What does 80–100% mean in a Swiss job advert?

Workload notation and what it means

Of 22,859 open Swiss adverts on 5 September 2026, 23.1% state the workload in the title — 58% of those as a range. The range is negotiating room, not a typo.

A percentage of what, exactly

Nothing in Swiss federal law defines a full-time week. The Labour Act sets only a ceiling: under Art. 9, the maximum weekly working time is 45 hours for employees in industrial undertakings, office staff, technical and other salaried employees including sales staff in large retail businesses, and 50 hours for everyone else. The words "full-time", "part-time" and "Pensum" do not appear anywhere in that Act. The number your percentage is a percentage of comes from the contract, or from a collective agreement.

You can watch that number move between employers who publish their rules. For federal employees, Art. 64 of the Federal Personnel Ordinance states that the average working week is 41.5 hours and reduces in proportion to the workload for part-time staff. Canton Zurich sets 42 hours a week at a 100% workload, spread over five days. Canton Geneva sets 40 hours for a full-time post. Canton Ticino sets 42.

Three public employers in one country, three different weeks, five per cent apart. So a 100% post in Geneva is fewer hours than a 96% post in Ticino, and "80%" is not a fixed quantity of time until you know whose week it is a share of. On a 41.5-hour week a single percentage point is about 25 minutes; the twenty points between eighty and one hundred are 8.3 hours, which is one working day and nothing more.

This is the question to ask first, and it is almost never in the advert. Between a 40-hour and a 42-hour full week there is more than a full working week of difference across a year, at the same stated percentage and often at a comparable salary.

What the range is actually signalling

A range widens the applicant pool at no cost to the employer, and it defers a decision that is genuinely hard to make in advance. Whether a job fits into four days depends on who takes it and what the rest of the team covers, and neither is known when the advert goes up.

Where the work is tied to a shift or an opening time, the range disappears. Among the adverts we index that state a workload, 87.1 per cent of project-management roles give a range and 76.1 per cent of nursing roles do — but only 49.0 per cent of sales roles. A shift cannot be scheduled at "somewhere between eighty and one hundred".

The distribution of the ranges themselves is the part worth reading closely. 85.2 per cent of them end at one hundred, 72.4 per cent are exactly twenty points wide, and only 30.9 per cent reach down to sixty or lower. The characteristic Swiss range is not an opening towards part-time work. It is a full-time job with one day of negotiating room.

Read the second number rather than the first. A range that ends below one hundred — "60–80%", "40–60%" — describes a post that was designed as a reduced one. That is 14.8 per cent of all ranges, and those are the adverts where asking for a small workload does not work against the advert itself.

What it does not mean

It does not mean full-time hours for eighty per cent of the salary. That reading travels in from markets where workload is not expressed as a percentage, and it is the most common misunderstanding among people applying to Switzerland for the first time. The percentage is the contractual object: it fixes the hours and the pay in one number. The Federal Personnel Ordinance says so plainly for the Confederation in Art. 38 — for part-time employees, the salary, the local allowance and the supplements correspond to the workload. Private employers put the same rule in the contract rather than in an ordinance.

It does not shrink your holiday. Art. 329a of the Code of Obligations requires the employer to allow at least four weeks of holiday each year of service, and five weeks for employees under the age of 20. That is stated in weeks. At 80% you still get four weeks; they simply contain fewer paid hours. The pro-rata reduction in the same article applies to an incomplete year of service, not to a reduced workload.

And it does not make the job part-time. This is where the notation misleads job seekers most reliably. Two-thirds of ranges start at eighty, and only 17.4 per cent go down to fifty or lower. If you need a 60% post and treat every advert with a range as a part-time listing, most of what you shortlist was never that.

One more thing it does not mean: it is not an invitation you can leave open. The employer wrote a range because they want the number from you.

Why the bottom of a range is not just a smaller number

When a range reaches a long way down — "20–40%", "20–80%" — the figure you agree stops being only about time. Two thresholds in Swiss social insurance attach to the size of the job rather than to the percentage as such, and both matter more to people who are new here and assume cover is automatic.

The occupational pension is the one to check. Under Art. 2 para. 1 of the Occupational Pensions Act, employees over 17 who earn an annual salary of more than CHF 22’680 from one employer are subject to mandatory insurance. Whether a small workload clears that line depends on the full-time salary of the post, so it cannot be answered in percentages alone — but it is worth asking before signing, particularly if you hold two small jobs with different employers rather than one. Each employment relationship is assessed on its own.

The second is accident insurance. Art. 13 of the Ordinance on Accident Insurance provides that part-time employees working at least eight hours a week for one employer are also insured against non-occupational accidents; below that, only occupational accidents are covered, and commuting accidents count as occupational ones. Eight hours is between 19.0 and 20.0 per cent of a full week depending on the employer, so the line sits at roughly a fifth.

Neither threshold appears in a job advert, and neither is something an employer normally raises. They belong in the same conversation as the percentage itself.

How to answer the range in your application

State a figure. A range is a question addressed to you, and an application that does not answer it postpones the conversation to a point where both sides have already invested time. One sentence in the covering letter does it: the workload you want, from when, and how you would spread it across the week.

Ask what one hundred per cent is in hours before you compare two offers. At 42 hours, 80% is 33.6 hours; at 40 hours it is 32. That gap is roughly an hour and a half a week, and salary figures quoted for "100%" are not comparable between employers until you know it.

Ask about the distribution as well as the level. Eighty per cent can be four full days or five shorter ones, and for childcare, a course, or a commute across a cantonal border the distribution matters more than the percentage. It is in almost no advert and in almost every contract.

Do not inflate your answer to be safe. If the advert says 80–100%, eighty is explicitly on offer and needs no apology or justification that sounds like a limitation. Writing 100% to avoid friction and then asking to reduce it later means negotiating from the weaker side, and in a system where the percentage sits in the contract, a change means amending the contract.

When the advert says nothing at all

77.9 per cent of the adverts we index carry no percentage in the title. That is not a statement that the role is full-time — it is a statement that the employer did not answer the question there. Sometimes the workload appears in the body of the advert instead; sometimes it appears nowhere.

For readers applying in English, the silence is close to the norm rather than the exception. Only 7.7 per cent of English-language adverts state a workload in the title, against a third of German-language ones. If your search runs mostly through English-language listings, you will be told the workload roughly a quarter as often, and the gap is not a sign that those employers are more flexible.

The practical consequence is simply that you name the number first instead of second. That is usually the better position anyway, as long as the work divides sensibly and you say how you would cover it at the workload you are asking for.