Earny SA
Rue de Lausanne 35a
1110 Morges
Suisse
Rue de Lausanne 35a
1110 Morges
Suisse

© 2023 Earny AG - Designed and hosted in Switzerland
Withholding tax requires employees who receive a salary to pay their taxes up front each time that salary is processed.
Employees who are not Swiss citizens or do not hold a C permit are required to pay Swiss withholding tax. Below is an overview of the different permit types in Switzerland.
The company that processes a salary deducts the withholding tax from their employees salary and pays it directly to the withholding tax office in the kanton that employees live in. For an employee that requires to pay withholding tax, the company must register this employee with the withholding tax office.
When the company submits their withholding tax information, they will receive an invoice from the Kanton. Sometimes, this invoice is blank and it is up to the company to fill in the amount owed to the kanton for their withholding tax amount.
Should your employees not have a C permit or the Swiss nationality, you will need to register them with the withholding tax office. This is a separate tax office from within the Kantonal government. For example, in Zurich, you will need to register your employees with Quellensteuer | Kanton Zürich.
Please note that you need to register your employees with the kanton they live in and not where the company is based. For example, if your company is based in Zurich but your employees live in Zug, you will need to register with the withholding tax office with the Quellensteuer - Kanton Zug.
The office will provide you with a withholding tax number which is used to identify your company and your employees when you submit your employees withholding tax amounts each month.
Because businesses are the ones submitting withholding tax amounts, the withholding tax office lets you deduct a specific percentage when you submit the withholding tax amount. This amount you get to keep. The withholding tax office will provide you with this percentage upon registering your employees.
For example, they may say that you can deduct 2% from the withholding tax you submitted. This means that if you submit CHF 1,000 in withholding tax that was collected from your employees, you only have to pay CHF 980 and can keep CHF 20 for yourself.
Each employee that has to pay withholding tax is given a 5 digit code that refers to a specific rate they have to pay.
This five digit code is dependent on a number of questions. The questions include:
Based on these questions, we can determine someone's withholding tax code.
For example, if someone:
His/her withholding tax code would be ZHA1Y. If we break this down:
For the first two digits, a company can reference the kanton short forms below
An employee’s marital status impacts the 3rd character in the withholding tax code. So in the example above, ZHA1Y. "A" represents single. You can see all the codes below.
The below only applies to employees working in the Canton of Ticino and living in Italy.
For employees living in France and working in the Cantons of BE, BS, BL, JU, NE, SO, VD and VS they receive a withholding tariff of SF.
An employee can be part of a religion and choose not to pay a religion tax. This is optional for the employee to decide.
If you have more than 9 children, you cap the digit at 9. For example, if you have 12 kids, your withholding tax code could be ZHC9N. The fourth digit does not change to 10.
Yes the more your employee’s make in gross salary, the more they will need to pay in withholding tax. Their withholding tax rate is dependent on their withholding tax code (ZHC2N) and their gross yearly salary.
You can find the withholding tax tables at the federal government website for each kanton. You simply need to find the kanton and open the file to view the table. The tables can be found here - https://www.estv.admin.ch/estv/de/home/direkte-bundessteuer/dbst-quellensteuer/qst-tarife-kantone.html.
For example, for someone who has a withholding tax code of ZHC1N and a gross salary of CHF 120,000, their withholding tax rate would be 8.91%. You can find the Zurich table here - https://www.estv.admin.ch/dam/estv/de/dokumente/qst/2022/tar22zh.zip.download.zip/tar22zh.zip.
The employee’s monthly salary is CHF 10,000 (CHF 120,000/12 months) therefore his withholding tax amount would be CHF 891 (CHF 10,000 x 8.91%) on a monthly basis.