The Registration Divide 2026: in Zurich 31 of 1,000 households register their domestic help, in Lucerne 11, and inspection density explains nothing

The Federal Act against Undeclared Work (BGSA) relies on deterrence: the cantons inspect, SECO counts the inspections. If deterrence worked, cantons with a high inspection density would have a higher registration rate. They do not. The 20 cantons without Chèque-Emploi produce a cloud of points with no direction.

This is no acquittal for the inspections, but a pointer to where they are aimed: in 2025, only 239 of the inspections across Switzerland took place in private households, the rest in businesses. SECO's inspection density measures the pressure on hospitality and construction, not on living rooms. Anyone who wants to raise registration in Lucerne or St. Gallen will find no lever in the inspection statistics.

Care at home is the fastest-growing segment of domestic work. Cantons with a higher share of over-80s should therefore have more employers in the simplified procedure. The relationship across the 20 cantons without Chèque-Emploi is r = −0.03. Ticino has the highest share of the very old, 8.2 %, and ranks 2nd; Basel-Country has the second-highest, 7.6 %, and ranks 20th. Zug, at 5.6 %, has a below-average share and ranks 4th.

The explanation lies closer to the compensation office than to demographics. Where a compensation office actively offers and promotes the simplified procedure, it gets used. SVA Zürich runs its own section called «Hausdienst» (domestic service), SVA Aargau a page called «Haushalte mit Angestellten» (households with employees). Where the office steers households into the ordinary procedure, they disappear from this statistic, not from legality.

Geneva 3.3, Vaud 3.7, Fribourg 3.7, Neuchâtel 0.8, Jura 0.3: going by the AHV statistics, French-speaking Switzerland would be a paradise of undeclared work. It is the opposite. Since 1998 (Valais), 2004 (Geneva), 2005 (Vaud) and 2006 (Fribourg), household employment there has run through Chèque-Emploi structures: the household buys hours of wages, the structure settles AHV, accident insurance and withholding tax. For the compensation office, the structure is a single employer, or it treats the cleaner as its own employee outright.

In 2024 Vaud had 10,976 employers at Chèques-emploi and 1,439 in the simplified procedure: 7.6 times as many. Fribourg 3,130 active Chèque contracts against 668: 4.7 times as many. Geneva cites around 15,000 households a year, undated and unaudited. If Vaud is counted with its Chèque employers, it comes to around 32.5 per 1,000: arithmetically ahead of Zurich. The canton that ranks 23rd in the AHV statistics would, with its own channel, be the leader.

The SECO report shows a decline in the simplified procedure from 98,305 employers in 2021 to 65,669 in 2025, minus 33 %. The cantonal lines show where it comes from: Vaud fell from 11,372 to 1,804 (2022), Geneva from 5,484 to 1,264, Neuchâtel from 599 to 154, Fribourg a year later from 1,562 to 722. German-speaking Switzerland barely moved.

Two compensation offices explain the break in writing. OCAS Geneva in its 2023 annual report: «Cette baisse est due au transfert du siège d’une plateforme en ligne spécialisée dans l’économie domestique dans un autre canton.» The decline, in other words, is due to an online platform specialising in domestic work moving its registered office to another canton. The Neuchâtel office in its 2022 report: a member that until then had registered every household individually «considère désormais ces travailleurs comme ses propres salariés», now treats these workers as its own employees. The national time series therefore measures where platforms have their registered office and how they settle, not how many households register legally.

The decline from 2024 to 2025 (-3.8 %) is broader: 13 cantons lose more than 10 %, among them Ticino (-22.8 %), Zug (-26.8 %) and St. Gallen (−19.6 %). It coincides with the introduction of VAV plus on 1 January 2025, the new procedure for households that voluntarily settle under the ordinary rules. No compensation office explains it. Zurich grows by +10.5 % in the same year.

Three compensation offices publish how many household employers they keep on their books in total, across all procedures. The figures turn the ranking on its head. SVA Basel-Landschaft counts 5,776 «Hausdienstarbeitgebende» (household-service employers), 42.5 per 1,000 households, but only 15 % of them in the simplified procedure. SVA Zürich counts 39,741 households, 54.6 per 1,000, of which 57 % in the simplified procedure. Ticino 12,106, 70.6 per 1,000, 39 % simplified.

Going by these figures, whether a household registers its cleaner depends less on fear of an inspection than on how easy its own compensation office makes it and whether the neighbours do it. For households in Lucerne, St. Gallen or Basel-Country the same law applies as in Zurich: AHV contributions from the first franc of wages, accident insurance from the first day of work, and the simplified procedure is open to every household up to a total payroll of CHF 60,480. Registration with your own compensation office takes an afternoon. Clino guides you through the steps; the household itself has to decide and sign.