Tax for Accumulating Vs Dividends

Hello everyone!

I’m new to the community, trying to educate myself to FI in order to spend more time out there in the mountains (and less in the office). I’ve been lurking around a bit and learnt a lot during the pas few weeks.

Straight to the point : I stilll don’t understand the difference between Acc and Div in switzerland. I’ve come to the conclusions that Swiss tax don’t apply to Acc funds, but that it’s not worth the investment since the federal tax office consider most of Acc funds as giving “virtual” dividends, as stated on the ICTAX webpage.

So even though Swiss is supposedly friendly to Acc ETF, it is not more efficient, tax-wise, to choose one, because the chance are that it will, or already is, taxed as a “virtual” Div. Is that it ?

Is that why everyone is so much into vanguard’s ETF (Div, but low TER) instead of Ishares’ ones (Acc, but slightly higher TER) ?

This is exactly how I understand it.
You will pay the same dividend tax unless the fund is not registered with ICTAX. One example I can show is this brand new iShares MSCI World Small Cap UCITS ETF:

It’s probably only just a matter of time before it’s registered, but until then you may run into issues.

Xtrackers and UBS may actually have the cheapest EUR denominated funds as of now, you’ll have to compare.

Usually you can just ask the Tax people nicely and the will list it.
At least it worked for me (VT) and I think a couple of others on this forum.

This is not the same since all US-based ETFs are distributing. The problem is with accumulating ETFs since the tax authorities cannot reliably estimate the dividend amounts. The fund provider has to do it.

Hi all, we have discussed this here:

In any case, better have it listed on ICTax, then you have an official amount to declare to tax authorities… otherwise they can decide (guess?) how much to tax you, and it could be even worse

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hey @Gotama,
for a full explanation of this topic, please refer to

it should explain your questions :slight_smile:

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