Salary & employment

What does the offer actually pay?

A Swiss gross salary and a French household budget are not the same number, and the gap is mostly social insurance rather than tax. These guides read a Swiss payslip line by line and explain how to compare an offer honestly.

2 guides

• Your first Swiss payslip explainedYour first Swiss payslip is longer than you expect, and half of it is abbreviations. It reads much better in blocks, though — gross pay, then state social insurance, then pension and accident cover, then tax — with the amount that lands in your bank left until last. That figure is the end of the payslip, not the end of the story: as a France resident, some of your real costs never appear on it at all.
• How to evaluate a Swiss job offer when you live in FranceThe salary in the offer letter is almost never the number to hold against the net pay on your current payslip. The two are built from different parts: different deductions, a pension whose value stays invisible until you ask, and a set of costs — health insurance, tax, currency, the commute — that never touch a Swiss payslip at all. This walks you through building a comparison that actually holds up, on one annual basis, in francs and in hours.

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