26,783 Listings: Switzerland's Invisible Childcare Market

The census: four platforms, one invisible market

Four platforms were systematically scraped on July 24, 2026: babysitting24.ch and care.com as dedicated marketplaces with profile listings, topnanny.ch as a two-sided marketplace with supply and demand reported separately, and tutti.ch and anibis.ch as general classifieds portals, searched for childcare keywords. Each platform covers the market differently, and each has its own limitation: babysitting24.ch shows babysitter and nanny as the same, indistinguishable pool of listings; care.com publishes self-advertised, not independently re-counted, figures; topnanny.ch covers only 22 city and district markets, not all 26 cantons; and the classifieds portals give only a snapshot, not a full census. Together, they still draw a consistent picture of a large market.

The thinnest evidence comes from tutti.ch and anibis.ch: of 334 classifieds screened in the cleaning/childcare category, only 58 turned out, on manual review, to actually be childcare offers (17.4%), the rest were cleaning or other services. Notably, 31 of the 58 genuine childcare listings, or 53%, come from Ticino, even though Ticino holds only around 4% of Switzerland's population. That could be a real regional pattern or an artifact of the sampling window; we flag it explicitly as an open question, not a settled finding.

Supply by canton: Zurich and Geneva dominate

On babysitting24.ch, the platform with the broadest canton coverage, supply can be mapped nearly nationwide. Zurich leads with 5,538 listings, narrowly ahead of Geneva (5,268), both far ahead of Vaud (2,726) and Basel-City (2,485). Aggregated by BFS Grossregion the pattern is even clearer: the Lake Geneva Region (Geneva, Vaud, Valais) alone accounts for 8,493 listings, nearly a third of the whole market, while Eastern Switzerland trails with 1,329 listings from only five of its seven cantons (Appenzell Outer Rhodes and St. Gallen yield no reliable figure).

#			Listings
1	Zurich		5’538
2	Geneva		5’268
3	Vaud		2’726
4	Basel-City		2’485
5	Bern		1’846
6	Lucerne		1’317
7	Aargau		853
8	Zug		835
9	Fribourg		786
10	Basel-Country		766
11	Neuchâtel		695
12	Ticino		509
13	Valais		499
14	Solothurn		477
15	Schaffhausen		428
16	Thurgau		385
17	Grisons		298
18	Nidwalden		262
19	Jura		171
20	Schwyz		153
21	Obwalden		144
22	Uri		124
23	Glarus		115
24	Appenzell Inner Rhodes		103

Listings per canton, babysitter category, excluding contaminated pool_fallback rows (babysitting24.ch, as of 2026-07-24). Appenzell Outer Rhodes and St. Gallen are missing: no reliable figure, explicitly not to be read as zero. Each canton figure comes from a single city search (typically the cantonal capital), not the whole canton.

Download PNGCopy imageData (CSV)

Supply and demand: 7,787 against 4,003

Topnanny.ch is the only one of the four platforms that reports supply and demand separately, giving a direct picture of the imbalance. Nationally, across all 22 city and district markets it covers, carers offer their services 7,787 times, while parents actively seek care only 4,003 times: a supply overhang of nearly 2:1. But the national average masks large local differences. In Bezirk Aarau, 52 carers offering their services face 105 seeking parents (ratio 2.02), the sharpest demand imbalance in the whole census. At the other extreme is Bezirk Lausanne: 908 carers offering their services against just 266 seeking parents (ratio 0.29), essentially tied with Geneva (0.30). Geneva is simultaneously the largest market on both sides (964 seeking, 3,218 offering) and the canton with the highest institutional Kita usage in Switzerland (70.9%): huge, but not undersupplied.

Where Kita capacity is thin, the private market booms

The most striking finding of this census is not a single number but a pattern: cantons with low institutional Kita usage systematically show stronger private-market pressure. Across 15 cantons, the canton-aggregated ratio of parents seeking to carers offering on topnanny.ch correlates negatively with the share of households using a Kita or after-school care (BFS EFG 2023): Spearman rho = −0.81. A second, independently sourced proxy using SODK-recorded Kita places per 1,000 children confirms the direction (rho = −0.61, n = 16). The correlation is exploratory, not causal, and rests on a small sample, so it is not proof that missing Kita capacity causes the private market, but it does show a consistent pattern across two independent data sources, robust even when the two thinnest cantons are dropped from the calculation (rho stays between −0.77 and −0.80).

Numbers to Quote

Five citable numbers from this census, each with its source, ready to copy-paste for newsrooms.

• “26,783 childcare listings are live on babysitting24.ch alone, spread across 24 of 26 cantons.”

  Source: babysitting24.ch, as of 2026-07-24

• “On topnanny.ch, 7,787 carers offer their services while only 4,003 parents actively seek care, a supply overhang of nearly 2:1.”

  Source: topnanny.ch, as of 2026-07-24

• “In Bezirk Aarau, 52 carers offering their services face 105 seeking parents, the sharpest demand imbalance in the census.”

  Source: topnanny.ch, as of 2026-07-24

• “The lower a canton's institutional Kita usage, the stronger the private market pressure: Spearman rho = −0.81 across 15 cantons.”

  Source: topnanny.ch × BFS EFG 2023

• “Of 334 classifieds screened on tutti.ch and anibis.ch, only 58 turned out to actually be childcare, more than half of them from Ticino.”

  Source: tutti.ch, anibis.ch, as of 2026-07-24

The registration duty: what the market shows, and what it doesn't

None of the four platforms requires AHV registration before a family and a carer make contact. That is not legally required, but it also means the visible market says nothing about how many of the resulting employment relationships are legal. The legal position itself is clear, regardless of the platform:

26,783 listings show just how large Switzerland's private childcare market really is. What they do not show is how many of the employment relationships that result from them ever reach a compensation office.

More studies in this series

Surprising Findings