end: 31 to 45 days the first time, 46 to 60 the second.

Section 3 covers the instructions of the authority and the RAV. Failing to attend the information day, an advisory meeting or a control interview without a valid reason costs 5 to 8 days the first time and 9 to 15 the second. Not following other instructions, such as producing documents, costs 3 to 10 days, and at least 10 the second time. Not taking up a temporary employment programme is 21 to 25 days; abandoning one is 16 to 20. Courses are graded by length: under ten course days, the actual number of days missed; about three weeks, 10 to 12 days; four weeks, 13 to 15; five weeks, 16 to 18; about ten weeks, 19 to 20.

Section 4 covers breaches of the duty to inform and report, with no fixed figure — it follows the fault in the individual case. Section 5 covers the rare situation where someone does not take up self-employment after a funded planning phase, at 20 to 25 days. For a third breach of the same kind, most rows stop giving numbers and instead refer the file to the cantonal authority, which also has the person's placement capacity reviewed.

The other scale: how the job ended

The scale used by the funds is almost entirely about one ground — unemployment through your own fault. Article 44 paragraph 1 of the ordinance describes when that applies: giving the employer cause to terminate, in particular by breaching duties under the employment contract; ending the contract yourself without another job assured; leaving a position likely to last for one you knew, or should have known, would be short; and turning down a suitable permanent job in favour of one you knew would be short-lived.

Rather than days, that scale assigns degrees. Serious fault covers a justified summary dismissal from a permanent contract, ending the contract yourself or by mutual agreement without another job assured, moving to an insecure or short-term position, resigning in order to train, and being dismissed after refusing reasonable and proportionate changes to the contract. Serious fault means 31 to 60 days.

Not everything on that scale is serious. Accepting a dismissal given at an improper time or without respecting the notice period is graded by the salary lost: up to one month is slight fault, up to two months medium, beyond that medium to serious. The same grading applies where someone holding a medical certificate resigns without notice and thereby gives up the salary due during the notice period. Termination during the probation period has its own row, at medium or serious fault depending on who ended it and why.

Two further rows cover untrue or incomplete information given to the fund and benefit obtained unlawfully; both run from slight to serious. Where unemployment is said to be self-inflicted, point D76 requires the employee's account and the employer's account to be compared systematically, because intent has to be clearly established before it can be held against anyone.

How a range becomes a number

The starting point is the middle. Point D77 states that, for serious fault, the assessment starts from the midpoint of the 31 to 60 day range — that is, 45 days — and then weighs aggravating and mitigating factors and the principle of proportionality, following Federal Supreme Court case law. The directive declares the same principle applicable to slight and medium fault, so a 5 to 8 day row starts at roughly six and a half days rather than at eight.

There is more room below the bands than they suggest. Point D73 records the case law under which article 45 paragraph 3 is a rule that the administration and the courts may depart from where particular circumstances justify it, so discretion in serious cases is not limited to the 31-day minimum. Point D74 attaches the condition: any departure, stricter or milder, must be reasoned in the ruling itself.

Point D64 lists what counts as a circumstance: motives; personal circumstances such as age, civil status, state of health, any dependency, social environment, level of education and language skills; particular circumstances such as the behaviour of the employer or colleagues and the atmosphere at work; and mistaken assumptions about the facts, for instance being certain of getting another job. Point D78 adds that the factors named in the scales are not exhaustive.

Repetition lengthens the suspension. Article 45 paragraph 5 requires an appropriate extension and looks back over the suspensions of the past two years — the directive calls this the observation period and states that a single ruling may not exceed 60 days. Each authority counts only its own earlier rulings, and a different type of breach still counts: a control interview missed two years ago feeds into the assessment of a later suspension for a refused job. The absolute ceiling of 60 days per ground, and of 25 days for the self-employment case, is in article 30 paragraph 3 of the act.

The costliest distinction rests on a fact vacancies rarely state

Between 3 and 45 days the scale contains no judgement at all, only a contract question: was the refused position fixed-term, and if so, how long? One week is 3 to 5 days, six months 34 to 41, permanent 31 to 45. It is the largest single lever in the whole catalogue, and it depends on information that job adverts almost never carry.

We counted this in our own inventory on 23 August 2026. Only 4.2 per cent of open vacancies say anything about the contract type, whether through an employment-type field or through wording in the text. About 3.4 per cent carry a fixed-term signal and 1.4 per cent state explicitly that the position is permanent. Among the fixed-term ones, only about one in six names a duration — and where a duration is named, two thirds of the time it is longer than six months, which is past the last graded row of the scale.

The employment-type field shows the same gap from the other side: 82.7 per cent of vacancies are marked full-time, 5.5 per cent part-time, and 0.9 per cent each temporary, contract and internship, while a good nine per cent give no type at all. Anyone trying to work out which row an assignment would fall under will usually not find the answer in the advert; it comes from the employer or from the advisor.

Before any of that comes the prior question of whether the work was suitable. Article 16 paragraph 2 of the act exempts work that does not comply with customary conditions for the occupation and the locality, that does not take reasonable account of the person's abilities or previous activity, that is inappropriate to their age, personal circumstances or health, that requires more than two hours of travel each way without suitable accommodation at the place of work, or that pays less than 70 per cent of insured earnings. The clause on previous activity does not apply to people up to their 30th birthday.

When the days are deducted, and when they lapse

The suspension period does not start with the ruling. Under article 45 paragraph 1 of the ordinance it runs from the first day after the end of the employment relationship where the unemployment was self-inflicted, and in every other case from the day after the act or omission the ruling is based on.

Deductions run one after another, not in parallel. Paragraph 2 provides that a suspension is served after any waiting period or a suspension already running, and the directive spells out the order: general waiting days first, then special waiting days, then suspensions in the chronological order in which their periods began. A suspension already running does not delay the start of the next suspension period.

There is a lapse rule, and it is short. Article 30 paragraph 3 of the act provides that enforcement of a suspension lapses six months after the suspension period began. The same provision states that a suspension applies only to days on which the entitlement conditions are met, and that suspended days are counted against the maximum number of daily allowances — the days are cut, not postponed.

An appeal does not pause any of this: point D58 records that an appeal against a suspension ruling has no suspensive effect and that the suspension is to be enforced immediately. Which row is applied to a given file, which degree of fault is assumed and which mitigating circumstances are recognised is decided case by case — your RAV and your unemployment fund give the binding answer, and the ruling itself sets out the reasons and the way to contest them.