| Registrations for short-term starts with Swiss employers |
2024 |
2025 |
Change |
| Private-household services |
1,726 |
1,890 |
+9.5% |
| All branches |
171,819 |
166,955 |
−2.8% |
The two rates were 12.3 percentage points apart. Private-household services remained a small category—about 1.13% of the 2025 total—but its direction was unusual.
SECO had already described the 2024 household figure as a new high in a series beginning in 2005. Because the comparable 2025 figure is higher, 1,890 is the highest published level since at least 2005.
Possibly, but the data do not establish it.
More registrations mean that more short-term starts were recorded in this official channel. That is compatible with greater formalisation and is directionally encouraging. It could mean that more households are declaring short-term employment.
It could also reflect more underlying activity, a shift from another administrative route, or changes in recording or industry assignment following the move to EasyGov in March 2025. SECO’s table does not track whether previously undeclared employment became declared, and it contains no estimate of the undeclared market.
The conclusion is therefore narrower—and still newsworthy: one registered household-employment channel grew sharply while the equivalent national total fell. Whether this is beginning to displace undeclared work is the important next question.
A private home becomes a workplace when someone is paid to clean, provide childcare, help an older person or perform another household service. Yet this work remains unusually difficult to see in conventional labour-market statistics.
Greater use of registered channels would matter. Declared employment creates a route into social insurance, accident cover, payroll records and other worker protections. It also gives households a clearer way to meet their obligations as employers.
Helpore works directly with these processes. We conducted and published this analysis because making lawful household employment simpler—and easier to understand—is central to our work. Helpore has a commercial interest in this market; the national calculations themselves come from published federal data and can be reproduced from the downloadable workbook.
A separate SEM snapshot recorded 5,828 valid G permits in the administrative category “domestic services” on 31 July 2026. Of those permit records, 89.1% were recorded for women and 52.3% in Ticino.
This paints a striking picture of a highly female and geographically concentrated permit category. It is a separate snapshot: valid permits are not the same as verified active workers, and they cannot be added to the annual SECO registration figure.
Helpore’s de-identified platform data provide a closer, company-specific view. The snapshot started with 587 active, email-confirmed, non-test Helper accounts; 192 recorded a non-Swiss EU/EFTA nationality and 185 of those also had a recorded eligibility route. Within that final group, 58—or 31.4%—selected the short-stay route and supplied a Swiss entry date within the previous 90 days.
The 185 is a filtered analytical cohort, not Helpore’s public-profile count. The information is self-reported and does not show whether an authority registration or placement was completed, so it is presented as platform context rather than a national estimate.
Three distinctions are enough to interpret the study correctly:
- Registrations are not unique workers or jobs. The published total counts administrative records in a specific short-term procedure.
- The permit figure is separate. The 2025 SECO result is an annual flow; the July 2026 SEM figure is a stock of valid permits on one date.
- The result shows direction, not cause. The data establish the counter-trend but cannot tell us whether it reflects formalisation, market growth, switching between routes or the EasyGov transition.
Helpore compared the same component—short-term starts with Swiss employers—in SECO’s 2024 and 2025 statistical appendices.
For private-household services:
(1,890 / 1,726 − 1) × 100 = 9.5017%, reported as +9.5%.
For all branches:
(166,955 / 171,819 − 1) × 100 = −2.8309%, reported as −2.8%.
The supporting permit analysis uses SEM table 5-20 for 31 July 2026. Full source cells, formulas, definitions and the detailed technical limitations are available in the workbook and methodology ledger.
- SECO, Statistical appendix to the FlaM Report 2025, tables 1-1 and 1-3, released 17 June 2026.
- SECO, Statistical appendix to the FlaM Report 2024, table 1-3.
- SEM, Foreign population statistics, July 2026, including table 5-20.
- FSO, Profile: Cross-border Commuters Statistics, explaining the distinction between valid permits and estimated active cross-border workers.
- SECO and EasyGov, report on the standard employment contract for domestic work and the EasyGov transition.
Questions or factual corrections can be sent to hello@helpore.com.
Gilberto de la Fuente
Director at Helpore
Through Helpore, we want to contribute by bringing the best quality household help to Switzerland; that's why it's an objective of ours to facilitate the registration process for those who have just arrived in Switzerland from the EU.
— Gilberto de la Fuente, Director at Helpore
