How to evaluate a Swiss job offer when you live in France

Get the whole offer onto one annual basis

A Swiss salary sitting next to your current one looks like an easy decision. It is usually the least reliable comparison you can make, because the two numbers are built out of different parts: different deductions, a pension whose value is invisible until you ask, and a whole set of costs that never appear on a Swiss payslip at all.

So we will build the comparison properly instead, in five moves: put the offer on one annual basis, turn payroll into a range rather than a promise, add the France-resident costs that sit outside it, price the week in hours as well as francs, and finish with a single sheet you can hold two offers against. Start with the offer itself.

Write down six things before you compare anything: the annual gross salary, whether it is paid 12 or 13 times, what is guaranteed versus variable, your employment percentage, the start date and the contract duration. Keep reimbursed expenses in a separate column — they are not salary, however nice they look next to it.

A thirteenth payment deserves a note of its own, because it is the most misread line in Swiss offers. It changes when the money arrives, not how much of it there is over a year.

Then ask for a written contract, or written terms, covering function, salary, weekly hours, holidays, probation, overtime and termination. Ask too whether a collective agreement applies to your role, since it can set conditions the individual contract never mentions. A verbal "of course that's fine" is not one of the three kinds of number above.

Build a payroll range, not a precise promise

The fixed employee social-insurance deductions are the easy part — they are set nationally and you can look them up. Everything after that is employer-specific, which is why a net figure quoted at interview is worth very little.

So request two documents: the pension-plan certificate and the non-occupational accident rate. The pension fund controls how the LPP plan is designed, and the employer must pay at least half of the total contribution. That last rule matters more than it sounds. A genuinely good employer plan can be worth as much as a salary difference large enough to move you between offers — and it is invisible until you ask.

Ask payroll for an illustrative first-month calculation, clearly marked as an estimate on both sides. Bonuses, your age, the plan design and the accident risk class can all move it, so treat the result as a range rather than a figure.

Build that range in the Swiss salary estimate and keep every employer-specific input visible, so you can see later which assumption was the one that mattered.

Now add the costs Swiss payroll never sees

This is the section that changes people's minds. Start with the tax route, which follows from the canton you work in and your return pattern. Depending on which route applies, you are either budgeting for French tax instalments or for Swiss withholding — and neither of those is your final annual tax, so treat both as provisional.

Then add the rest of the real week: your health-insurance route, the commute, parking or a rail pass, meals, childcare and the cost of turning francs into euros. Individually they look like details. Together they are frequently the difference between two offers.

Use a range for the CHF/EUR conversion rather than today's rate. A household budget built on one favourable exchange rate is a fragile thing, and the rate will move whether or not your rent does.

Organise the relevant facts with the tax-residence check before you attach any tax figure to the offer.

Model the routes open to you in the health-insurance comparison, then verify the current premiums for your actual household rather than a single person.

And use the currency-exchange comparison to model the complete CHF-to-EUR outcome instead of one headline rate.

Price the week, not only the month

Write out one realistic week. Door-to-door commute, office days, home days, and the recovery time an early border crossing actually costs you. A salary increase that arrives with ten extra hours of commuting a week is a different offer from the one on paper.

Then pin down what kind of promise the homeworking is. Contractual, discretionary, or simply what the team does at the moment? Only the first survives a change of manager.

And have tax and social security checked separately, because they are separate. The social-security framework can preserve Swiss cover for eligible home telework below 50% with an A1 certificate — which is genuinely useful, and which settles nothing at all about your tax treatment.

Finish with a one-page decision sheet

Put it on one page, in five rows: guaranteed annual cash, estimated payroll net, tax and health paid outside payroll, work-related costs, and weekly time. Then add a sixth row that has nothing to do with money — protections: pension, sickness pay, accident cover, notice period, probation and flexibility.

Next to every number, write where it came from and who confirmed it. The gaps will be obvious once they are on one page, and those are the questions to put to the employer in writing before you answer.

The sheet will not decide for you, and it is not meant to. What it does is make two offers genuinely comparable, and show you which single uncertainty is big enough to be worth paying an adviser to resolve.