What happens if I move canton?

A note on where these rules can be read

One thing to know before the detail: the two ordinances that govern almost everything below, AVIG and AVIV (the Unemployment Insurance Act and its ordinance), are published in German, French and Italian only. There is no official English text on fedlex. The links at the foot of this page therefore point to the German versions, and the article numbers are the same whichever language you open. Where a Swiss term has no clean English equivalent it is kept and glossed once: RAV is the regional employment centre, the Arbeitslosenkasse is the fund that actually pays your daily allowance, and the Rahmenfrist is the two-year frame inside which those allowances are counted.

What a move does not touch

The frame for drawing benefits runs for two years and starts on the first day on which all conditions of entitlement are met (Art. 9 paras 1 and 2 AVIG). It keeps running wherever you live. The daily allowances you have already drawn, the insured earnings they are calculated from and your contribution period all travel with you. Crossing a cantonal border resets none of it and restarts nothing.

The rhythm is unchanged too. Every calendar month is a control period (Art. 27a AVIV). Proof of personal job-search efforts must be submitted for each control period by the fifth day of the following month, or the first working day after that; if the insured person lets the deadline pass without an excusable reason, the efforts are no longer taken into account (Art. 26 para. 2 AVIV), and the competent office reviews them monthly (para. 3). A house move is not listed anywhere in that provision as an exception.

A penalty already imposed does not evaporate at the cantonal border either. Where an insured person is repeatedly suspended from entitlement, the suspension is extended appropriately, and the suspensions of the last two years are taken into account for that extension (Art. 45 para. 5 AVIV). The provision counts suspensions, not cantons; nowhere does it limit the count to those imposed by the same office.

Who becomes competent, and from when

The office of the insured person's place of residence is competent for signing on and for the counselling and monitoring interviews that follow (Art. 18 para. 1 AVIV). Place of residence means legal domicile under Articles 23 and 25 of the Civil Code (para. 2) — the place where you stay with the intention of remaining, not the address where a letterbox still carries your name. Keeping an old address to stay with a caseworker you like is therefore not an option the ordinance offers.

For unemployment benefit, the territorial competence of the cantonal authority follows the place where you meet the monitoring obligation; for everything else it follows your place of residence (Art. 119 para. 1 letters a and e AVIV), and the decisive moment is the date of the ruling (para. 2). One detail has a long tail: a request to waive repayment of benefits is decided by the cantonal authority of the canton in which the insured person was resident when the repayment ruling was served (para. 3). That is the old canton, even if you left long ago.

If an office doubts its own competence it clarifies the matter with the other office; if the two cannot agree, the compensation office designates the competent one (Art. 119 para. 4 AVIV). This is not a procedure you have to run. But it explains why in the month of a move invitations to counselling interviews sometimes arrive twice and sometimes not at all. Contact both offices yourself instead of waiting for post to catch up.

The unemployment fund: moving is the only exception

You claim your benefit from a fund of your own choosing, but within the frame for drawing benefits a change of fund is not permitted, and the Federal Council determines the exceptions (Art. 20 para. 1 AVIG). arbeit.swiss, the Confederation's own portal, puts it to jobseekers in the same words: «You are free to choose any fund. You are then tied to this fund for the entire two-year qualifying period. You may only change the fund under certain conditions.»

That condition is the move. During the frame, an insured person may change fund only if they move out of the fund's area of operation, and the change must be made at the start of a control period unless it happens at the end of the frame (Art. 28 para. 2 AVIV) — so on the first of a month, not on the day the removal van arrives. The new fund receives access rights to the case from the following control period onwards, while the previous fund keeps them for proceedings already running (para. 3). There is, by design, a month in which both sides hold part of your file.

Whether you have to change at all depends on who insures you, and this is the part most people miss. Every canton has a public fund open to all insured residents of that canton (Art. 77 para. 1 AVIG), so its area of operation ends at the cantonal border. The funds run by employee and employer organisations — the union funds — often operate across several cantons. If you are with one of those, you may not be leaving its area of operation at all, and you keep the same fund and the same caseworker. Ask your fund before triggering a change you do not need.

Weekly residence instead of moving

Not every change of canton is a change of domicile, and the ordinance has a paragraph for exactly that. People who only return home at weekends hold their counselling and monitoring interviews with the competent office either of their place of residence or of the place where they stay during the week (Art. 18 para. 4 AVIV). The choice is yours, your domicile stays put, your fund stays put, and the interviews happen where you actually are from Monday to Friday.

The permit side says the same thing more briefly. A temporary stay in another canton requires no permit (Art. 37 para. 4 of the Foreign Nationals and Integration Act), and foreign nationals holding a valid short-stay, residence or settlement permit need neither a permit nor a registration for temporary stays in another canton of up to three months in a calendar year (Art. 67 para. 2 VZAE). If you want to try a job in the next canton before committing to it, you do not have to move first.

If you hold a permit, the move is itself a permit question

A change of canton requiring authorisation exists as soon as the centre of your life relations moves to another canton (Art. 67 para. 1 VZAE) — not when you change your postal address. Holders of a short-stay or residence permit who want to move their place of residence to another canton must apply in advance for the corresponding authorisation from the new canton (Art. 37 para. 1 AIG). In advance means before the move, not before the first day of a new job.

Then comes the sentence almost nobody knows, and for an unemployed permit holder it is the most consequential line in this whole answer. Holders of a residence permit «have a right to change canton if they are not unemployed and there are no grounds for revocation under Article 62 paragraph 1» (Art. 37 para. 2 AIG). Being unemployed means there is no legal right. That is not a prohibition — the new canton may still authorise the move — but the decision is discretionary, cantonal practice differs, and it is worth asking before you sign a lease rather than after. Holders of a settlement permit C have the right as long as no grounds for revocation under Article 63 apply (para. 3).

For nationals of the EU and EFTA the Act applies only insofar as the Agreement on the Free Movement of Persons contains no diverging provisions or the Act provides more favourable ones (Art. 2 paras 2 and 3 AIG). Annex I Article 8 of that agreement gives employed persons the right to occupational and geographical mobility throughout the territory of the host state, and geographical mobility expressly includes changing the place of work and the place of residence. You still have to register and have the permit reissued in the new canton. The office to ask is the migration office of the canton you are moving to.

What the insurance pays instead of a relocation grant

There is no relocation grant in Swiss unemployment insurance. There is the opposite of one. If no suitable work can be found for the insured person in their region of residence and they have completed the contribution period under Article 13, the insurance grants contributions towards daily commuting costs or towards weekly-residence costs (Art. 68 para. 1 AVIG). These are paid for at most six months within the frame (para. 2) and only to the extent that taking work away from home leaves the person financially worse off than in their previous job (para. 3). The commuting contribution covers the necessary travel costs actually incurred by someone returning home daily (Art. 69 AVIG); the weekly-residence contribution combines a flat rate for accommodation away from home, the extra cost of meals and one journey home per week (Art. 70 AVIG).

The region of residence is defined rather than felt. A workplace lies within it if a public transport connection to the place of residence exists whose length does not exceed 50 kilometres, or if the insured person can cover the distance within one hour in a private motor vehicle available to them (Art. 91 AVIV). Moving shifts that circle, and with it which vacancies count as suitable at all. Among other things, work is not suitable if it requires more than two hours of travel each way and no appropriate accommodation is available at the place of work (Art. 16 para. 2 letter f AVIG).

What actually changes: the market outside your door

The entitlement stays the same; the market does not. In our own collection of open Swiss vacancies, a good third name no canton at all — «Switzerland», a region, or nothing. Of those that do name a place, a little over a quarter sit in the canton of Zurich, and the three largest labour markets together carry roughly half. Moving to a small canton does not halve the vacancies you can reach; it pushes them into the neighbouring canton, which is precisely what the region of residence and the commuting contribution exist for.

For an English-speaking reader the sharper number is the language one, and it runs the opposite way to the cliché. Counting only vacancies whose language is recorded, 53.8 per cent of adverts in Geneva are written in English, 52.2 per cent in Zug and 45.6 per cent in Zurich. In Basel-Stadt it is 29.0 per cent, in Vaud 26.9, in Aargau 12.3 and in Thurgau 2.3. Moving from Zurich to Thurgau, an hour's train ride, takes the English-language share of your local market from roughly one advert in two to roughly one in forty. That is not a nuance you can compensate for with a better CV.

It also means the honest answer to «can I job-hunt in English there» depends entirely on which canton «there» is, and that this is worth saying out loud in your first interview at the new RAV. Your caseworker decides which vacancies are put in front of you, and the two-hour rule of Article 16 paragraph 2 letter f is applied to the region you now live in, not the one you left.

Proof goes through the channel your new RAV designates

Job-Room is national. Your RAV is not. arbeit.swiss states it on its own front page: «information and documents subject to deadlines must be submitted via the eServices on Job-Room or through a channel designated by the regional employment centre or the unemployment insurance fund.» Which channel applies to you is set by the competent office — and that is exactly what changes when you move. Ask about it in the first five minutes of your first interview in the new canton, not on the fourth day of the following month.

An application tracker does not change that and is not meant to. It keeps the date, the company, the contact person, the role and the advert in one place so you can copy them without gaps into whatever form your new canton uses. Legally, only what was submitted on time through the designated channel counts. And if the month of the move is unclear, the simplest rule in this whole answer applies: send both offices the same thing rather than sending one of them nothing.