Wealth Tax in Switzerland, Canton by Canton

Most countries dropped their wealth tax decades ago. Switzerland kept it, and it is not a rounding error: on net wealth of CHF 1,000,000 the annual bill runs from CHF 885 to CHF 6,732 depending on where you live.

It is also the Swiss tax people understand least, because it works on a base nobody tracks day to day. Here is what it is charged on, what it costs in each canton in 2026, and the one asset class that is invisible to it.

What it actually is

Wealth tax is charged on your net wealth: everything you own, minus everything you owe, valued on 31 December. It is levied by the canton and by your commune. There is no federal wealth tax at all, so unlike income tax there is no national layer sitting underneath the cantonal one.

That single fact explains why the geography is so extreme. With income tax, a fixed federal slice damps the differences between cantons. With wealth tax there is nothing to damp them, so the full cantonal range shows through.

Rates are progressive and typically run to somewhere between one and five per thousand of taxable wealth, which sounds negligible until it is applied to a whole balance sheet every year.

What counts, and the large thing that does not

The base is wider than most people expect. It includes:

• Bank and savings balances, including accounts held abroad.
• Securities: shares, funds, bonds, and cryptocurrency at its year-end value.
• The surrender value of cash-value life insurance policies.
• Property, entered at its official tax value, which in most cantons is well below market value.
• Vehicles, and business assets if you are self-employed.

Debts come off: mortgages, personal loans, outstanding credit card balances. The tax lands on the difference, which is why a heavily mortgaged property can add far less to the bill than its price suggests.

And then the exclusion that matters most: pillar 2 and pillar 3a capital is not taxable wealth while it stays locked in the scheme. Someone with CHF 400,000 in a pension fund and CHF 100,000 in a bank account is taxed on the CHF 100,000. It becomes taxable wealth when it is paid out. This is the single largest reason two households with identical balance sheets can receive very different assessments, and it is worth knowing before comparing your figure with anyone else’s.

What it costs, canton by canton

Wealth tax only, for one tax year, on net wealth of CHF 1,000,000: single person, CHF 100,000 gross salary, no church tax, age 40, tax year 2026. The cheapest commune in each canton. Isolated by pricing the identical profile with and without the wealth.

Zug, Schwyz and Nidwalden sit at the bottom within a few francs of each other. Neuchâtel at CHF 6,732 and Vaud at CHF 5,501 sit at the top, and these are the cheapest communes of those cantons: the median commune is higher again. Zürich, at CHF 1,553 in Zumikon, sits closer to the low end than most people assume.

Put against a CHF 1,000,000 balance sheet, the Neuchâtel figure is about 0.67 per cent of assets a year and the Zug figure about 0.09 per cent. Over a long holding period that difference compounds against the portfolio, because the charge falls on the asset itself rather than on the income it produces.

The cheapest canton depends on how much you have

Nearly every published ranking picks one wealth level and presents the result as the order. It is not stable.

The same wealth tax at three levels of net wealth. Zug is the cheapest of these cantons at CHF 500,000 and at CHF 1,000,000, and the most expensive of the three low-tax cantons at CHF 2,000,000.

At CHF 500,000, Zug charges CHF 180 and Schwyz CHF 392. At CHF 1,000,000 they have almost converged, CHF 885 against CHF 914. At CHF 2,000,000 the order has flipped: Zug charges CHF 3,019 while Schwyz charges CHF 1,958 and Nidwalden CHF 1,872. Zug’s scale is more progressive; the Schwyz and Nidwalden scales are flatter and overtake it.

This changes the total bill, not just the wealth line. On CHF 100,000 of income and CHF 2,000,000 of wealth, Freienbach in Schwyz comes to CHF 7,575 all in, against CHF 8,216 in Baar in Zug, even though Baar has the lowest income tax in the country. Rankings that hold wealth constant at one level are answering a different question from yours.

Allowances, and why couples are not simply doubled

Every canton exempts an initial amount, and every canton sets its own. Zürich exempts the first CHF 80,000 of net wealth for a single person and CHF 161,000 for a married couple in 2026. In our figures no canton charges anything at all on net wealth of CHF 50,000, so the allowances all sit above that.

Marriage changes more than the allowance. On the same CHF 1,000,000, a married couple in Baar pays CHF 541 against CHF 885 for a single person, because both the higher allowance and the couple’s position on the progressive scale work in their favour. The proportion differs by canton, so the couple discount is not a fixed factor you can carry from one canton to another.

Several cantons also cap the result. Bern, for instance, operates a wealth tax brake limiting the charge in relation to the income the wealth produces, subject to a minimum. Provisions like these matter most in exactly the situation where the tax is hardest to pay.

The three valuations that catch people out

Because the base is a snapshot rather than a flow, most of the difficulty is in valuing things rather than in the rate itself. Three cases account for nearly all of it.

• Property. It goes in at the official tax value set by the canton, not at what it would fetch on the market. In most cantons that value is materially lower, and it is not recalculated every year, so the figure on your assessment can look badly out of date compared with the neighbourhood. That is normal and it is the correct figure to use.
• Foreign currency and foreign accounts. An account abroad is part of your net wealth and is converted at the year-end rate published by the Federal Tax Administration, not the rate on the day you look. Foreign holdings are declared whether or not any Swiss institution reports them.
• Cryptocurrency. It is wealth, not a curiosity, and it is valued at 31 December. The Federal Tax Administration publishes year-end values for the major coins in its official rate list; anything not listed is declared at a defensible year-end market value. Holding it on a foreign exchange or in self-custody changes nothing about the obligation.

The practical upshot is that the wealth tax rewards knowing what you held on one specific day. Most of the effort people spend on it each spring goes into reconstructing that day from statements after the fact.

Why it bites in a bad year

Income tax falls when income falls. Wealth tax does not work that way. It is charged on the value of the asset on 31 December regardless of whether that asset produced anything, so a portfolio that ended the year lower than it started still generates a bill, and a property that produced no rent still generates a bill.

This is a structural feature rather than a quirk, and it is the main practical argument for holding the year-end figure somewhere you can see it rather than reconstructing it from statements each spring. Whatever you use to track it, the number that matters is assets minus debts on 31 December.

How these figures were produced

Each figure is the wealth component alone, isolated by pricing an identical household twice through the Federal Tax Administration's calculation engine, once with no wealth and once with the stated amount, and taking the difference. Everything else, including income, age, marital status and church affiliation, is held constant.

Tax year 2026, cheapest commune in each canton, 1,988 communes priced in total. Valais is excluded because its communes set their own scales, so a commune-level figure cannot be reproduced accurately there. The remaining 25 cantons reconcile to the franc against the ESTV result.

The bottom line

Wealth tax is small as a percentage and large as a habit. It applies every year, to the whole balance sheet, with no federal layer to flatten the differences between cantons, and the ranking of cantons changes with the amount you hold. Retirement capital sits outside it entirely, which makes the taxable figure different from the number most people think of as their net worth.

You can price your own household against every commune with hopli’s commune tax comparison, which reports income tax and wealth tax separately. See also the cheapest and most expensive communes for tax and how the Swiss retirement system works, since the pillar 2 and 3a exclusion is the largest single factor in what is left to tax.

These are published cantonal figures, reproduced. They are general information, not advice on your own tax position.

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