AHV contributions for the self-employed in Switzerland

Registering a business name, printing an invoice or telling a client you are freelancing does not make you self-employed in the eyes of the AHV. A compensation office (Ausgleichskasse) decides that, and it decides it on how the work is actually done rather than on what the arrangement is called. Until the decision is made, a payment you receive can still be treated as a wage, in which case the contribution duty sits with the person paying you rather than with you.

The practical consequence for a new Einzelfirma is a gap. You are invoicing before you are recognised, and the bill for the contributions on that first stretch of income turns up afterwards, once the office has a figure to work from. The contribution is owed on that income either way, which is why the reserve matters more at the start than at any later point.

AHV

Old-age and survivors' insurance, the first pillar. For the self-employed it is billed to you directly instead of being taken off a salary.

IV and EO

Disability insurance and the income-compensation scheme. They are charged inside the same contribution as the AHV and do not arrive as separate bills.

ALV

Unemployment insurance. The self-employed are not insured for it and are not charged for it.

Ausgleichskasse

The compensation office that recognises the status, bills the contributions during the year and settles the year afterwards.

Einzelfirma

A sole proprietorship. The Swiss reference records its minimum capital as CHF 0, and its income is your income.

Where the full rate applies, AHV, IV and EO together come to 10.0% of income from self-employment as the compensation office establishes it: 8.1% AHV, 1.4% IV and 0.5% EO. That is the whole of the first-pillar charge on the self-employed side. ALV is not part of it, because the self-employed are not insured against unemployment and therefore pay nothing towards it. Contributions are rounded to whole francs.

Solory's AHV/IV/EO calculator applies the scale to an income figure you type in and labels the result an estimate to confirm with a Treuhänder before anything is filed. It keeps nothing: no AHV figure is stored against your account, and none of it is sent anywhere.

A small income is not charged the full 10.0%. A declining scale runs from a floor rate at the bottom up to the full rate, and the two ends of it are fixed: the floor rate is 5.371% and applies below CHF 10'100 of income, and the full rate is reached at CHF 60'500. Between those two bounds the office steps the rate up through its own table.

The scale has a hard bottom. However little the year produced, the Swiss reference records a minimum annual contribution of CHF 530, so a quiet first year does not end in a contribution of zero. When the income is small enough for the percentage to be beside the point, that minimum is the figure to plan around.

1. 1

   The year is billed on an estimate

   Contributions during the year are provisional, worked out from an estimate of what the year will produce. An estimate set too low is not a saving. It only moves money out of the instalments and into the settlement.

2. 2

   Instalments fall due quarterly

   The Swiss reference records the self-employed instalment as due 10 days after the end of the period. That is a short window, and it is the date the authority published rather than a working-day version of it.

3. 3

   The year is settled once the real income is known

   When the income for the year has been established, the office settles it against what you already paid and issues a final account. The reference records a payment window of 30 days on that settlement.

4. 4

   The difference is payable then, not spread

   A strong year produces a settlement bill on top of the instalments you are already paying for the current year. Late payment carries interest, recorded in the reference at 5%.

Solory's Cashflow Projection carries an AHV reserve assumption and a VAT set-aside assumption next to the opening balance, so the week-by-week look-ahead shows what is left after the contributions rather than what is in the account today. It runs a best, likely and worst band, it can take its payment delay from your own median time-to-pay instead of from an optimistic guess, and it says on the page that it is an estimate and not a guarantee.

• An AHV reserve and a VAT set-aside as named assumptions in the cashflow look-ahead, not as an afterthought
• What-if scenarios for a new client, a lost client, a rate change, an expense change and a delayed payment
• An AHV/IV/EO calculator that turns an income figure into a contribution for 2025 or 2026, rounded to whole francs
• The quarterly AHV instalment as a dated obligation in Your Swiss deadlines, with in-app and optional email notices 14 days ahead, 3 days ahead and on the day
• A Swiss reference entry on AHV self-employed status that names its authority, links its page and prints the date it was read

Two limits on that deadline view are worth knowing before you lean on it. Dates are shown exactly as the authority published them, with no shift for a weekend or a public holiday and no account taken of an extension you were granted. And the canton is never guessed from a postcode, because Swiss postal codes do not follow cantonal borders - until you record your canton, only federal entries appear at all. The personalised deadline view and its notices start on the Professional plan.

Employing somebody makes you an employer for AHV purposes, which is a different relationship with the same office. Payroll contributions on wages are settled monthly or quarterly, and the Swiss reference records them as due 10 days after the period ends - the same short window as your own instalment. An annual payroll declaration is recorded as due on 30 January.

Which payment period you are given is decided by the size of the wage bill rather than by preference. The reference carries a quarterly wage-sum ceiling and an annual period ceiling, and that is the only reason Solory asks in Settings whether you employ anyone and what annual wage sum you expect.

• It files nothing. There is no AHV declaration submission, no transmission to a compensation office, no e-filing of anything. The product produces figures, dates, CSV and JSON exports and a dated PDF dossier that a human or a Treuhänder files.
• It gives no legal or tax advice. That is stated on every compliance surface and on every calculator tab.
• It does not replace a Treuhänder, and it is not a double-entry accounting system. There is no chart of accounts, no journal and no balance sheet - it produces an income statement (Erfolgsrechnung) and a tax report from cash and invoice data.
• It stores no AHV figure. The calculators are stateless estimators: nothing is kept against your account and nothing is filed anywhere.
• It holds no figures outside 2025 and 2026. Ask for another year and the calculator refuses rather than guessing.
• It does not update Swiss figures by itself. A watch re-fetches the official pages and raises a detection when one of them changes, but it writes nothing into the reference - a person reviews every change.
• The AI assistant drafts and proposes, and every write waits for you to confirm it. It cannot send an email or file anything on your behalf, and the steps it may propose are record operations inside your own account.
• It does not cover all of Swiss business law, and it publishes the register of questions its research could not answer from an official source, so that silence is never mistaken for a fact.