I found this excellent site, not sure if it is already listed. But I know a lot of people want to know if their salary is normal to the Swiss standard.

Have a look. It is in French, German and Italian only but only takes a little effort to use the drop down boxes to get a report.

http://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/portal/e.../salarium.html

Very good,

very interesting!

It got me right on the mark. Seems quite accurate!

... and confirmation that officially women earn less than men in Switzerland.

Exactly. I knew there would be a difference but I am shocked about how much it is. Unfortunately I am a woman...

Interesting... I asked it how much I would earn with or without 3 years work experience. 100 CHF/month less, with the experience

Interesting but I couldn't find my job/qualifications in any of the lists..... listing the things as close to my job as possible told me I should earn 40% more than I am even though I know my wage is the higher end of normal for the job.....
It will probably work ok for "normal" people/jobs.....

Very interesting especially when you play around with the variables. B visa vs. Swiss came out very different from what we expected.
Thanks very much for posting this link.

Wow! I found out to be exactly in the middle!
Big brother in watching us...

Yep.. accurate for me as well.. put me in the 50%... makes me wonder if the comp. and ben. people in these big companies do much more than look up the numbers on this site

pretty good! make this a sticky, refer any new posts to it and delete them!

you need to speak french or german though!

Ah - Mod sighs deeply.
I made it a Sticky yesterday - temporarily at least.
I'm for ever giving folk links to stickies and outside links, but if 'helpful' EFers give detailed information each time (even if it's wrong!!), the person making the request is NEVER going to bother to look things up. And as the info given only applies to this particular case, the next person who comes along with a similar, but not quite identical request, asks again.
Ah - Mod sighs deeply again.

Perhaps the title of the sticky should be changed to "Swiss Salary - Personal Wages Calculator". I think people will find it easier that way.

Thanks for this...

Yes, excellent tool. Obviously feeds off actual salary scales...

Having started to look at job vacancies in Switzerland, I begin to understand why questions like "How much can I earn as XXX?" or "Is CHFxxx a good salary for XXX?" keep appearing.

I have seen quite a few vacancies advertised with broad job descriptions. When you are asked to write back including salary expectations, it is difficult to pitch this at the right level. On one hand you don't want to sell youurself cheap, but also don't want to price yourself out of the position.

Hopefully, this calculator will help people to come to these decisions (some of the time).

I promise not to ask about salaries

Great link... about time something a bit more acurate was out there. Took me months to get what the scales were truely like for my position.

it told me I'm ridiculously underpaid, but I already knew that

We get quite a lot of threads on EF asking if a certain salary is reasonable for a certain post, or how much a person can expect with X qualification for Y job.

To make all this easier, I suggest making an ultimate salary thread that works like this:

-we describe a certain qualification, a certain position if possible, and the type of company (without naming them!) and approximate salaries that we know of /have heard of

I can start with a few:

-Chemical Engineering graduate (Masters) from one of the two polytechnic schools: you can expect to start at around 80k CHF a year, from what I've been told. Typical employers could be in pharma, chemical products, oil refining or perfumes/aromes. The cantons of Basel and Valais in particular have quite a few employers.

-Engineering internships (graduate students): One of the polytechnic schools suggests 800.- a month as a reasonable sum, although I have known of people who have earned up to 3k a month.

-Chemical Engineering PHD, big pharma: I was told at a job fair that salaries started at around 90k CHF a year.