Status of the Swiss company database: size, counting method and limits

The Swiss company database in figures

Counted on 4 November 2026: 1,005,992 records, 264,448 of them with a phone number, email or website. Two sources have been processed: the commercial register (Zefix via LINDAS, open government data of the Federal Commercial Registry Office) and the open places data of Overture Maps (Places, licence CDLA Permissive 2.0). Planned are the legal notices on company websites, OpenStreetMap, open data from cantons and federal offices and individual look-ups in the FSO UID register; these sources are not yet included in the figures.

• 1,005,992records in total (commercial register and Overture Maps)
• 1,004,969of which active
• 264,448with phone, email or website
• 245,793with phone number
• 80,363with their own email address
• 197,018with website

As of 4 November 2026. A record is either an entity in the commercial register or a place from Overture Maps that could not be matched to any entity with certainty. The contact figures refer to all records; a record can have several contact fields, so the figures overlap and must not be added up. We do not currently offer a check against the asterisk marking; phone numbers are not checked and are not intended for telephone marketing.

What the records consist of

• 796,383 entities in the commercial register – all active legal entities in the Zefix file of 1 November 2026, each UID once (796,386 rows, 3 of them duplicate UIDs). The commercial register itself contains no phone numbers, email addresses or websites. For 85,906 entities we could match at least one place from Overture Maps with certainty; through these places, 85,650 entities have a contact.
• 209,609 places from Overture Maps without a match, 208,586 of them active and 178,798 with a contact. We could not match these places to any entity in the commercial register with certainty. They may be branches or further locations of registered businesses, or businesses that are not in the commercial register (for example sole proprietorships with turnover below CHF 100,000). We count them as records of their own; one business can therefore appear more than once.

How we count

• Commercial register: the Zefix file (open government data of the Federal Commercial Registry Office via LINDAS), downloaded on 1 November 2026. It contains only registered, non-deleted legal entities; all 796,383 entities therefore count as active.
• Overture Maps: places from Overture Maps Places, release 2026-10-21.0. Of 720,039 places in Switzerland, only the 297,562 places with a confidence value of at least 0.77 that do not belong to non-business categories or vending machines count (418,165 places are below the threshold, 4,312 belong to such categories).
• Matching: a place belongs to an entity if name and street, address and a word of the name, or the website domain agree. In this way 87,953 places are matched to 85,906 entities; their contact details count for the entity. The remaining 209,609 places count as records of their own. Places below the threshold do not count even if they could be matched to an entity.
• Active: all entities in the commercial register and the places not marked as permanently closed in Overture Maps.
• With a contact: with a phone number, website or own email address.
• Own email address: an address not shared by three or more places with different names (269 such addresses are excluded); generic sender addresses such as noreply do not count.
• Company websites: collection of the legal notice details is under way; on 4 November 2026, 285,284 of 345,592 domains had been visited. Contacts from the websites are not yet included in the figures above.

Target size (estimate of 25 October 2026)

On 25 October 2026 we estimated the size of the database once collection is complete at around 795,000 entities. The basis was the number of active entries in the commercial register according to Zefix on LINDAS on that day (795,908, SPARQL query of 25 October 2026). This size has been reached: the whole commercial register, with the 796,383 active entities of the file of 1 November 2026, is included in the figures above. Contact figures are no longer estimated but counted.

Status by industry

The records in our database are not yet assigned to industries, so there are no figures of our own per industry yet. The table shows the official number of businesses per industry (FSO, STATENT 2024) and the price for the one-off export of the whole industry; the quotation states the size available for your selection.

The table can be scrolled sideways.

“To follow” = no industry assignment in the database yet. The industry figures cannot be added up to the total: not every NOGA division belongs to one of our industries. Definition and source per industry are on the industry pages.

Contact coverage

Share of records for which a phone number, an own email address or a website is stored: across all records and separately for the entities in the commercial register and the places without a match. There are no figures per industry yet.

The table can be scrolled sideways.

The commercial register itself provides no contact details: an entity only has a contact if a place from Overture Maps is matched to it. The share describes for how many records a contact field is stored, not how many numbers can be reached or mailboxes receive mail.

Keep four terms apart

• Present: the field contains a value in the stored dataset.
• Current: a statement about the status of the source; it does not guarantee that the value is unchanged today.
• Reachable: an email can be delivered or a number reached. Field counts do not prove this.
• Lawfully usable: your specific purpose must be lawful. Email advertising needs consent, and sales calls are only allowed to numbers without the asterisk marking.

For comparison: official figures

The following figures come from official statistics and the commercial register. They describe the market, not our database, and count according to their own rules.

• 796,383active entries in the commercial register (Zefix, file of 1 November 2026)
• 649,353businesses in Switzerland (FSO STATENT 2024)
• 579,431of which with 1 to 9 employees
• 2,160of which with 250 or more employees

Commercial register: Zefix, open government data of the Federal Commercial Registry Office, file downloaded via LINDAS on 1 November 2026; free use with attribution (“Open use. Must provide the source.”). Statistics: FSO, Statistics on the structure of businesses (STATENT) 2024 and businesses by size class, retrieved on 25 October 2026. STATENT counts businesses with employees or self-employed persons paying AHV contributions; the commercial register counts registered legal entities, including holdings, foundations and branches. For comparison, EU-27: 33,978,235 businesses (Eurostat, Structural Business Statistics (sbs_ovw_act), 2024); more under EU and other markets.

How to read the figures

• Counted is not delivered. The figures describe the dataset on the reference date; the figure in the quotation is binding for your selection.
• A record is not always a separate business. Places without a match may be branches of registered businesses; one business can therefore appear more than once.
• Official statistics are not a dataset. FSO and Zefix figures describe the market, not the size of our exports.
• What matters is the field you need. How many records of a selection have a phone number, an email address or a website is stated in the quotation.
• The page date is not the reference date. Revising this page does not move the reference date of the data.

Published versions

• 4 November 2026 – counted figures instead of an estimate

  Counted figures replace the estimate of 25 October 2026: 1,005,992 records, 1,004,969 of them active and 264,448 with at least one contact (245,793 with a phone number, 80,363 with their own email address, 197,018 with a website). Composition: 796,383 entities in the commercial register (Zefix via LINDAS, file of 1 November 2026) and 209,609 places from Overture Maps (Places, release 2026-10-21.0) without a match to an entity.

• 25 October 2026 – launch of kontaktdatenbank.ch

  First publication: estimate of the size of the Swiss company database once collection is complete (795,000 entities, 795,000 of them active; 360,000 with phone, email or website, 320,000 with a phone number, 200,000 with their own email address, 290,000 with a website), 22 industries by NOGA 2008 with official figures (FSO STATENT 2024) and prices in CHF. The database was under construction.