The employer's calendar: what falls due, and when
AHV/AVS, accident insurance and pension statements, salary certificates, tax at source: a Swiss employer's deadlines over a year, in order.
Taking on your first employee means, above all, inheriting a calendar. Here is what comes round every year, in the order it falls due.
In January
- Salary certificates for the past year must be given to each employee. One per person, including anyone who left during the year.
- The final AHV/AVS, disability, income compensation and unemployment statement goes to the social insurance office: you declare the salaries actually paid, and the office calculates the balance against the instalments paid.
- The accident insurance salary declaration goes to the accident insurer, on the same principle.
Then the balance arrives
In the following weeks you receive the settlement statements: social insurance office, accident insurance, daily sickness allowance, family allowances. Depending on the gap with your instalments, it is either a top-up to pay or a refund.
All year round
- AHV/AVS instalments are due each quarter — or each month if your payroll is large.
- Occupational pension (LPP) premiums follow the schedule set by your pension institution.
- Tax at source withheld from the salaries of your foreign employees must be accounted for and paid to the canton, usually monthly or quarterly.
Whenever staff change
These are the most frequent omissions, because they follow no calendar:
- an arrival: registration with the social insurance office and the pension fund;
- a departure: deregistration, final statement, holiday balance;
- a change of salary: adjustment of the pension contributions, and often of the tax-at-source scale;
- a change of family situation for an employee taxed at source: marriage, a birth, separation — the scale changes.
What costs money
It is not the contributions: it is the registration that was forgotten. An employee not registered with the pension fund for months, a tax-at-source scale never updated, and the correction is made retroactively, at your expense.
That is exactly what we take on with payroll: the statements, the registrations and the deadlines.
Estimate the cost online, or call us on +41 26 303 36 69.