Businesses in Switzerland: Official Figures

Keep market statistics apart from your CRM

1. Store market statistics as a separate reference table, not as additional company rows in your CRM. Keep unit, period and source next to each value.

2. Do not derive a contact rate from a market size: STATENT counts businesses with employees or self-employed persons paying AHV contributions, the commercial register counts registered legal entities.

Request a selection for a market

Official market statistics

• Businesses by canton 2024Businesses and employees per canton, size classes and businesses per 1,000 inhabitants (FSO STATENT, STATPOP).
• Commercial register by legal formActive entries in the Swiss commercial register by legal form: GmbH, AG, sole proprietorship, foundation, association and others (Zefix/LINDAS).

Where the figures come from

The pages use official figures: from the Federal Statistical Office’s statistics on the structure of businesses (STATENT), from population statistics (STATPOP) and from the commercial register (Zefix, open government data). We retrieved the tables ourselves on 25/10/2026 and took them over unrounded; our own values are only simple calculations from them (shares, values per 1,000 inhabitants).

These are not figures from our dataset. They describe how many businesses exist, not how many of them would be in an export from kontaktdatenbank.ch or have a phone number. We state the size of a specific selection in the quotation.

What applies to all analyses

• Two ways of counting. STATENT counts 649,353 businesses in 2024: units paying social security (AHV) contributions for their staff or themselves, including agriculture and public administration. The commercial register counts registered legal entities, including holdings, foundations and branches without staff of their own. Each page states which way of counting applies.
• Head office, not location. Both sources assign a business to its head office. Branches and plants in other cantons do not appear there.
• Confidential cells. Where the FSO does not publish a figure for data protection reasons, we leave the cell empty and do not recalculate it.
• We do not interpret causes. The tables show levels and differences. Why a canton performs differently cannot be read from them alone.

Using the figures

You may use the figures with attribution. Please name the official source (FSO or Zefix) with table and date; each page contains a citation template. If you need a figure for a particular industry, region or size class that is missing here, write to info@kontaktdatenbank.ch.