Moving within Switzerland changes more than the rent. Income tax is levied at three levels and the municipal one varies enormously between neighbouring villages; the commute changes; and the move itself costs money once. Zügle puts all of it on one screen and reduces it to a single figure per month. Here is exactly how.
The one convention that governs everything
Every difference is written candidate minus current — the flat you are considering, minus the home you live in now.
- A negative number means moving saves you money. It is shown in green.
- A positive number means moving costs you more. It is shown in red.
- Anything inside ±50 CHF a month (±1000 a year) is shown in amber: within the noise of the estimate, and not a difference you should move house over.
1. Income tax
Swiss income tax has three layers — federal, cantonal and communal — and only the first is the same everywhere. The cantonal and communal parts are set as a multiplier (the Steuerfuss) on a base tax, so two municipalities ten minutes apart can differ by thousands of francs a year on identical income.
Zügle asks the Federal Tax Administration's own calculator for the tax due on your gross income in each municipality, for your marital status, denomination and number of children, and reports the difference.
It uses the detailed calculation from gross income. That lands about 11% below what the ESTV's simple calculator returns for the same number, because the simple one treats what you type as already-taxable income. The difference between two municipalities — which is what this tool is for — stays comparable either way.
2. Rent
Net rent plus recurring charges, read from the listing itself. Where a listing only ever published a gross figure, that is used instead and treated as the whole cost. Both halves are editable: if the advertised rent is wrong, or a landlord comes back with a different number, you can override it and the comparison recomputes without re-fetching anything.
3. Commute
Journey time comes from the public Swiss transport API, from each home to the place you commute to. The fare is estimated from the fare zones between the two, with a distance tier as a fallback and a handful of curated real-world combined fares where a zone calculation is known to be wrong.
You can override the monthly cost with what you actually pay. An override always wins over the estimate.
4. One-off costs, kept separate
The costs of moving itself — the debt-collection register extract, the deposit paperwork, the move — are shown on their own and are deliberately not folded into the monthly verdict. Mixing a one-time cost into a recurring figure makes a good move look bad for the first year and a bad one look fine forever after.
5. Quality of living, and what it refuses to do
Alongside the money, a score covers things money does not capture — commute, distance to a centre, proximity to a lake, and similar.
Where Zügle has no figure for a criterion, that criterion abstains and its weight is redistributed across the others. It is never scored zero. Scoring a gap in our data as a mark against the municipality would quietly punish exactly the smaller places the tool is most useful for.
Each recommendation also carries how confident it is that a figure is really about that municipality — an exact tax calculation counts fully, a cantonal average counts for much less — and it lists the reasons in your own figures, including the negative ones.
A worked example
Moving from Siebnen (SZ) to Schindellegi (SZ), same canton, ten minutes apart, on a typical household income:
- Rent: +790 CHF a month — the new flat is considerably more expensive.
- Tax: −5110 CHF a year — Feusisberg's communal multiplier is far lower.
- Net: +4370 CHF a year. The tax saving is real and large, and it still does not cover the rent. Moving does not pay off.
This is the case the test suite pins, precisely because the intuitive answer ("lower tax, obviously move") is wrong.
What this does not include
Wealth tax, deductions specific to you, pension and asset effects, property purchase, school and childcare costs, and the value of being near the people you know. The figures are estimates from published data, not a personal calculation — see the .
Determinism
The comparison and the ranking are ordinary arithmetic over published figures. No language model is involved in any number this tool shows: the same inputs give the same answer tomorrow, and every step can be checked by hand.