NEUCHATEL. The gender pay gap in Switzerland narrowed again in 2024, to 15.7 per cent from 16.2 per cent two years earlier, the Federal Statistical Office reported on Monday. The direction of travel is now well established: the gap stood at 19.0 per cent in 2018 and 18.0 per cent in 2020.
The figures come from the Swiss Earnings Structure Survey, the country’s most comprehensive wage measurement, which is conducted every two years. They confirm that the median tells a gentler story than the average: the median gap was 8.4 per cent in 2024, down from 9.5 per cent in 2022 and 10.8 per cent in 2020.
Much of the difference has an accounting. Women and men enter the labour market differently, work in different occupations and industries, and hold different levels of seniority and responsibility. When the statisticians control for education, years of service and position, a residual remains: the unexplained gap was 6.5 per cent in 2024, or CHF 640 gross per month, down from 7.0 per cent and CHF 657 two years earlier.
The sectoral spread is wide. The private sector shows a gap of 17.2 per cent against 12.8 per cent in the public sector, and finance and insurance, the industry that anchors Zurich’s prosperity, records the widest disparity of any branch at 30.6 per cent.
Hierarchy compounds it. The unexplained gap reaches 12.4 per cent among senior managers, double the 6.1 per cent recorded among employees without management responsibility. At the top of organisations, in other words, the part of the pay difference that cannot be explained by CVs is at its largest.
The survey arrives in a busy season for household economics. Real wages rose 1.6 per cent in 2025 and the gross median monthly wage stands at CHF 7,024, figures that frame the pay equity debate inside the broader autumn argument about premiums, rents and the cost of living.
Employers’ organisations welcomed the trend and cautioned against reading discrimination into every unexplained franc, noting that the survey cannot capture negotiation behaviour or career interruptions in full. Women’s organisations answered that CHF 640 a month is not a rounding error but a second health premium.
The policy instruments already exist in outline: pay analyses are mandatory for larger employers, and public procurement rules lean on firms that cannot show progress. What Monday’s figures will not settle is the argument over whether the pace, roughly half a percentage point a year, is a trend to applaud or a timetable to legislate.
At the current rate of improvement, the arithmetic is easy and uncomfortable: the gap closes sometime in the 2050s. Half the gap has an explanation. The other half has a payslip, and a deadline that keeps moving.