School Until 3.20 pm, Work Until 6 pm

The parents' window: 50 hours, of which school covers a good half

The calculation starts with federal data: a full-time job comprises 41 hours 47 minutes of contractual working time per week (FSO, labour volume statistics 2024), the Employment Act mandates a break of at least 30 minutes from 7 hours of work, and the average commute takes 30 minutes each way (FSO, commuter mobility 2023). Together that makes an absence of 9 hours 51 minutes per day: whoever drops the child off at school at 8 am is back, in the model case, shortly before 6 pm. The parents' window that needs to be covered thus spans 50 hours per week, exactly the frame daycare is built for. With the move up to primary school, it collapses.

School presence means: the time the child spends supervised at school according to the official Blockzeiten and timetables. Even the most generous city, Lugano with lessons until 4.15 pm, covers 57 percent of the parents' window. The tightest, Biel/Bienne with school ending at 11.45 am on Wednesdays and Fridays, covers 45 percent.

The gap, city by city

For a third-grade child, at the age when most cantons schedule 2 to 4 afternoons of lessons, the weekly gap ranges from 21.5 hours in Lugano to 27.8 hours in Biel/Bienne. Striking: schools in French-speaking Switzerland and Ticino keep the children longer, the German-speaking cities send them home earlier. Geneva and Lugano teach until 4 pm and 4.15 pm respectively; in Lucerne, St. Gallen, Winterthur and Biel school is out at 3.20 pm, in Bern sometimes as early as 3 pm.

Converted into working time, the gap corresponds to a workload of 51 percent (Lugano) to 66 percent (Biel/Bienne) of a 41-hour-47-minute week. It is half a job that the Swiss school system delegates back to families every week, and one that appears in no labour market statistic.

What the gap is made of: lunchtime, Wednesday and the time after 3.30 pm

The gap has the same four building blocks everywhere, but every city mixes them differently. In Lugano the biggest hole is lunchtime: school closes at 11.30 am and does not reopen until 1.30 pm, two hours a day, four times a week, the child eats at home, just as the system has always intended. In Lausanne the lunch break lasts over two hours, and lessons do not start until 8.30 am. In Basel the break is fixed canton-wide at 12.15 pm to 2 pm. And in St. Gallen and Biel/Bienne two whole afternoons are completely school-free, Wednesday and Friday.

The Wednesday afternoon is a national institution: in all ten cities, a third-grader has no lessons on Wednesday. Eight cities absorb it with care modules. The exception, of all places, is Geneva: the Parascolaire GIAP states in its terms and conditions: “Il n'y a pas de prise en charge le mercredi”, no care on Wednesdays, and this in the only canton whose constitution guarantees, in Art. 204, all-day care “on every school day” (“chaque jour scolaire”). The canton of Zurich, for its part, diagnoses the problem in its own monitoring report: “On Wednesdays, lunchtime and afternoon offerings are comparatively rare.”

What the bridge costs: from CHF 3,880 to CHF 15,525 per year

All ten cities have out-of-school care with income-dependent tariffs. For dual-earner couples that means, almost everywhere: top tariff. Closing the full gap with municipal modules, supervised lunch plus afternoon care until 6 pm, costs per child and school year:

The difference is no detail: between St. Gallen (CHF 5,862) and Biel/Bienne (CHF 15,525) lies a factor of 2.6, for comparable services. The explanation lies in the tariff model: Bern and Biel bill care by the hour, at the top rate of CHF 13.14, plus 8 to 9 francs per lunch. Cities with module prices are cheaper, and Zurich's Tagesschule lunch of CHF 6 is the cheapest school lunch in Switzerland, Lausanne's CHF 35.75 per lunch module the most expensive.

Just as decisive is the income at which the top tariff kicks in. Winterthur draws the line at CHF 77,575 of taxable income, a single full-time median wage almost gets you there; above it, the full-cost tariff of CHF 105 per care day applies. Bern and Biel charge the top tariff only from CHF 170,000. Geneva has no upward progression at all: everyone pays the same base tariff, only downward discounts are possible.

Where the bridge eats up the most pay

Absolute prices say little as long as wages differ as much as they do in Switzerland: the median wage ranges from CHF 7,502 in the Zurich region to CHF 5,708 in Ticino (LSE 2024). Set the annual bridge against twelve regional median monthly wages and the ranking flips:

In Biel/Bienne the care bridge costs 18.6 percent of a regional median wage, almost a fifth, in Bern 16.9 percent. At the other end, a Geneva family pays 4.6 percent, for an offering without Wednesdays. And Ticino is missing from this ranking for a telling reason: Lugano does not publish its tariff table, so where Switzerland's wages are lowest, the price of the gap remains officially unquantified.

Place guarantee, demand clause or waiting list: access

A tariff is worthless without a place. Here the cities split into three worlds. Zurich (“every child is entitled to a care place”, 72 Tagesschulen from this school year, all of them by 2030) and Winterthur (“Every child … is admitted”) guarantee the place. Most German-speaking cantons have a demand clause: the municipality must run an offering if there is enough demand, in the canton of Bern from ten children, in Lucerne in theory from a single child. And in French-speaking Switzerland and Ticino, access is decided by priority rankings and waiting lists: Lausanne prioritizes working parents without guaranteeing a place, and in the canton of Vaud families report waiting 6 to 12 months. Lugano allocates canteen and doposcuola places according to a four-tier priority order in which dual-earner couples form the last category behind single parents, hardship cases and families referred by social services, and on top requires an employer's certificate with gross salary, place of work and working hours.

Even where access works, it is heavily used: in Bern, 44.3 percent of all city children attend all-day care (58.3 percent in the Breitenrain-Lorraine school district), in Winterthur it is 47 percent, in St. Gallen 43 percent, and at Geneva's GIAP around 80 percent of schoolchildren are enrolled, 30,000 children. The demand is there. The question is what it costs and who gets in.

Three ways to close the gap, and what they cost

At heart, families have three options: the municipal modules, a privately employed nanny, or one parent cuts their workload. All three have a price, and it differs by a multiple:

The modules are almost always the cheapest solution, if you get a place. A legally employed nanny costs CHF 23,800 to 32,400 per school year for the gap hours, but is the only option that also covers the Geneva Wednesday, the edge hours and sick children. The most expensive is the seemingly free model: if one parent reduces their workload by the gap, they forgo, depending on the region, CHF 35,000 to 56,000 in gross salary per year, plus lower AHV and pension fund contributions that add up all the way to retirement. Exactly this model is the Swiss norm today: in 53 percent of couple households with children, the father works full-time and the mother part-time.

Over the year: 1,300 to 1,500 hours without school and without parents

The weekly gap is only half the truth, because it applies only in school weeks, and depending on the canton there are 36.5 to 39 of them. On top come 13 to 15.5 weeks of school holidays, set against an average of 5 weeks of parental vacation (Clino has measured this holiday gap canton by canton in a separate study). Both gaps together yield the annual balance:

For 1,291 to 1,507 hours per year the child is covered neither by school nor by the parents' vacation. For comparison: a full-time job comprises around 1,960 working hours after deducting vacation. The structural care gap of a Swiss family with a primary school child thus corresponds to 66 to 77 percent of a full-time job, year after year, until the child is old enough to stay home alone.

Figures to quote

What families can actually do

School covers a good half of the parents' window. The other half is, every week anew, organization, money or workload, and in no statistic a job.

Surprising findings