If you pay a cleaner CHF 30 an hour, you are not paying CHF 30 an hour. Somewhere in that arrangement sits a holiday entitlement, and if nobody has written down how it is handled, it is usually the household that ends up paying for it twice. This guide sets out the official percentages for 2026 and where they come from. It also covers the detail on the payslip that decides whether the money you have already paid counts for anything.
It is written for households employing help at home in Switzerland, whatever the work is called: cleaning, childcare, a hand with an older parent. If you are the one doing the work, the same numbers tell you what your payslip should show.
The short answer on holiday pay for an hourly wage
On top of the base hourly wage you owe two separate supplements:
| What | Days per year | Supplement on the base wage |
|---|---|---|
| Holiday, 4 weeks (legal minimum) | 20 | 8.33% |
| Holiday, 5 weeks | 25 | 10.64% |
| Holiday, 6 weeks | 30 | 13.04% |
| Each paid public holiday | 1 | 0.39% |
A base wage of CHF 30 an hour with four weeks of holiday and one paid public holiday becomes CHF 32.62 an hour. On a three hour clean once a week that is about CHF 34 a month, and close to CHF 400 over a year. Most households never budget for it.
The two supplements are worked out separately on the base wage, not stacked on top of each other. The official table for domestic work does it the same way.
Why the hourly wage on its own is never the full wage
Swiss law gives every employee at least four weeks of paid holiday per year of service, and five weeks until the end of the year in which they turn 20 (Art. 329a of the Code of Obligations). There is no lower limit for small jobs: three hours a week counts. The law also says the employee must not be worse off financially during holiday than if they had worked (Art. 329d), which is the reason the supplement exists at all.
For someone on a monthly salary this is invisible: the salary keeps arriving while they are away. For someone paid only for the hours they actually work, no hours means no money, so the holiday entitlement has to be converted into a percentage that rides on every hour worked, or set aside and paid out when the holiday is actually taken.
Public holidays follow their own logic. The 1 August is the only public holiday guaranteed across the country, and cantons may designate up to eight further days. Whether those days are paid for hourly staff depends on your cantonal standard contract and on what you agreed, so the public holiday share gets counted in days rather than taken for granted.
Where the percentages come from
The percentages are not a rule of thumb. They come from the number of holiday days divided by the working days that remain: 20 days of holiday out of 240 remaining working days gives 8.33 per cent, 25 days gives 10.64 per cent, and a single day gives 0.39 per cent.
For work in private households, the federal standard employment contract publishes the full table. The SECO information sheet on the NAV Hauswirtschaft states plainly that the minimum wages for hourly staff are understood without holiday and public holiday supplements, and that the two supplements are each calculated on the base hourly wage rather than added together first. Its own worked example, using the 2026 minimum for unskilled domestic work, looks like this:
- Base hourly wage: CHF 20.35
- Public holiday supplement, 0.39 per cent: CHF 0.10
- Holiday supplement, 8.33 per cent: CHF 1.70
- Hourly wage including supplements: CHF 22.15
Two limits to keep in mind. The federal minimum wages apply from an average of five hours a week with the same employer, and they do not apply in Geneva, which runs its own standard contract for domestic work: the CTT-EDom sets a minimum of CHF 24.59 an hour for unskilled domestic work, well above the federal figure, and lists nine paid public holidays. People whose main task is childcare, such as babysitters and childminders, sit outside the federal minimum wage rules too, although their holiday entitlement under the Code of Obligations is unaffected.
Calculate your supplement
Set the hourly wage, the holiday weeks and the hours per week, and switch between the two points of view depending on whether you pay the wage or receive it. The calculator covers the holiday supplement, which is the big one; the public holiday share is the separate 0.39 per cent per paid day from the table above. The percentages are the ones Helpore uses in its own payroll.