Average Salary in Switzerland: Hours Per Week and Part-Time vs Full-Time Pay Maths

If you are looking at the average salary in Switzerland, you are probably doing one of two things: weighing a Swiss job offer against a UK wage, or working out what an overseas hourly rate is worth across a full year. Our search for this article returned UK-only sources — the ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE), GOV.UK minimum wage material and NHS England Digital earnings estimates. None of them publishes a Swiss salary figure, so we will not quote one. What they do give is a solid set of UK pay anchors and, more usefully, the hours-per-week arithmetic that turns any hourly rate into an annual salary. That arithmetic works the same way whether the contract is written in pounds, euros or Swiss francs.

What the UK benchmarks actually say

ONS ASHE shows that median weekly earnings for full-time employees were £766.60 in April 2025, up 5.3% on the year in nominal terms and 1.1% in real terms once adjusted using CPIH. On an annual basis, median gross annual earnings for full-time employees were £39,039, compared with £37,439 a year earlier — a rise of 4.3%. Median hourly earnings excluding overtime for full-time employees were £19.67, up from £18.66. Median weekly earnings for part-time employees rose to £280.00 from £263.25.

Two caveats matter. First, ASHE annual figures cover employees who have been in the job for a year or more and include pay affected by absence, so they are not directly comparable with weekly or hourly figures. Second, ASHE measures employee jobs rather than people, and shifts in workforce composition affect both the levels and the growth rates.

Hours per week decide your answer

The conversion rule is simple: annual ≈ hourly rate × hours per week × 52 weeks. The 52 multiplier assumes paid work in every week of the year and no unpaid overtime.

Using a 37.5-hour week, the April 2025 National Living Wage of £12.21 an hour comes to about £23,809.50 a year. The ONS median full-time hourly rate of £19.67 comes to about £38,356.50. Working backwards, £39,039 ÷ 52 ÷ 37.5 gives roughly £20.02 an hour, which is the hourly equivalent of the median full-time annual figure.

But 37.5 is a convention, not the national average. ONS ASHE put mean weekly total paid hours at 32.8 in April 2025, down from 33.1 a year earlier, partly because the share of part-time jobs rose to 28.0% from 27.2%. If your contract says 40 hours, the same £12.21 rate gives about £25,396.80 a year. If it says 20 hours, it gives about £12,698.40. The hourly rate has not changed; the hours assumption has.

Full-time, part-time and the official dividing line

ASHE defines full-time as more than 30 paid hours per week, or 25 or more hours for the teaching professions. Part-time is 30 paid hours or fewer, or under 25 for teaching. That single threshold decides which benchmark applies to you. A 30-hour contract sits in the part-time series, where the median is £280.00 a week — about £14,560 across 52 weeks. A 32-hour contract sits in the full-time series, where the median annual figure is £39,039. Two hours a week can move you between two quite different sets of numbers, so always state your hours.

Hourly rate, annual salary, overtime and London weighting

It helps to keep four ideas separate:

• Hourly rate — what you are paid per hour worked. ASHE's headline hourly figure excludes overtime.
• Annual salary — contracted pay across the year. Overtime, bonuses, tips and salary sacrifice sit outside the conversion unless your contract folds them in.
• Overtime — usually paid at a premium and excluded from the median hourly figure, so it can lift actual take-home pay without changing your contracted annual salary.
• London weighting — a contractual or allowance-based uplift. The National Living Wage does not vary by region, and ASHE's headline figures are UK-wide. The Living Wage Foundation's voluntary real living wage for employees outside London was £12.60 in April 2025, with a separate London rate set higher; the sources in our search do not give a precise London figure, so treat that as a contract question.

The minimum wage floor

GOV.UK National Living Wage and National Minimum Wage rates at the April 2025 ASHE reference date were £12.21 for employees aged 21 and over, £10.00 for ages 18 to 20, £7.55 for ages 16 to 17, and £7.55 for apprentices aged 16 to 18 and those aged 19 or over in the first year of their apprenticeship. The ONS low and high pay bulletin estimates that 447,000 jobs, or 1.6% of the total, were paid below those rates, while stressing that this is an estimate and not a measure of non-compliance. It also finds a large concentration of jobs paid within 20 pence of the National Living Wage, with the highest point of the hourly earnings distribution around £12.40.

For the current minimum wage year, our on-site reference table uses £12.71 an hour, which is about £24,784.50 gross a year at 37.5 hours a week. Always check GOV.UK for the rate that applies to you, because rates change and age bands differ.

Public sector reference points

NHS England Digital staff earnings estimates for the twelve months to the end of June 2026 put mean annual basic pay per full-time equivalent at £44,457 in NHS trusts and other core organisations, 5.6% higher than a year earlier, with mean annual earnings per person of £45,163 and non-basic pay per person of £5,615. For NHS support organisations and central bodies, mean annual basic pay per FTE was £56,136. These are means for specific workforces, not medians for the whole economy, and they sit well above the all-economy median — a useful reminder that "average" depends entirely on which group you measure.

So how do you size up a Swiss offer?

We cannot give you a Swiss median from these sources, and any figure quoted without a Swiss statistical source should be treated with caution. What you can do is rebuild the comparison on a like-for-like basis. Take the gross hourly rate or monthly gross pay in the offer, convert it to a weekly figure using the contracted hours, multiply by 52 or by the paid weeks stated, then compare against UK benchmarks on the same hours basis. If the Swiss contract sets 40 or 42 hours a week, run both numbers: the extra hours change the annual total even when the hourly rate is identical, and they also change the effective hourly value of any fixed monthly salary. You can model this quickly with our hourly calculator and compare the results against the UK figures in our salary data pages.

Check your own contract

All of these conversions assume a steady contracted week with no unpaid overtime, bonus, tips or salary sacrifice. Actual pay depends on your rota, holiday pay method, London weighting and overtime rules. If you are converting a UK rate as part of a job search, our salary articles walk through part-time and full-time scenarios in more detail. Always read the contract and check official GOV.UK guidance before relying on any annual figure.