The Swiss staff-leasing licence (Personalverleih)

Who needs a Swiss staff-leasing licence

The staff-leasing licence is mandatory for any business that hires out workers commercially and for remuneration. The defining feature is a three-cornered relationship. You employ the worker. A client company directs their day-to-day work. You invoice the client for the hours. That is the temp-agency model, and it is the activity the AVG controls. The threshold is regular, paid activity. A one-off, unpaid loan of an employee is not caught; running the loan of staff as a line of business is.

The AVG draws a second line that decides the shape of the application. Two distinct activities sit under the same statute, and a staffing company often does both.

• Staff leasing (Personalverleih). You are the employer of record. The worker stays on your payroll and you lend them to a client that gives the instructions. You carry the wage risk.
• Private placement (Arbeitsvermittlung). You introduce a job-seeker to an employer who then hires them directly. You take a fee for the match and carry no payroll. The placement side has its own depth, set out in our guide to the Swiss recruitment and placement licence.

Both need a licence. The consequences diverge on money: only staff leasing requires a security deposit, because only the leasing firm owes the wages it must be able to honour. Many staffing businesses hold a combined authorisation covering both, since a single client relationship can move from one to the other as a project changes shape.

The licence holder is a company, and it must already exist on paper. A staff-leasing or placement permit presupposes an entry in the Swiss commercial register, which is why the licence almost always sits on a Swiss GmbH or AG. Setting up that company is the first step, and treating it as an afterthought is what costs founders a wasted month. Our guide to Swiss company formation covers the share capital, the register entry and the management the licence will later test.

The cantonal and SECO split

Two authorities can be involved, and geography decides which ones. The cantonal labour office (kantonales Arbeitsamt) of the canton where the company has its seat grants the basic licence. This is the licence a purely domestic leasing business needs, and the only one. SECO enters for cross-border work and issues a separate federal licence that sits on top of the cantonal one. The application for the federal licence can be lodged with the same cantonal authority, at the same time as the cantonal one.

Cross-border, here, means the worker or the client is outside Switzerland. Leasing staff from a Swiss base out to a client company abroad needs the SECO licence on top of the cantonal one. The federal layer exists because the cantons cannot police what happens across the national border; SECO can. A business that only places or leases inside Switzerland never touches SECO for the authorisation.

One direction is closed outright, and this is the point foreign founders most often misread. Hiring out workers into Switzerland from a seat abroad is not permitted. The AVG does not authorise a recruitment business established outside Switzerland to recruit for jobs in Switzerland at all, with or without a foreign licence. A foreign agency that wants the Swiss market has to come onshore, which is the subject of its own section below.

Branches add a third wrinkle. A company that operates from several cantons needs a separate cantonal licence in each canton where it runs a leasing or placement office. The head-office licence does not travel. A group with offices in Zurich, Geneva and Zug therefore holds three cantonal licences, plus the single SECO licence if any of them leases across the border.

The conditions to qualify

Four conditions decide the licence, and the cantonal authority checks each before it grants. They are not one-off hurdles. They must hold for the whole life of the licence, and the authority can withdraw the permit if one of them lapses.

Commercial-register entry and premises

The business must be entered in the Swiss commercial register, and the leasing or placement activity should appear concretely in its stated business purpose. It must also run from suitable business premises. A registered company with a real office is the baseline; a letterbox is not, and the premises are assessed partly through the lens of data-protection rules, because the firm handles workers' personal data. This is where the Swiss-presence requirement bites for foreign staffing groups, and where a registered office and resident director arrangement puts a genuine domicile and qualifying management on Swiss soil.

The qualified responsible person

The licence attaches to a named responsible person, and not to the company alone. That person must hold Swiss nationality or an EU/EFTA residence permit, be of good reputation, and demonstrate relevant training and several years of professional experience in placement or leasing. The residence condition is the one foreign founders underestimate: the responsible person cannot be a non-resident sitting abroad. Good reputation is tested through a criminal-record extract, a debt-collection-register extract and confirmation of no outstanding tax debts. Where the person lacks formal HR qualifications, SECO's guidance allows the licence to be granted on condition that an HR course is completed, so the gap is rarely fatal.

No conflicting activity

The business must not pursue any activity that could put the interests of the leased workers or the job-seekers at risk. The concern is a recruiter who ties placement to other business in a way that narrows the worker's freedom of choice or creates dependence. In practice this rarely blocks a straightforward staffing company, but it shapes what a mixed-services firm can offer under one roof.

The security deposit

Staff leasing carries a security deposit, and placement does not. The reason is structural. A leasing firm owes wages to workers it has placed with clients; if it fails, those wage claims need a backstop. The deposit is that backstop. A placement agency, which never employs the job-seeker, has no payroll to secure and lodges nothing. The licence is issued only once the deposit is in place, so it sits on the critical path of a leasing application.

The amount scales with the size of the leasing operation. It runs from CHF 50,000 to CHF 150,000, set by the authority against the scale of the business, as published on the Confederation's SME portal. Cross-border leasing sits at the upper end of that band. A head office can spare its own branches from lodging a separate deposit in each canton by lodging the maximum deposit centrally; the exact figures are fixed by the cantonal labour office under the fee ordinance (GebV-AVG, SR 823.113) and reviewed periodically, so they should be confirmed before you budget.

Beyond the deposit, the permit fees themselves are modest. The licence fee runs from CHF 750 to CHF 1,650 across the cantonal and SECO permits, with later amendment fees of CHF 220 to CHF 850. For cross-border placement there is also a cap on what may be charged to the job-seeker: no more than 5% of the first gross annual salary, under the fee ordinance, and that fee must be shared with the Swiss partner agency. The deposit is the number that shapes the cash plan; the fees are a rounding error against it.

In the staffing mandates we set up, the part that bites is rarely the deposit. It is the residence and experience profile of the responsible person. A founder who plans to run the business from abroad discovers late that the licence needs a qualified person resident in Switzerland, and the file then has to be rebuilt around someone who fits.

What the staff-leasing licence does not do

The licence authorises a leasing or placement business. It does not settle the employment terms of the workers, and that is where new entrants most often misjudge the burden. Leased workers in many sectors are covered by the collective agreement for staff leasing (GAV Personalverleih), which sets minimum wages, working hours and other terms that the leasing firm must apply regardless of the licence. Holding the permit is permission to operate; the GAV governs how you must treat the people you place.

Three further limits are worth stating plainly. The licence is not a work permit: a leased worker from outside the EU/EFTA still needs the appropriate residence and work authorisation, which is a separate immigration question. The licence is not a tax or social-security clearance: the leasing firm remains the employer for AHV, accident insurance and withholding tax on the workers it employs. And the SECO federal licence does not replace the cantonal one. It is an additional layer for cross-border activity, never a substitute, so a business that leases across the border holds both. The wider set of SECO permits and special authorisations is mapped across our SECO and special permits guides.

How a foreign founder should approach it

For a founder coming from outside Switzerland, the order of operations is what saves time, because the foreign route into this market is narrow. A recruitment business established abroad cannot hold the Swiss licence directly and cannot recruit into Switzerland from its foreign seat. SECO sets out two lawful paths. The first is to work in conjunction with a Swiss agency that already holds the cantonal and federal licences, where the Swiss partner runs the supply of labour and the foreign agency stays behind it. The second, and the cleaner one for a group that wants its own Swiss operation, is to set up a base in Switzerland.

That base follows a fixed sequence. Form the Swiss company and register it. Install a responsible person who holds Swiss or EU/EFTA residence and can show leasing or placement experience. Secure premises. Then lodge the licence application, with the security deposit attached for leasing. Build it in that order and the application reads as a formality. Skip the sequence and the responsible-person condition forces a rebuild around the one element that cannot be bought in a hurry.

The structure that carries the licence is an ordinary Swiss operating company, most often a GmbH or AG with a Swiss-resident director. That is the same structure we build for any Swiss trading business, and the staffing licence sits on top of it. Where the management or domicile needs filling, our resident-director and registered-office service supplies the Swiss-side person and address the AVG requires, and the company itself is set up through Swiss company formation.