On 1 October 2026 Switzerland switches on a federal register of beneficial owners for the first time in its history. If you run compliance, risk or supplier onboarding, the instinct is to assume Swiss ownership data is about to open up. It is not. The register is explicitly not public — and for most of the people who need Swiss ownership data, nothing changes at all.
That is the honest headline, and it reframes everything else about Swiss company data. Switzerland runs one of the most genuinely open corporate registers in Europe on the identity layer: free search, a free public API, a clean national identifier. Then it stops dead at two points — ownership and financials — and stays stopped after October.
This guide covers how the system is actually built, what you can pull for free, what the Transparency Act does and does not change, and where the data runs out. Every factual claim here is sourced from primary or named sources listed at the end.
The short version
- No single register. 26 cantonal commercial registers hold the authoritative files. The Federal Commercial Registry Office (EHRA) approves every entry and runs the central database.
- Zefix is the free front door — all 26 cantons in one search, plus a public REST API and an open-data extract. The canton, not Zefix, issues certified extracts.
- One identifier does everything. The UID,
CHE-XXX.XXX.XXX, ties commercial register, VAT, customs, social insurance and statistics together. - Ownership splits by legal form. GmbH quota-holders are public. AG shareholders are not published anywhere.
- Private financials are never published. Publication is required only for listed equity or outstanding bonds (Art. 958e CO).
- The Transparency Register goes live 1 October 2026 — and is closed to the public. Access: designated Swiss authorities and Swiss AML-regulated intermediaries only.
- 2025 insolvencies rose about 50% because of a bankruptcy-law change, not a demand collapse. Read the status flags accordingly.
How Swiss company data is actually structured
Switzerland is a federation, and its company register is built like one. Company law is federal — the Code of Obligations and the Commercial Register Ordinance apply nationwide — but the register is kept by the cantons. Each of the 26 cantonal commercial register offices holds the complete file for companies domiciled in its territory: articles of association, directors and signing authorities, capital structure, purpose clause and the full history of changes.
What stops this from becoming a 26-portal problem is the layer above it. The Federal Commercial Registry Office (EHRA), a unit of the Federal Office of Justice, exercises oversight: it reviews every cantonal entry for legal compliance before publication, issues binding directives on commercial register and company-name law, and operates the central database of all registered legal entities. That two-tier review is a large part of why Swiss register data is unusually clean.
Four channels surface that central database, and it is worth being precise about which does what, because commercial intermediaries charge a mark-up for documents that are free at source.
| Channel | What it gives you | Access |
|---|---|---|
Zefixzefix.ch | Free federal search across all 26 cantons by name, UID or canton. Core record: name, UID, legal form, seat, status, purpose, officers and signing authority, former names, links to SOGC publications and to the responsible cantonal register. | Free · public Public REST API Open-data extract |
| Cantonal registers 26 offices | The legally authoritative file. Articles of association, public deeds, register applications, full change history. The only source of a certified extract. | Mostly free Certified copies paid |
SOGC / SHABshab.ch | The official gazette, published every working day. Every registration, amendment and deletion, plus bankruptcy openings, debt-enforcement notices and calls to creditors. The searchable archive is how you reconstruct a company’s history. | Free · public |
UID registeruid.admin.ch | Federal Statistical Office. The CHE-XXX.XXX.XXX identifier and, critically, VAT registration status — the only route to verify a Swiss VAT number. | Free · public |
| Transparency Register from 1 Oct 2026 | Beneficial owners of in-scope entities, filed via EasyGov and held by the Federal Office of Justice. | Not public |
A practical warning worth repeating
Several commercial portals charge a substantial mark-up for Swiss register documents. Articles of association, uncertified extracts and SOGC publications are available directly from Zefix and the cantonal registers at no cost or at the official fee. Check the source before you pay a premium for a free document.
Liechtenstein is not Switzerland
The two share a currency, a customs union and a border, and are routinely conflated in vendor coverage claims. Liechtenstein is a separate sovereign state with its own commercial register, maintained by its Office of Justice in Vaduz. Nothing in this guide applies to it, and a Swiss dataset that claims Liechtenstein coverage should be asked to prove it separately.
Legal forms, and who is actually in the register
Two questions decide what you can learn about a Swiss counterparty, and both are answered by its legal form: is it in the commercial register at all, and are its owners visible?
| Legal form | Minimum capital | Register entry | Owners visible? |
|---|---|---|---|
| AG / SA Company limited by shares | CHF 100,000 share capital; at least 20% of each share’s nominal value and no less than CHF 50,000 paid in at formation | Mandatory | No |
| GmbH / Sàrl Limited liability company | CHF 20,000, fully paid in — no partial payment permitted | Mandatory | Yes quota-holders registered |
| Einzelunternehmen Sole proprietorship | None | Only above CHF 100,000 annual turnover — voluntary below | Yes the proprietor is named |
| Kollektiv- / Kommanditgesellschaft General and limited partnership | None | Mandatory | Yes partners registered |
| Genossenschaft Cooperative | None | Mandatory | Partial members not listed |
| Verein / Stiftung Association / foundation | None | Foundations always; associations if commercially active | Partial governing bodies only |
| Zweigniederlassung Branch of a foreign company | None | Mandatory | Parent entity named, but its own ownership sits abroad |
The gap most entity-resolution logic misses
A sole proprietorship below CHF 100,000 of annual turnover does not have to be in the commercial register. So a Swiss counterparty that returns nothing in Zefix is not automatically suspicious — it may be a real trading business that has simply never crossed the threshold. Check for a UID and a VAT registration before you treat an empty result as a red flag. The inverse also matters: absence from the register means no filed officers, no capital figure and no change history, so a small Swiss supplier can be entirely legitimate and still un-diligenceable through registry data alone.
Reading a capital figure after the 2023 reform
The company law revision in force since 1 January 2023 changed two things that affect how a registered capital number should be interpreted. Share capital may now be denominated in EUR, USD, GBP or JPY where that is the currency of the company’s business activity, provided the equivalent at formation meets the CHF minimum — so a Swiss entity may legitimately show capital in euros. And companies may adopt a capital band, letting the board move capital within a defined range without a fresh shareholder resolution. A capital figure is therefore a point-in-time value within a permitted range, not necessarily a fixed constant.
The identifier system: UID, VAT and the numbers people confuse
Switzerland gets identifiers right in a way many jurisdictions do not. There is one master number, it is permanent, and it threads through the whole administration.
| Identifier | Format | Issued by | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|---|
| UID (IDE / IDI) | CHE-123.456.789 | Federal Statistical Office | The entity exists and is registered somewhere in the Swiss administration. Digits are random — no canton or vintage encoded. Last digit is a check digit. |
| VAT number | CHE-123.456.789 MWST(TVA / IVA by region) | Federal Tax Administration | The same UID plus a suffix. Only present once the business is VAT-registered. Since 1 January 2014 this replaced the old six-digit VAT number. |
| Commercial register suffix | UID + HR / RC | Cantonal register | The entity is entered in the commercial register — not every UID holder is. |
| CH-ID / FCRO-ID | Legacy internal keys | EHRA | Older identifiers still surfacing in Zefix records and in third-party datasets. Useful for matching historical data. |
The mistake that costs you an input-tax deduction
A UID existing does not prove VAT registration. Verification has two layers: the entity exists, and its VAT status reads active. And because Switzerland sits outside the EU, VIES will not validate a CHE number — the UID register is the only route.
Searching Zefix in practice
Five things make the difference between a lookup that stands up in a file and one that does not.
- Search by UID, not by name, wherever you have one. Swiss company names repeat across cantons and often carry local-language variants. The UID is unique and permanent.
- Read the status field before anything else. Entities appear as active, in liquidation or deleted. A deleted entity still returns in results, which is useful for historical checks and dangerous if you skim.
- Click through to the canton. Zefix gives you the record; the cantonal register holds the documents and issues the certified extract. If you need articles of association or a legally binding extract, that is where you go.
- Use SOGC for the timeline. The register shows the current state. The gazette shows how it got there — every amendment, officer change, capital movement, bankruptcy opening and creditor call, dated.
- Expect German, French or Italian. Purpose clauses, signing-authority scopes and register remarks are in the cantonal language and are not translated. Automated screening that keyword-matches an English purpose clause will silently under-perform on Swiss data.
One field worth extracting that most teams ignore
The register records whether a company has opted out of a limited audit, together with the financial year from which the waiver applies. It is a small flag with real signal: it tells you the company has no more than 10 full-time positions, that all its shareholders agreed to drop assurance, and that no auditor has looked at the numbers since. Since 1 January 2025 the waiver can no longer be applied retroactively — it must be filed before the financial year begins — which makes the registered date meaningful rather than cosmetic.
The ownership problem: why the legal form decides everything
Here is where Switzerland diverges sharply from its neighbours, and where most cross-border due diligence quietly fails.
For a GmbH / Sàrl, the quota-holders are entered in the commercial register. They are public, free to retrieve, and legally reliable. For an AG / SA — the vehicle of choice for anything of scale, and for essentially every holding structure — shareholders appear nowhere in the register. The public sees the board and the signing authorities. That is all.
Swiss ownership data has never been absent — it has been internal. Since 2015, anyone acquiring 25% or more of the capital or voting rights of an unlisted company must notify the beneficial owner to the company. The company keeps a share register and a register of beneficial owners. Both sit in a filing cabinet at the company’s seat, accessible to the company and to authorities, and to nobody else.
Bearer shares: a reform that is already complete
Outdated pages still describe Swiss bearer shares as a live anonymity route. They are not. Under the Global Forum Act, in force since 1 November 2019, bearer shares are admissible only for companies with listed equity securities or bearer shares structured as intermediated securities. All others were converted into registered shares by operation of law on 1 May 2021, and shares whose holders never came forward became void on 1 November 2024.
The practical consequence for a data team is that the anonymity question has moved. It is no longer “is this a bearer-share company?” It is “where does the ownership chain leave Switzerland, and can I pick it up in a jurisdiction that publishes?”
The Transparency Register: what actually changes on 1 October 2026
The Federal Act on the Transparency of Legal Entities and the Identification of Beneficial Owners was adopted by Parliament on 26 September 2025. The Federal Council published the implementing Ordinance on 12 June 2026 and fixed entry into force at 1 October 2026. It creates a centralised electronic register of beneficial owners operated by the Federal Office of Justice, with EasyGov as the reporting channel.
Who is in scope
| In scope | Out of scope |
|---|---|
| Swiss AG/SA, GmbH/Sàrl, cooperatives, SICAV and SICAF | Listed entities, and entities at least 75% owned by listed entities or public authorities |
| Foreign entities with a Swiss nexus: a registered Swiss branch, effective place of management in Switzerland, or Swiss real estate | Pension funds |
| Trustees domiciled in or administering trusts from Switzerland, unless already subject to the AML Act | Swiss associations, Swiss foundations, Swiss sole proprietorships |
How a beneficial owner is defined
The natural person who ultimately controls the entity by holding — directly or indirectly, alone or in concert — at least 25% of capital or votes, or who controls it by other means. Two definitional points matter for anyone building ownership logic:
- Indirect control has a threshold rule. The Ordinance deems indirect control to exist where a person holds more than 50% of one or more intermediary entities which themselves hold at least 25% of the reporting entity.
- “Control by other means” is deliberately broad. It covers the right or ability to appoint or remove more than half the board, to veto specified decisions such as changes to the corporate purpose or the budget, or to force profit distributions — and extends to influence exercised through agreements, debt instruments, the articles of association, or family and fiduciary relationships.
Where no natural person qualifies, or where the entity cannot fully verify a beneficial owner, the highest-ranking member of the management or board is reported. In that second case the individual is designated as a contact point for authorities rather than as a beneficial owner — a distinction worth preserving if you are modelling this data.
Deadlines
First, what “ordinary audit” means — because the deadline depends on it
Swiss law sets three tiers of statutory audit, and the Transparency Act borrows the top one to set reporting windows.
- Ordinary audit (Art. 727 CO) — required where a company exceeds two of three thresholds in two successive financial years: CHF 20 million balance sheet total, CHF 40 million revenue, 250 full-time positions on annual average. Also required for companies with listed securities, for those obliged to produce consolidated accounts, and where shareholders representing at least 10% of capital demand it.
- Limited audit (Art. 727a CO) — the default for everyone else.
- Opting out — a company with no more than 10 full-time positions on annual average may waive audit entirely with unanimous shareholder consent.
So the shorter three- and four-month windows in the table below apply to the larger end of the Swiss corporate population; most SMEs fall into the five- and six-month rows.
| Situation | Reporting deadline |
|---|---|
| New Swiss entity | Within 1 month of registration in the commercial register |
| Existing AG/SA subject to ordinary audit | Within 3 months of entry into force |
| Existing AG/SA, all other cases | Within 5 months |
| Other existing entities, ordinary audit | Within 4 months |
| Other existing entities, all other cases | Within 6 months |
| Entities whose beneficial owners already appear in the commercial register as members or corporate bodies | Up to 2 years |
| Any change to reported information | Within 1 month of the entity becoming aware |
Foreign in-scope entities must designate a representative or a service address in Switzerland when they register.
And now the part most coverage buries
The register is not publicly accessible
Electronic access is limited to certain Swiss authorities, including criminal prosecution authorities, plus financial intermediaries and advisors subject to the Swiss Anti-Money Laundering Act, for their KYC and due diligence obligations. Public access was not adopted.
If you are an EU obliged entity without a Swiss AML footing, a foreign bank, a corporate procurement or third-party risk team, an investor, or a journalist, 1 October 2026 gives you nothing you did not have on 30 September. Swiss ownership becomes better documented and no more visible.
Enforcement
The Act is not advisory. Published analyses of the legislation describe a supervisory body attached to the Federal Department of Finance, which audits compliance and refers violations for prosecution under Swiss administrative criminal law, with serious cases capable of reaching the Federal Criminal Court. Intentional breach of the reporting and disclosure obligations — and the provision of false information — is described as carrying fines of up to CHF 500,000, with responsibility resting on the governing bodies rather than the entity in the abstract. For repeated violations, commentary points to further measures including suspension of membership and financial rights, and refusal of land register entries.
Why enforcement matters even though you cannot read the register
A penalty regime this heavy changes the behaviour of the counterparty in front of you. From October, an in-scope Swiss entity must have identified its beneficial owners, documented the chain of control, and kept the record accessible in Switzerland. That means the information now reliably exists in a defensible form even where you cannot pull it from a register. Asking a Swiss counterparty to evidence its beneficial ownership becomes a materially more reasonable request after 1 October 2026 than it was before, and a refusal becomes a more meaningful signal.
This is not a criticism of the Swiss approach — it is consistent with where the EU landed after the 2022 CJEU ruling closed public UBO access across the bloc, a shift we covered in our guide to which countries publish beneficial ownership data. It is simply a fact that changes what you should plan for. The correct response is not to wait for October. It is to build ownership resolution that does not depend on a register you will never be able to read.
When the register is closed, you resolve ownership from what is open
We source Swiss company data first-party from official government registries and normalise it against the same schema as 200+ other countries. For Switzerland that means the identity layer in full — entity, UID, legal form, seat, status, officers and signing authority, change history from the official gazette.
On ownership we are direct about what is achievable. Where the record exists we take it: GmbH quota-holders from the register, disclosed significant holders for listed companies, and — the part that actually moves the needle — the corporate chain above a Swiss entity resolved through the registries of jurisdictions that do publish shareholders and parent filings. Where a chain terminates in a private Swiss AG with nothing filed, we tell you that, rather than presenting a modelled guess as a verified owner.
Built for KYB, onboarding, third-party risk, due diligence and data teams.The financial statements blind spot
If the ownership gap is the one people expect, the financials gap is the one that catches teams out. Under Art. 958e of the Code of Obligations, a Swiss company must publish its annual accounts only in defined cases: where it has equity securities listed on a stock exchange, or outstanding bonds. Everything else — every private AG and GmbH, at every size — files nothing that a third party can retrieve.
There is one statutory opening. Creditors who can prove a legitimate interest must be allowed to inspect the annual and consolidated accounts and the associated audit reports. That is a right exercised against the company, not a database you can query, and it does not scale to a portfolio.
There is a second problem underneath the first, and it is the one that should worry a risk team more. The accounts that exist are frequently unaudited. Any company with no more than 10 full-time positions can waive audit entirely with unanimous shareholder consent, and published analyses of the Swiss audit market put the audit rate across potentially audit-liable legal forms at roughly 16% by the end of 2024 — meaning something close to five in six opt out. For newly formed AGs and GmbHs, opting out is described as close to standard practice.
What that means when a Swiss counterparty sends you accounts
If a Swiss company supplies management accounts during onboarding, the base case is that no auditor has examined them. Ask which audit regime applies — ordinary, limited, or opted out — and check the register, because the opting-out flag and its effective financial year are recorded there. Treat unaudited Swiss statutory accounts as self-reported. Statutory accounts under the Code of Obligations are also prudence- and tax-driven and permit hidden reserves, so even audited figures may understate the real position; that is precisely why Swiss banks and investors ask for Swiss GAAP FER or IFRS statements instead.
Set against the jurisdictions we have profiled — Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Norway — the contrast is stark. Those registers give you a filed balance sheet. Switzerland gives you a purpose clause and a share capital figure.
What you can still read from the record
Share capital and any capital changes are registered and public. So is the audit position: whether the company performs an ordinary audit, a limited audit, or has opted out entirely. So are the signing authorities and their scope. And SOGC carries debt-enforcement notices, bankruptcy openings and calls to creditors. None of that is a P&L, but for counterparty risk it is more signal than most teams extract from it.
Reading Swiss status data in 2025 and 2026
One dataset needs a health warning before you feed it into any risk model.
A revision of the Debt Enforcement and Bankruptcy Act (SchKG) took effect on 1 January 2025. It obliges public creditors — tax authorities, social insurance bodies, customs — to pursue outstanding claims through bankruptcy proceedings rather than attachment, putting them on the same footing as private creditors. Companies that had been quietly surviving on unpaid public debt began failing visibly.
The practical implication: a Swiss company that entered bankruptcy proceedings in 2025 is not necessarily a worse credit than one that did so in 2023. The threshold moved. Any model trained on the pre-2025 Swiss series will over-read the 2025 spike, and any vendor comparison that quotes Swiss insolvency growth without naming the SchKG revision is selling you a misreading.
The layers that sit above the commercial register
A commercial register entry proves an entity exists and who can sign for it. It proves nothing about licensing or sanctions status. Two further federal sources close that gap, and both are free.
| Source | What it answers | Practical note |
|---|---|---|
| FINMA authorised institutions | Whether a bank, insurer, securities firm, fund institution, portfolio manager or trustee actually holds a Swiss licence, and under which category. | FINMA also publishes UID numbers for authorised companies, which lets you join the licence list to the commercial register cleanly. A firm claiming a Swiss licence and absent from the list does not hold one — though FINMA notes a newly authorised institution may not yet appear, and a delisted one may briefly persist. |
| FINMA warning list | Companies and individuals that may be conducting unauthorised financial activity, often while presenting as Swiss-regulated. | Inclusion signals missing authorisation, not a finding of illegality. The list is not exhaustive and not updated daily, so absence proves nothing on its own. |
| SECO sanctions | Swiss sanctions designations, including the autonomous packages adopted since February 2022. | Switzerland maintains its own consolidated list alongside the UN list. An EU-only screening configuration will not cover Swiss designations. |
The join that makes this usable
Because FINMA publishes UIDs, and because the UID is the same identifier used by the commercial register, the VAT register and the statistics office, a Swiss entity can be resolved across licensing, tax and registry sources on one key. That is unusually clean by international standards — most jurisdictions force fuzzy name matching between a company register and a regulator list. Switzerland is generous on identity and closed on ownership, and the identifier is the part worth exploiting hardest.
Where Swiss registry data runs out
An honest inventory. These are structural gaps, not vendor limitations — no provider can source what is not recorded.
| Gap | Why it exists | Practical workaround |
|---|---|---|
| AG shareholders | Never entered in the commercial register. Held in the company’s own share register. | Resolve the chain from the other end — parent-company filings in jurisdictions that publish, group disclosures, listed-issuer reporting. |
| Private financials | Art. 958e CO limits publication to listed equity or bond issuers. | Consolidated accounts of a foreign parent; audit position and capital from the register; credit-side signals from SOGC. |
| Beneficial owners | Held internally pre-October 2026; held in a non-public federal register afterwards. | Ownership chain reconstruction, plus disclosure notifications for listed entities. |
| Identifiers for natural persons | Switzerland assigns a unique identifier to legal entities (the UID) but does not mandate one for individuals in this context. | Name-plus-date-of-birth-plus-residence matching; expect ambiguity on common names and treat director matches as probabilistic. |
| Cross-checking at registration | Notarial involvement provides identity verification at incorporation, but registry submissions are not systematically cross-referenced against other national databases. | Independent verification against sanctions, PEP and adverse-media sources rather than relying on the register alone. |
| Unregistered businesses | Sole proprietorships below CHF 100,000 annual turnover are not required to register. | Check for a UID and VAT registration; treat an empty Zefix result as inconclusive rather than adverse. |
| Unaudited accounts | Opting out is available below 10 full-time positions and is widely used. | Read the opting-out flag and its effective year from the register; treat supplied accounts as self-reported where it is present. |
| Group structure | The register records the entity, not the group. Parent-subsidiary links are not a register field. | Reconstruct across jurisdictions from shareholder records where they are published. |
Where a data provider is not the right answer
If you need one certified extract for a bank account opening, a court filing or a notarial process, go directly to the cantonal register. A commercial dataset cannot issue a legally binding certified extract, and paying a vendor for a document the canton will certify for a fixed official fee makes no sense. Providers earn their keep at scale, in normalisation, in monitoring, and in the cross-border joins — not on single-document retrieval.
Accessing Swiss company data at scale
Route 1: direct from the official sources
- Zefix web search — free, no account, all cantons. Right for ad-hoc lookups.
- Zefix REST API — published by EHRA; access is arranged with the office. Right for lightweight entity verification.
- Open data — a daily core-data extract of active entities on opendata.swiss, plus linked data via LINDAS. Right for research and statistics; thin for compliance work.
- SOGC archive — free, and the only complete record of corporate events over time.
- Cantonal registers — documents and certified extracts. Twenty-six interfaces, largely in German, French or Italian.
This is a perfectly good route for Switzerland alone, at low volume, with German or French in the team. It stops working the moment Switzerland is one row in a multi-jurisdiction portfolio — and note that Switzerland is outside BRIS entirely, so the EU interconnection layer will not pick it up for you. Our map of registry API access by country sets out how unusual Switzerland’s open API actually is.
Route 2: one normalised feed
The case for a provider is not that the Swiss data is hard to find. It is that Swiss data in isolation is nearly useless for a portfolio: different schema, different language, different identifiers, no group structure, no way to join a Zurich AG to its Delaware parent or its German subsidiary without doing the cross-border work yourself.
Swiss registry data, delivered the way your stack needs it
Company records sourced first-party from official government registries — Switzerland alongside 200+ other countries on one schema, one identifier model, one refresh cycle.
What to watch after October
- Whether access widens. Switzerland timed entry into force so the FATF can assess the new regime in its 2027–2028 evaluation. That review is the realistic trigger for any future change to the access rules — not domestic pressure.
- Data quality in the first year. Transitional windows run from three months to two years, so the register will be materially incomplete well into 2027. Treat early-period absence as “not yet filed” rather than “no beneficial owner”.
- The FinMIA disclosure threshold. A Federal Council consultation opened in June 2024 proposed raising the entry threshold for significant-shareholding disclosure from 3% to 5%. We could not confirm its current parliamentary status at the time of writing — verify before you rebuild any threshold logic.
- Divergence from the EU. The EU’s own framework continues to tighten under AMLD6 and the AML Regulation. Swiss entities in EU supply chains will face EU-side ownership evidence requirements that the Swiss register will not satisfy for them.