I’m curious for those who have been in large/traditional companies (I’ve mostly been exposed to foreign companies so I don’t know what’s customary).
Do you/your employer contribute on 2nd pillar for:
Or are the contributions based purely on salary income for you.
Our employer contributes to 2nd pillar for the annual bonus based on the actual amount of the bonus and they only started it this year. AFAIK standard practice is to exclude bonuses from employer contribution.
Depends on the company but some actually do add an average bonus of the last few years on top of the fixed salary and then send this number as insured salary to the pension fund.
Normally no as it’s a one-time payment.
See answer one.
To add to that, a good PF doesn’t apply the coordination deduction and insures salary higher than 200k.
yearly bonus (if yes is that based on actual bonus or some contractual target?)
Yes, based on the actual bonus. The actual bonus is based on target bonus x company performance % x personal performance %. Insured salary is based on target bonus though.
starting bonus /other oneoff payment at hiring
It wasn’t included.
one off bonus (eg based on finishing a given project)
any other?
I don’t know because I believe those are very rare, at least in engineering. The yearly bonus is adjusted based on performance instead as explained above. But most likely not.
At big company - On the Annual bonus there was a deduction to 2nd pillar on my pay-slip based on the actual bonus, about 3.5% of amount (no idea if employer matched this).
At KMU - one-off bonus (project finished <10% under budget) was without deduction to 2nd pillar.
At another big company, your bonus number is gross.
when you receive the net they deduce the the employer and employee part of the second pillar based on the rate you have choose.
It’s based on actual bonus and fixed percentage
I assume they only take the employee part out of the gross, right? Would be weird otherwise 
big compagny, only based on annual salary, 3 levels of contribution by employee choice, applicable to both regular 2nd pillar plan and above 150KCHF to plan 1e but bonus or any incentive not taking into account.
Thanks everyone, super useful (and such a big variety, 2nd pillar is probably the most overlooked benefits when switching jobs, there’s so many variations even beyond the contributions percentage).
Extra question for those who contribute on the variable part (bonus etc.), how is the insured (savings) salary computed? (the one used to compute the buy-in potential).
Average over 12 months? Something else?
In my case they call it on-target earnings (OTE). It’s your current yearly salary + expected bonus assuming 100% company performance and 100% personal performance. Expected bonus is a % of yearly salary. Actual bonus is prorated on the actual salary (so if over the past 12 months you spent 3 months at X and 9 at Y due to a raise, it’s the weighed average), but OTE update is immediate, and thus insured salary. So the moment you get a raised, your buy-in limit immediately increases to the full new amount.
There’s also 0 deductions (coordination or otherwise), and it tops out at ~800k (not that salaries are anywhere near that), so it’s actually better than the (minimum) contribution ratio makes it look at first glance.
Not in my company. If your age bracket is 7% they will take out 14% of your bonus.
Wow, that’s really odd, it’s called employer contributions after all…
Isn’t the bonus essentially an employer contribution?
It depends what you count as gross. Economically, the fully loaded cost to your employer is your ‘gross’ pay and so you deduct all the employer costs and employee costs to get to the net.
You can also check these out online. A lot of pensions funds for big companies publish the regulations online so you can download the ones for Novartis and UBS for example and see exactly what the terms are.
Sure but normally the employer doesn’t use the gross number with employee (contract, salary slip, etc.).
Otherwise we might as well call them all employee contributions and simplify. 
Good idea, I’ll check. Looks like Novartis just adds the last bonus.
That would be a good thing as we see the full picture. Some countries try to hide tax on employment income by defining it as a tax on the employer but it is based on the employee salary so economically it is a tax on the employee in the end as the amount that an employer is willing to spend is just split between the employee and taxes.
Ok won’t debate this since it’s mostly political stance. But thanks for earlier pointers!