Built a tax comparator across all 2,244 Swiss municipalities — looking for math sanity checks

Taxes
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Hey all, new here but figured this is the right community for what I’m about to share, because nobody scrutinises Swiss tax math like Mustachians do.

Built wheretolive.ch — a comparator for effective income + wealth tax across all 2,244 Swiss municipalities, with federal + cantonal + municipal layers decomposed. Enter income, civil status, kids, Pillar 3a / BVG contributions, then click a municipality on the map or compare two head-to-head.

Sanity-check example, 192k gross household income, Zug vs Zürich:

Zug Zürich
Federal income tax 8,949 8,949
Cantonal income tax 7,920 12,683
Municipal income tax 5,033 15,401
Total income tax 21,902 37,056
Wealth tax (cant. + mun.) 193 653
Total tax burden 22,095 37,709
Effective rate 11.5% 19.6%
Marginal rate 22.4% 34.9%

Delta: 15,614 CHF/year on identical gross income. The marginal-rate gap (12.5pp) is the one I keep coming back to — at the next raise you keep ~78 cents per franc in Zug vs ~65 in Zürich. Compounded over a FIRE-relevant timeframe that’s life-changing money.

Data sources / methodology:

  • Cantonal tax administrations, 2024/2025 rates

  • 143,593 individual data points (family situations × income brackets × Pillar 3a / BVG deductions × wealth levels)

  • Federal Bundessteuer-Tarif applied separately

  • All three layers (federal + cantonal + municipal) decomposed in the UI

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Known limits:

  • 23 municipalities with incomplete tax data, flagged in the UI

  • Indicative values; not a substitute for proper advice on multi-canton income, AHV-Renten, self-employment, Quellensteuer, or unusual deduction stacks

  • Wealth-tax progression handled per canton but only manually verified on ~10 cantons so far

Where I’d love this community’s input:

  1. Sanity-check the math against a municipality you know well — does it match your last Steuererklärung?

  2. Edge cases I might be getting wrong: Quellensteuer thresholds, Doppelverdiener-Tarif application, intercantonal property income split

  3. Pillar 3a / BVG buy-in modeling — currently a flat input; should I model the staircasing more carefully?

  4. Cantons where my math might be the most suspect (LU and GR are the ones I’m least confident about)

There’s a heatmap view across all 2,122 mapped municipalities.

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The east-west tax gradient is sharper than I’d intuited.

Free, beta, no signup, no ads. DE/FR/IT/EN. Solo dev so iterations are slow, but I read every reply.

Disclosure: I built it. Looking for math review, not promotion.

4 Likes
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Seems like a knockoff, just maybe a tiny bit more practical, of the official website (Swiss tax calculator). A bit more practical because afaik the official website can’t do income and wealth at the same time, so why not.

However - why would you need anyone to test it for you? As far as what you explained, it’s basically the same thing just 2 features combined.

So what I’m going to propose is that you test it yourself against the official website, though I suspect that that’s where you get your data from anyways (if you don’t, why not?), so it should be correct.

1 Like
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It can do both at the same time. You just have to input your net taxable wealth

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In case you couldn’t find the link either: https://www.wheretolive.ch/

Nice tool.

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Oh cool thanks!
Then what would anyone need that new website for ?? @lukas any other features?

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Edit: previously written post not applicable, I hadn’t checked the tool, which is apparently more complete than I thought.

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For it to offer a reasonable advantage I feel like it should be able to at least calculate ALL deductions…

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Checked for Niederhasli and Niederweningen ZH.

The commuting cost are too low. A ZVV Abo for 4 & 5 zones costs way more than 90 per month.

Childcare is CHF 120-130 per day without subsidies in Niederhasli.

I’d like to be able to add my own, known values.

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I have tried it on a chrome browser on iPhone 11 but the website doesn’t display very well. It is cropped on the left side.
How do you take into comparison the projected flat price in the monthly spending ? Price seems low in Geneva district.

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Hi, yes, that’s exactly where I scraped the data from. The official ESTV calculator is great as a reference, but a bit limited in practice — you basically type in one municipality and can compare it with one other. For someone without a clear idea of where to live, that quickly becomes cumbersome.

wheretolive.ch is built around much higher interactivity: it starts with a short questionnaire (where you and your partner work, etc.) and then surfaces the optimal municipalities across the whole country in one go. You can filter, re-rank, and explore trade-offs interactively rather than running comparisons one pair at a time.

Ultimately, the idea is to go beyond taxes and bring multiple factors into the picture — though I’ll admit data quality on the non-tax side is still something I want to improve.

Thanks for the feedback.

1 Like
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You are, actually! I take that as feedback to highlight this functionality more :wink:

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A few things beyond the multi-municipality ranking:

  • Commute-aware search: you enter where you (and your partner) work, and it factors travel time into the ranking, not just taxes.
  • Map-based exploration: you can see results on a map and visually spot clusters of attractive municipalities rather than reading through a list.
  • Health insurance premiums: included alongside taxes, since they vary a lot by canton/region and meaningfully affect disposable income.
  • Cost-of-living factors: rent levels and a few other indicators (still expanding here — data quality is the main bottleneck).

The core idea is to answer “where should we live?” holistically rather than just “where are taxes lowest?”.

3 Likes
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I am actually working on further breaking it down. It works best for rental prices. I had a purchase advice tab, but took it down and am working on refactoring it. And yes, data like rental prices and house prices are difficult to get right, hence I offer the option to overwrite so that you can type in specific constellations:

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2 Likes
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Will have to check it out, the official site is, I agree with you, very good of course, but limited when comparing.

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If the goal is to define “where to live” then I believe you need to add many more variables. Just doing tax calculation might not be enough

how about including

  • cost of living
  • Cost of raising kids
  • Social impact
  • How far are your friends living
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Second this and also add availability of amenities and public transport and schooling.

You can get daycare costs for valais municipalities on their websites. In some communes in Valais due to their low costs of childcare you end up being financially better off for having children, but that should be contrasted with remoteness and job availability.

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Work opportunities and other personal development (sports, school, etc.)

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I specified that the most important factor for me is to have short commute and that I work in Zurich, “doesn’t matter” other preferences (language, urban, etc.). The website recommends 3 communes in Ticino, with commutes between 2.5 and 3.5 hours (one way). All of three are “100/100” commute score :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

2 Likes
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I had that bug before, I thought I fixed it. Will check, thanks !

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I actually do provide some proxies here:

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I just decided not highlight them too much until I am have more complete data!