Hi all,
We would like to share our situation and see if someone can give us some advice:

We currently live in Edinburgh and I might be offered a good position in Basel. My wife works from home and her company would allow her to relocate either to France or Germany since they do not operate in Switzerland. Therefore we would need a German or French address for my wife's company and I would need to go to to Basel everyday.
We are still young (mid 30s) and we like to go to the gym and walk our dogs everyday, local shops and pubs in the weekends,plus we do not speak German. We think that this kind of life might be hard to find a places around Basel such as Lorrach or Weil am Rhein and we might decline the offer because of that.

Has anyone been in this situation? What are the best places around Basel?

Thanks everybody!!

If your wife works from home, why do they care where she lives?

Live in Basel.

Officially the company has to pay taxes and then you need a local address.

1000s of people live in Germany and France and work in Basel (Grenzgänger, Frontaliers respectively).
Lörrach, Weil am Rhein, Grenzach and Saint Louis (FR) all have local shops, bars and restaurants, and gyms. Plus they can essentially be considered suburbs of Since they are quite well served by public transport, and are only a short bike ride/car journey/ bus or train journey away.

Other bigger FR/DE towns are also not too far away eg Colmar, Mulhouse, and Freiburg (im Breisgau). These have good train connections to Basel for commuting

If you really want to live in Basel. Your wife should really be able to do this. She would need to persuade her company to contact a Swiss Lawyer to set things up (tax etc).

This sort of thing, ie where to live in France or Germany has been discussed many times in the forum. You should find some opinions from actual Frontaliers and Grenzgängers if you have a search.

How local do the local pubs have to be? I live in France, not even in any of the border villages, but it still takes only 15 minutes to get to the center of Basel. So while not walking distance, it's still close enough. As you don't speak German, it's likely you would be socializing with other expats anyway, and of course there are more of them living in Basel than Weil or St Louis.

I really don't think so - as pointed out, plenty work in the other direction. Another route would be for her to work as a contractor through a payroll company. Then her employer has a b2b contract with the payroll company, who pay her salary in Basel and take care of all legally necessary deductions. She might even be able to work as self-employed (doesn't work for people with just one "client" within Switzerland, but I seem to recall that it would in this situation).

I work as a contractor for a UK company - but through my own company, not a payroll company - quite happily.

And many of those don't speak either French or German. Check out Leymen - it's in France, but connected to the Basel tram system.

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