XJuly 10, 2026
In Switzerland, qualifying foreign residents are not taxed on their actual worldwide income.
They pay on their spending instead, a base set with their canton within legal limits. The 2026 federal floor sits at a deemed CHF 435,000, about EUR 471,000 or USD 539,000.
It is called lump-sum taxation, the forfait fiscal. The base is your worldwide living expenditure, not your income, and it cannot fall below a legal minimum, the higher of the federal floor, seven times your Swiss rent, or a higher cantonal minimum. A separate control calculation then puts a floor under the tax itself, capturing your Swiss-source and treaty-relieved foreign income. It is taxed every year at ordinary federal, cantonal and communal rates.
The last consolidated federal figure is end 2018, 4,557 people paying CHF 821 million in tax, about EUR 890 million or USD 1.02 billion. No newer national total is published, the cantons hold the current numbers.
This is rare. Switzerland publishes no single national price for the regime.
Italy now charges a fixed EUR 300,000 a year on foreign income. Greece, a fixed EUR 100,000. You know the number before you pack.
Switzerland publishes no such number. You set the base with your canton, above the legal minimum, and it is assessed each year. One modeled Vaud case, on CHF 2 million of income and CHF 15 million of wealth, turns about CHF 950,000 of ordinary tax, near EUR 1.03 million or USD 1.18 million, into about CHF 240,000, near EUR 260,000 or USD 297,000. A private model, not an official rate.
The gates are hard. No Swiss citizenship, no Swiss tax residency in the prior ten years, no gainful activity in Switzerland, and both spouses must qualify.
And it is politically exposed. Five cantons have already abolished it, Zurich first from 2010 by popular vote. For the individual, though, there is no maximum duration, unlike the fifteen-year caps in Italy and Greece.
So the real question for a base is not the rate. It is the mechanism. A flat fee is one public number, fixed before you move. In Switzerland the rules and minima are public, but the final figure is set case by case, canton by canton.
For the place you actually anchor a family and a company, which is the more honest design, a fixed price on the door or a figure set behind your own file? Tell me where I am wrong.
Data from GeoCompass, the jurisdiction intelligence layer I build at Lucky Nomads.
Greece
Italy
Switzerland