Is job evaluation required by law in Switzerland?

What Switzerland's law requires

Switzerland takes a distinctive route to pay equity. The Federal Gender Equality Act (GEA, SR 151.1), revised with effect from 1 July 2020, requires employers with 100 or more employees to conduct an internal equal pay analysis, have it verified by an independent body, and inform employees of the result. Where most explicit mandates legislate factor-based job evaluation, Switzerland legislates a statistical test of the pay system itself.

The center of gravity is Logib, the Confederation's free analysis tool. Logib runs a regression of pay against objective, wage-relevant factors — training and education, years of service, professional experience, the requirement level of the job, and professional position — and flags an unexplained gender pay difference beyond a 5% tolerance threshold. Logib is the recommended method and has been recognized by the Federal Supreme Court, but it is not exclusive: an employer may use a different methodology if it can demonstrate the method's scientific quality and legal conformity.

Who must comply

The duty applies to public and private employers with 100+ employees (apprentices excluded from the count). The compliance cycle has three steps:

1. Analyze — run the equal pay analysis using Logib or a demonstrably equivalent method.
2. Verify — have the analysis reviewed by an independent body: an accredited audit firm, a properly constituted employee representative body, or an employee-rights organization meeting statutory criteria.
3. Inform — communicate the result to employees (and, for listed companies, shareholders) within a year of verification.

The analysis must be repeated every four years — with one important release valve: an employer whose analysis demonstrates equal pay is excused from further repetitions. The whole obligation is also time-limited by a sunset clause and currently expires on 30 June 2032.

Enforcement and recent developments

The Swiss regime is deliberately light on sanctions — there are no fines for an adverse result. Its leverage is procedural and reputational: a verified analysis exists, employees know about it, and an unexplained gap above tolerance is visible to the people best placed to act on it. Equal pay claims under Article 3 of the GEA remain available to employees, and a documented analysis is central evidence in any such dispute.

For multinational employers, the contrast with the neighboring EU Pay Transparency Directive matters: Switzerland is not an EU member, so the Directive's June 2026 transposition wave does not apply — but Swiss companies with EU operations will face both regimes, one statistical and one built on equal-value job comparison.

How point-factor job evaluation supports compliance

Logib's regression is only as good as the job data behind it. Two of its most influential variables — the requirement level of the job and the professional position — are judgments about job content, and they have to be assigned consistently and gender-neutrally for the analysis to stand up to independent verification.

That is where structured job evaluation earns its keep in Switzerland:

• Defensible requirement levels — a point-factor evaluation derives each job's competence and responsibility demands from documented criteria rather than title or grade tradition, giving the regression inputs an audit trail.
• Consistency at scale — when hundreds of roles must be levelled the same way every four years, a documented methodology beats ad-hoc classification.
• Beyond the 5% threshold — employers who want to explain or close a flagged gap need to know whether two differently-paid roles genuinely differ in value. Factor-based comparison answers exactly that question, in exactly the terms (skill, responsibility, working conditions) that Swiss courts and the wider European equal-value standard recognize.

Switzerland asks a statistical question; answering it credibly still requires the discipline of analytical job evaluation underneath.

The law

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