B permit or L permit: which one your hire needs

For an EU or EFTA national, the contract length decides. A contract of twelve months or more, or an open-ended one, gives a B EU/EFTA permit valid for five years. A contract of three to twelve months gives an L EU/EFTA permit that runs for the term of the contract and can only be extended to a total of under twelve months. Employment of under three months in a calendar year needs no permit, only an online notification submitted at the latest one day before the first day of work. In every case the employer files, not the employee.

A Swiss hire begins with a question that looks like paperwork and is really a scheduling decision: does this person need a B permit, an L permit, or no permit at all. Answer it before you sign, and the file moves through the cantonal office in the background while onboarding runs. Answer it after you sign, and you may have promised a start date the canton has no reason to honour.

The employer files, not the candidate

The Foreign Nationals and Integration Act is blunt about this. Foreign nationals who want to work in Switzerland need a permit irrespective of how long they intend to stay, the application goes to the authority competent for the intended place of work, and where the work is employed work, the permit is applied for by the employer.

That last clause is the one foreign companies underestimate. The candidate cannot fix a permit problem on your behalf. Whoever is the legal employer in Switzerland carries the filing obligation, which is precisely why the permit question and the entity question are the same question. Permits themselves are issued by the cantonal migration offices, and the State Secretariat for Migration sorts them into three families: short-term permits of less than a year, annual permits with a fixed term, and settlement permits without one.

For EU and EFTA nationals, the contract length decides

There is no assessment of the person, no test of how badly you need them, and no quota. There is a contract, and its term determines the document.

The L permit is the short-term document. Its period of validity is identical to the term of the employment contract, and it can be extended for a total period of less than twelve months. Read that limit carefully: a nine-month contract extended by two months is still an L, but the extension cannot quietly carry the person past a year of employment. Once the engagement is genuinely a year or longer, it belongs in the B category and should have been written that way.

The B permit is the ordinary permit for an ordinary hire. It is issued to EU and EFTA citizens holding a contract of at least twelve months or of unlimited duration, it is valid for five years, and it can be renewed for a further five if the conditions still hold. One detail is worth knowing before you make someone redundant: the first renewal can be limited to one year if the holder has been involuntarily unemployed for more than twelve consecutive months.

Under three months: notification instead of permit

If a company based in Switzerland employs an EU or EFTA national for up to three months, no permit is required. The employer submits a notification form online, and the deadline is short but firm: no later than one day before the first day of work.

The rules change if the person stays on a foreign payroll and is posted to Switzerland. Then the frame is the Agreement on the Free Movement of Persons, which liberalises cross-border services for up to 90 effective working days per calendar year. The notification is due eight days before work begins, and those 90 days are counted twice over, once for the posting company and once for the posted worker. In construction and secondary contract work, gardening and landscaping, hospitality, cleaning, security services, itinerant trade and the sex industry, notification is required from the very first day regardless of duration. Beyond the 90 days, a work permit is required, and there is no legal entitlement to one.

One route that does not exist

Foreign staff leasing is prohibited. Under the free movement agreement and the Recruitment Act, a company based abroad may not lease staff to work in Switzerland, and the ban covers leasing to a Swiss company as well as leasing to another foreign company providing services here.

This matters because it rules out the arrangement companies reach for first: keep the person employed abroad, lend them to the Swiss operation, sort out the paperwork later. If work is being performed in Switzerland on a lasting basis, someone has to be the employer in Switzerland. That is the whole function of an employer of record, and it is also why the permit and the payroll registration are set up in the same step rather than in sequence.

Non-EU and non-EFTA nationals: the quota comes first

For a third-country national the question is not which permit but whether admission is possible at all. Only managers, specialists and other skilled professionals are admitted, which in practice means a university or higher education degree plus several years of professional experience. The employer must prove that no suitable candidate could be found in Switzerland or in an EU or EFTA state, and the salary, social security contributions and terms of employment must match what is customary for the region, the profession and the sector.

On top of that sits the annual quota. For 2026 the Federal Council left the numbers unchanged, and the amended admission ordinance entered into force on 1 January 2026:

• Third-country workers: a maximum of 8'500 permits, being 4'500 B permits and 4'000 L permits
• Service providers from EU and EFTA states employed for more than 120 days a year: 3'500 permits, being 3'000 L and 500 B
• UK nationals in employment: 3'500 permits, being 2'100 B and 1'400 L

The quotas are rarely exhausted nationally. Companies had used 74 per cent of the 2024 third-country units by the end of that year, and by the end of September 2025 about 52 per cent of the units available for that year. That is national comfort, not local comfort: units are distributed to cantons, so the number that matters is the one your canton still holds when you make the offer.

What the permit changes, and what it does not

It does not change social insurance. In principle everyone resident or gainfully employed in Switzerland is compulsorily insured under the AHV, and an L holder on a five-month contract is inside the same system as a C holder of twenty years. The employer cost of a hire follows the salary and the canton, not the letter on the card, and the cantonal spread is set out in Cantons, and why they change the number.

It does change how tax is collected. Withholding at source is tied to permit status rather than to nationality, and the collection method changes when an employee moves to a settlement permit. We covered the mechanics in Quellensteuer, explained for EU employers.

The C settlement permit itself is a matter of time served. It is granted after five or ten years of residence. The free movement agreement contains no settlement rules at all, so settlement treaties fill the gap: nationals of Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Sweden, along with Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway, can be granted settlement after five years of regular and uninterrupted residence. For nationals of the other EU member states no such treaty exists.

Before you sign

• Check the contract term against the twelve-month line. If the role is genuinely permanent, do not write a fixed eleven-month term to keep the file simple, because the L permit cannot be stretched past a year anyway
• Fix the place of work, since the competent authority is the one where the work is performed, not where your customer or your holding company sits
• For a third-country hire, ask the cantonal authority about available units before the offer letter goes out, not after
• Diarise the end date of an L permit alongside the notice periods that apply to the contract, because the two run on different calendars
• Remember that a short assignment is not a legal grey zone: under three months there is still a notification, and it is due the day before work starts

Common questions