Unemployment benefit after a fixed-term contract?

Why an expiring contract is not "your own fault"

Suspension of entitlement for self-inflicted unemployment rests on Article 30 paragraph 1 letter a AVIG. Article 44 paragraph 1 AVIV spells out what that covers, in four cases: giving the employer cause to terminate through your own conduct; resigning without having been promised another job; resigning from an employment relationship of probably longer duration in order to take one you knew or should have known would only be short; and turning down a suitable permanent job in favour of one you knew or should have known would only be short.

All four require a decision by you. Simply reaching the agreed end date is not one. The contract runs out because both sides agreed it would, and nobody has to act for the employment to end.

Two of the four are nonetheless aimed squarely at fixed-term work, and they catch the case where someone trades a secure job for a short contract. Letters c and d both turn on the phrase "knew or should have known" — and with a fixed-term contract you do know, by definition. Nothing in either letter is triggered by an employer choosing not to extend you.

The list is introduced with "in particular", so it is not exhaustive. What it describes is what the examination is looking for: an act by which you brought your own unemployment about. Whether something else applies in your case is for the cantonal office to decide.

The rule that stands in for the notice period

Article 17 paragraph 1 AVIG requires you to do everything that can reasonably be expected of you to avoid or shorten unemployment, and expressly to be able to prove your efforts. That duty starts before unemployment, not with it. The statute simply does not say from when.

The answer sits in SECO's directive on unemployment benefit — the Weisung AVIG ALE, valid from 1 January 2026 — at margin number B314: every insured person is in principle obliged to look for work before claiming, and must meet that obligation in particular during the notice period and, where the employment is fixed-term, during at least the last three months.

What matters is the moment you know you are objectively at risk of unemployment. If that moment is more than three months before you register, only the last three months before registration are examined. With a fixed-term contract you have known the date since your first working day, which is why the clock is never ambiguous in your case.

The same margin number cites Federal Supreme Court judgment 8C_863/2014 of 16 March 2015: with a fixed-term employment relationship, job-search efforts must be shown not merely during any short notice period but for at least the last three months before the claim — and temporary work carries a higher risk of becoming unemployed.

A second judgment cited in the directive names the most common excuse. Under EVG C 275/02 of 2 May 2003, a merely vague, oral assurance of continued employment does not release you from the duty to look for work. "My manager said it would probably be extended" is not an excusable reason.

Why the official leaflet does not answer this question

On 31 August 2026 we read the three publications a jobseeker in Switzerland is handed first. The result is the reason this question gets asked at all.

In the 2026 edition of the Info-Service guide "Arbeitslosigkeit — Ein Leitfaden für Versicherte", the section covering the run-up is headed "Before unemployment begins" and opens: if you have been given notice, first check whether the notice period was observed. What follows is the statutory notice-period ladder from the Code of Obligations, the special protection against dismissal, the advice to search during the notice period, and the note that you may register with the RAV during the notice period. The word "befristet" appears once in the whole booklet — inside the list of special waiting days, which does not apply to most readers.

In the SECO factsheet "Rights and obligations regarding unemployment insurance", the English edition published on arbeit.swiss, "fixed-term" does not appear at all, while "notice period" appears three times. The one sentence about timing reads: "You can already sign on with the regional employment centre (RAV) during your notice period."

This is not a mistake by the authorities — the booklets describe the common case. But it means every instruction you read there needs translating. Where it says "notice period", read "the remaining term of your contract". Where it says "from the day notice was served", read "from the day you signed".

The sanction grid is calibrated on a notice period

How many suspension days follow insufficient job-search efforts depends on fault: 1 to 15 days for slight fault, 16 to 30 for medium, 31 to 60 for serious fault (Art. 45 para. 3 AVIV). The directive turns that into a grid — and for the period before unemployment, that grid is indexed on one thing only: the length of the notice period.

Insufficient efforts give 3 to 4 suspension days with a one-month notice period, 6 to 8 with two months and 9 to 12 from three months. No efforts at all give 4 to 6, 8 to 12 and 12 to 18 days respectively.

A fixed-term contract has none of those numbers. What the directive supplies instead is the three-month rule from B314 — the same span that carries the harshest row of the grid. How a cantonal office maps that onto the grid in an individual case is its decision, and practice differs from canton to canton. What is set out here is the mechanism, not your ruling.

For completeness: a separate grid applies once you are unemployed. Insufficient efforts give 3 to 4 days the first time, 5 to 9 the second and 10 to 19 the third, with a warning that your placement capacity will be reviewed. Proof submitted late gives 5 to 9 days the first time — and the deadline is in Article 26 paragraph 2 AVIV: by the fifth day of the following month.

The condition a short contract can genuinely fail

It is not the contract type that decides your entitlement but the contribution period. Under Article 13 paragraph 1 AVIG, it is met by anyone who, within the frame period, was in contributory employment for at least twelve months. The frame period for contributions starts two years before the first day on which all the eligibility conditions are met (Art. 9 paras. 2 and 3 AVIG).

That is the real reassurance for most fixed-term contracts: what counts is not whether this one contract lasted twelve months, but what you worked in total over the preceding two years. A six-month contract following an earlier job can satisfy the contribution period; a single six-month contract straight after a degree usually cannot.

The counting rule is Article 11 AVIV. Every full calendar month in which you are liable for contributions is one contribution month; partial periods are added together, with every 30 calendar days counting as a month. This matters for fixed-term work in particular: the contribution period of part-time employees is determined by the same rules as for full-time employees. A 40 per cent Pensum yields as many contribution months as a 100 per cent one — the workload affects the size of the daily allowance, not the count of months.

What does turn on the contract form: if your fixed-term contract is ended early and you therefore hold salary or compensation claims, the corresponding loss of work is not creditable (Art. 11 para. 3 AVIG). After an unjustified summary dismissal, Article 337c paragraph 1 of the Code of Obligations makes the employer owe what you would have earned up to the expiry of the agreed term. And waiving such claims at the insurance's expense triggers suspension under Article 30 paragraph 1 letter b AVIG.

There is a special regime for fixed-term work — for six professions

Swiss law does contain a separate set of rules for "professions in which frequently changing or fixed-term engagements are usual". Article 8 AVIV names them: musician, actor, artiste, artistic collaborator in radio, television or film, film technician, journalist.

Two things follow for those six. First an advantage: under Article 12a AVIV, the contribution period for the first 60 calendar days of a fixed-term employment relationship is doubled. The directive works this out — a fixed-term contract starting on the first day of a calendar month and lasting at least two full calendar months yields two extra contribution months, and contracts that permit early termination are doubled too.

Then a disadvantage: under Article 18 paragraph 3 AVIG together with Article 6 paragraph 4 AVIV, one additional waiting day applies, once per control period. It falls away two months after the end of the employment that caused it, if the employment lasted at least one uninterrupted year, if it was ended early for economic reasons, or if no more than five days of monitored unemployment are shown per control period.

And one thing only these professions get: the directive lets them search within their existing field first, so that their professional qualification is preserved. Its worked example says that for a solo singer, a grace period of four to six months in which she need not apply outside her profession is not sufficient.

If you are not in one of those professions you get none of it — no doubling, no extra waiting day, no grace period. This is where most guidance on the internet goes wrong: it quotes the special regime without reading the list.

What fixed-term work in Switzerland actually looks like

The list in Article 8 AVIV comes from another era. We counted our own set of open Swiss adverts as at 30 August 2026 for how often an advert names a limited duration — befristet, temporär, Vertretung, Saison, Aushilfe and the equivalent wording in French, Italian and English.

Of the adverts for which we hold a summary, 2.7 per cent name such a limit; excluding the single largest advertiser, 2.4 per cent. Not one of them belongs to any of the six professions listed in Article 8 AVIV. Our search initially flagged two candidates and we checked both by hand and discarded them: a cosmetics role containing the words "Make-up Artist", and a banking advert containing the English verb "orchestrate".

The centre of gravity is health and care instead, at 37.0 per cent of fixed-term adverts, followed by retail, hospitality and logistics at 20.8 per cent, office, finance and administration at 11.4 per cent, industry, engineering and IT at 7.8 per cent, and education and research at 6.8 per cent.

Two further figures matter more to the benefit calculation than they look. Fixed-term adverts are far more often part-time roles: 20.9 per cent against 5.4 per cent across the whole set, and still 13.0 against 5.2 per cent once the largest advertiser is removed. And 9.2 per cent of fixed-term adverts are explicitly a cover for someone else, 6.1 per cent seasonal — contracts whose end date is fixed from the outset.

One thing about the sources: the rule itself is not in English

A large share of the people reading this page are working in Switzerland on an English-language contract, or arriving on one. It is worth knowing exactly how far the English material goes, because it stops short of the answer.

arbeit.swiss does publish an English FAQ on unemployment benefit, and it does carry the special waiting day — "1 day, if you were working in a seasonal job or in a profession where frequently changing or short-term contracts are common, before your time of unemployment". So the six-profession rule is reachable in English, even though the professions themselves are not listed there.

The three-month rule is not. It lives at B314 of the SECO directive, which arbeit.swiss publishes as Weisung AVIG ALE in German, Directive LACI IC in French and Direttiva LADI ID in Italian — and in no English edition at all. The English-language arbeit.swiss page on Regulation 883/2004 links the directive too, and the file it hands an English reader is the German one.

The main guide is the same story. The English publications page on arbeit.swiss lists "Arbeitslosigkeit – Ein Leitfaden für Versicherte" with "(German)" printed after the title. The English material that does exist there is a data-protection notice and the "Rights and obligations" factsheet — which, as above, contains the phrase "notice period" three times and "fixed-term" not once.

Practically: read the English FAQ for the eligibility conditions and the waiting days, and then treat the three-month search rule as the part you will only find in one of the national languages. It is the part that costs money.

Where the applications from those three months have to go

For a job-search effort to count, it has to reach the office that examines it. Under Article 26 paragraph 2 AVIV you submit the proof for each control period by the fifth day of the following month at the latest; if the deadline passes without an excusable reason, the efforts are no longer taken into account. The SECO factsheet names the two channels: the eService on arbeit.swiss, or the form "Nachweis der persönlichen Arbeitsbemühungen", as agreed with your RAV.

A private list — ours included — is a memory aid and never the filing channel. It helps you be able to evidence the three months before your contract ended when the first interview at the RAV asks about them. It is still submitted wherever your RAV requires.

For the period before you register, that means in practice: from the day you know the end date, record for every application the date, the company, the role, the channel and the reply. Article 26 paragraph 1 AVIV requires the effort to be targeted, as a rule in the form of a proper application, and the directive expressly looks at quality as well as quantity.

And sign on with the RAV as soon as it makes sense. The leaflets explicitly invite you to register before your last working day; they simply phrase it in terms of the notice period. Your equivalent moment is the day the end of the contract is settled.