Swiss inheritance law: who inherits, what, and when

An estate is everything a person owned and everything they owed. It passes to the heirs on the day of the death, with no step to take: in the words of the Civil Code, the heirs acquire the estate as a whole by operation of law. You become an heir automatically, debts included, and that is precisely why the law gives you a right to refuse.

Where there is no will, the Civil Code names the heirs by family group: the descendants, then the parental line, then the grandparental line. The rule is mechanical: as long as one person is alive in a group, the groups below it inherit nothing.

The surviving spouse sits outside that ladder and inherits alongside whichever group is called, in a proportion that depends on which one it is. A registered partner is treated as a spouse. An unmarried partner inherits nothing, however long the couple lived together, unless there is a will or a contract of succession.

One step gets skipped more often than any other: before the estate can be divided, the marital property regime has to be wound up. A slice of what the couple owned goes to the surviving spouse on that basis, not as an heir. The fractions above apply to what is left afterwards.

Those fractions are the picture without a will. With one, the deceased could change part of it and not the whole: the law keeps a minimum share for certain heirs, the statutory entitlement (Pflichtteil / réserve héréditaire). What is left over is the disposable part. Readers arriving from the UK or the US will know the idea as forced heirship, and some Swiss legal sites translate it as the compulsory portion. The English text of the Civil Code says statutory entitlement, and so does this page.

The revision that came into force on 1 January 2023 changed two things. The descendants' entitlement fell from three quarters of their statutory share to half, and the parents' entitlement was abolished outright. Everyone can now decide freely what happens to at least half of their estate, whatever their family looks like.

With a spouse and children, that leaves a quarter as the children's entitlement, a quarter for the spouse, and half to give as you please. With no spouse, the children keep half and the other half is free. If your question is really what you can decide yourself, writing a will has a calculator that works through the common family situations.

The spouse wears two hats, which is what makes the arithmetic so confusing. First comes the share from winding up the marital property regime, usually half of the property acquired during the marriage. Then comes the share of the estate, on what remains. A registered partner stands in the same position on both counts.

Three situations deserve attention. The family home first: the surviving spouse can ask to be given the house or the flat, along with the furniture, either outright or as a usufruct set against their share. Where children from an earlier marriage are in the division, this is usually the sorest question in the room.

Divorce next. Proceedings under way at the time of the death can cost the spouse their statutory entitlement if the will provides for it, which the revised law made possible. Then pension money: Pillar 3a savings and what the pension fund pays out follow their own beneficiary rules and do not fall into the estate the way the rest of the property does.

This is the one place on the page where sitting still can cost you real money. You are an heir the moment the person dies, debts included. Three options exist, and two of them run on a clock.

A rule of thumb that lawyers repeat: while the clock runs, do nothing that looks like taking ownership. Clearing the flat, selling the car or helping yourself from the accounts can be read as tacit acceptance, and the right to renounce goes with it. Acts of plain necessity (paying the funeral bill, keeping the house insured) raise no such question.

If every relative in line renounces, the bankruptcy office liquidates the estate. Nobody owes anything.

This is the document that proves you are an heir, and nearly everything else waits on it: unfreezing the bank accounts, selling or transferring a property, ending certain contracts. The name changes with the canton: Erbbescheinigung in the German-speaking cantons, certificat d'héritier in the French-speaking ones, acte de notoriété in Geneva. The function is the same everywhere.

It is issued at the deceased's last domicile, wherever the heirs and the assets happen to be. Which office issues it depends on the canton: a notary, a court, or the cantonal succession authority (Erbschaftsamt, Teilungsbehörde / service des successions). In Geneva it is the court or a notary; in Vaud, the justice de paix, the cantonal magistrate who handles inheritance and adult-protection matters in several French-speaking cantons. Reckon on two to eight weeks, and ask for several original copies at once, because every bank keeps one.

Once the certificate is in hand, four jobs open up, each with its own page:

• Bank accounts — why the account is frozen (blocked, in the banks' own wording), and how to pay the bills before the certificate arrives.
• Inheriting property — stay, sell, or buy out the other heirs, and the tax that follows.
• Clearing the home — the lease passes to the heirs, with deadlines to keep.
• Documents and formalities — the list to have ready before the first appointment.

There is no federal inheritance tax. Everything happens at cantonal level, and sometimes at municipal level too. Two rules settle which canton taxes what: movable assets are taxed in the canton where the deceased last lived, property in the canton where it stands, even when the heirs live somewhere else.

For most families the news is good. The surviving spouse is exempt in every canton, and children are exempt in the large majority of them. Rates climb steeply once the heir is outside the family.

The figures below were checked in the French-speaking cantons. The same principles apply across the country; the rates are set canton by canton, so confirm yours with your own cantonal tax office.

Two French-speaking cantons stop short of exempting the direct line altogether, and both have reworked their rules in recent years. If Neuchâtel or Jura concerns you, confirm the rate in force with the cantonal tax office before you calculate anything. It costs nothing, and it heads off a bad surprise on an inherited property.

Three points get missed. The tax is worked out on each heir's net share, after debts and funeral costs, and not on the estate as a whole. Gifts made during the person's lifetime can be pulled back into the calculation, depending on the canton. And an unmarried partner is generally taxed as a stranger to the family, at the top rate. For those couples, planning matters more than it does for anyone else.

Every family asks, and the honest answer is that it takes longer than you hope and less time than you fear. Here are the orders of magnitude observed in Switzerland for an estate where nobody is fighting.

What stretches it out, in order: a property some heirs want to keep and others want to sell, a business, heirs abroad, and above all an old quarrel coming back to the surface. What speeds it up: an executor named in the will, a clear inventory from the start, and one person on the family side that everyone deals with.

Plenty of straightforward estates get settled without a professional: one family, a couple of bank accounts, heirs who agree. A notary becomes useful, and sometimes unavoidable, in five cases: a property to transfer or sell, a business, a blended family, an heir living abroad, or a disagreement that is starting to set.

The practical rule is a financial one. As soon as a property is in the estate, a public deed is needed for the land register anyway, so you may as well bring the professional in at the start, before the verbal agreement that nobody will ever write down.