Just for your information and of course if you have any questions I will provide an answer:

The EU is currently investigating Switzerland for providing state assistance to companies coming to Switzerland. There is a basic EU law which restricts and sometimes prohibits the help a government can give a company. Switzerland has a three tier tax system which allows a Gemeinde and Canton to discount tax for businesses and people for that matter and the Cantons of Schwyz and Zug are famous for doing this. The EU is of the opinion that this systems provides companies moving to Switzerland instead of being domiciled in the EU with an unfair advantage... Switzerland of course disputes this as the bilateral agreement was related to the transfer of people and not of businesses and certainly not a harmonisation of laws and taxes as implied by this EU investigation.

Recently also the Canton Zurich agreed to maintain its Cantonal 100% tax level. This has serious implications for those who will be living in Zurich in 2007 and paying tax there... Any Canton can write a small loss but larger ones based on their GDP are only allowed to occur for two consecutive years. Thereafter the Canton is obliged to bring its tax to a level where it will break even. This is a problem for Canton Zurich as the tax will need to increase by double digit % to say 115% further the Gemeindes will need to increase the tax too and business in Zurich will become less attractive. Now obviously there must be an alternative and this can be for example increasing revenue from some other source (speeding cameras, and parking tickets for example!) or reducing the expenditure (closing schools for example). All in all though 2007 will be a tough year...

Richard

I tried in vain to find the tax multiplier for Canton Zurich in 2007. Is that information available? I am based in Zurich and about to search for my first apartment. But if I'm going to get a huge tax hit I might decide to go further afield. Are their any reliable estimates for the 2007 rates if there are no hard numbers?

From my experience Kanton Zürich has a lower tax band than St Gallen and Kanton Schweiz. Both these Kantons tend have have a lot of Land workers and not high earning Bankers etc.

DC

and I keep giving my address as Steuerparadies Schwyz.....

[taxhaven]

SZ is around 30-40% lower than ZH.

Just look at the car plates at UBS and CS etc: helluva lot of ZG and SZ to avoid tax...

Hi,

As stated there are three components to your tax, the bund or country part, which you cannot alter. The other two are dependent where you live. This therefore means it is not good enough to look for Kanton Zurich you also need to know where. Zurich is one of the cheapest kantons and places like Neerach, Zollikon and Herliberg battle it out every year to be the cheapest. However Kantons Zug and Schwyz are still going to work out cheaper. Pfäffikon or Bäch on Zurisee work out very cheap indeed and you still have a reasonable rail link into Zurich.

If you look on the zurich admin site you will get a list of rates for 2006. The 2007 rates should be published soon as well. This link allows you to calculate it...

http://www.steueramt.zh.ch/cgi-stcalc/StTarifNP99.cgi

For Zug use this link:

http://www.zug.ch/cgi/tax/np/kantordin.cgi

For Schwyz use this link:

http://212.126.164.71/SZ/Kt_SZRVDate.../calc_con.html

Does that Help?!

Wow. I hadnt really paid too much attention to the tax structure here. Really thought you had to be in the mega-earner category to justify re-location. But plugging my rough "family" figures in amazed me. Shift from Zurich ZH to Zollikon ZH and save CHF3000, surprising but not really enough to incur the increased living costs. But somewhere like Lachen SZ, save chf10,000 and have those recreational opportunities at my door, tempting. I'd have to change my name to "FayCrish" or something though ;-)

Hi,

It helps. It'd help more if could understand the German .