How Many Employees Does One 24/7 Post Need in Switzerland?
Holding one position every hour of 2026 in Switzerland takes 8,766 staffed hours. One full-time employee is genuinely available for about 1,892 of them, so the post needs 4.63 employees, which is 5 whole people.
One ring per person, one year each
Each ring is one employee's year, broken wherever they are on holiday, on leave, or off sick. No single ring closes, which is the whole problem: one person cannot hold a post that never stops.
Stack 5 of them and the picture closes. Trace any line out from the center and it crosses at least one solid arc, so every hour of 2026 has somebody on it. That is the relief factor, drawn rather than asserted.
Where the number comes from
- 1
Staffing one position 168 hours a week comes to 8,766 hours across the year.
- 2
Switzerland has 261 weekdays in the year, the starting point for one employee.
- 3
Take out 3 public holidays that fall on a weekday, 20 days of statutory paid leave, 8.2 days of average sickness absence, and 3 days of training: 34.2 days lost.
- 4
That leaves 226.8 working days per employee, and at a 41.7-hour week that is 8.34 hours a day, so 1,892 available hours a year.
- 5
8,766 coverage hours divided by 1,892 available hours is a relief factor of 4.63, so the post needs 5 people.
| Weekdays in the year | 261 |
| Public holidays on a weekday | −3 |
| Statutory paid annual leave | −20 |
| Average sickness absence | −8.2 |
| Training and onboarding (assumed) | −3 |
| Working days available | 226.8 |
| At 8.34 hours a day | 1,892 hours |
Paid public holidays are a statutory entitlement in Switzerland, so they sit on top of annual leave and are deducted separately here.
The training allowance of 3 days is a planning assumption rather than a sourced statistic, and it is deliberately low. Every other figure on this page carries a source. If your operation runs heavy certification cycles, raise it and the relief factor rises with it.
What the usual rule of thumb gets wrong here
The common shortcut is to divide coverage hours by contracted hours and add a quarter for absence. In Switzerland that gives 5.03 against a derived answer of 4.63, so the shortcut is high by 8.6 percent. A flat buffer travels badly because the things it stands in for, statutory leave and the length of the contracted week, are set nationally.
Nobody ever away. Not a real answer.
The usual shortcut, over by 8.6%.
From Switzerland's own leave, hours, and absence.
Other coverage shapes
The same availability figure answers any coverage window. Only the hours the post must be staffed change.
| Coverage | Hours a week | Relief factor | People |
|---|---|---|---|
| Round the clock, every day | 168 | 4.63 | 5 |
| Round the clock, weekdays only | 120 | 3.31 | 4 |
| Two shifts, every day | 112 | 3.09 | 4 |
| Extended day, weekdays only | 60 | 1.66 | 2 |
If your contract is more generous
20 days is the statutory floor in Switzerland, and most employers sit above it. Every extra week of leave is another week the post has to be covered by somebody else.
| Annual leave | Relief factor | People per post |
|---|---|---|
| 20 daysstatutory floor | 4.63 | 5 |
| 25 days | 4.74 | 5 |
| 28 days | 4.8 | 5 |
| 30 days | 4.85 | 5 |
| 33 days | 4.92 | 5 |
The inputs, and what they do not say
How the leave figure is defined
Swiss law states leave in WEEKS, not days: Art. 329a of the Code of Obligations requires "at least four weeks' holiday" per year of service (five weeks under age 20). Converted at a 5-day week that is 20 working days. Public holidays are a separate entitlement under Art. 20a of the Labour Act and are NOT part of the four weeks.
Why the contracted week is not the legal maximum
This page divides by a 41.7-hour week, the typical full-time contract in Switzerland, not by the 45-hour statutory figure. That larger number is a legal ceiling on how much someone may be asked to work, not a description of what a full-time employee is contracted for, and using it as capacity would understate the headcount a post needs.
The holiday count is a floor
Most public holidays in Switzerland are set regionally rather than nationally, so this page counts only the 3 days observed across the whole country. A specific region will observe more, which pushes the relief factor up. The public holiday calendar for Switzerland lists the regional days.
What these figures cannot be used for
Not a ranking. The sickness figure here comes from a national statistical source, while other countries in this library use the OECD labour force survey. Those systems define absence differently, and self-reported survey figures undercount short spells that administrative records capture. Each number is the best available answer for planning inside its own country, and the gap between any two of them is partly a gap between statistical methods rather than between workforces.
A relief factor also says nothing about whether a roster is legal or humane. It sets how many people the post needs across a year; it does not check rest periods between shifts, consecutive nights, or weekend distribution. Those constraints decide whether the pattern you build on top of this headcount is one anybody can actually work.
Research notes on Switzerland
STATUTORY HOURS. Switzerland has no statutory *standard* week, only a maximum. Labour Act (ArG, SR 822.11) Art. 9(1) sets two ceilings: 45 h/week for industrial workers, office staff, technical and other salaried employees including sales staff in large retail firms; 50 h/week for all other workers (hospitality, construction trades, small retail, etc.). I used 45 as the headline figure because it covers most office and industrial staff, but a planner modelling hospitality or construction should use 50. Art. 9(3) and 9(4) allow the ceiling to be raised by up to 4 hours temporarily for defined groups if the annual average is respected. The ArG does not apply at all to some groups (senior managerial staff, agriculture, domestic employees), who have no statutory weekly ceiling.
CONTRACTED WEEK. 41.7 h is 41 h 42 min, the contractually agreed weekly working time of full-time (100%) employees in 2025, all sectors, from the FSO Work Volume Statistics (AVOL, table T2/T3). Unlike France or Germany, Swiss collective agreements do NOT pull the week below the statutory ceiling in any general way; 41 to 42 hours is normal. Sector spread in 2025 ran from 41 h 10 min (information and communication) to 46 h 43 min (agriculture and forestry). Do not confuse this with the ACTUAL hours worked, which were 40 h 03 min in 2025 (contract plus 39 min overtime minus 2 h 18 min absences). Feeding 40.05 into a coverage model would double-count absence, since absence is normally deducted separately.
LEAVE AND THE SWITZERLAND-SPECIFIC TRAP. 20 working days is the legal floor and it excludes public holidays. This is the single most common error in Swiss data: sources frequently quote "4 weeks plus public holidays" as one blended leave figure, or import an EU-style assumption that public holidays are folded in. They are not, and there is no single national public-holiday count to add. Only 1 August (National Day) is nationwide; under Art. 20a ArG each canton may designate at most 8 further days as equivalent to Sundays, so legally protected public holidays range from about 7 to 15 days depending on canton and even on district within a canton. Any national headcount model has to treat public holidays as a cantonal parameter, not a constant.
The floor is also far below practice. FSO AVOL 2025 records full-time employees actually receiving 5.2 weeks of holiday per year (about 26 working days): 5.5 weeks for ages 15-19, 5.0 for 20-49, 5.6 for 50-64. If the calculator is modelling real available capacity rather than legal minima, 20 days will materially overstate staff availability.
SICKNESS. 8.2 days is the FSO AVOL 2025 figure for health-related absence per full-time job. Two caveats. First, the FSO series combines illness AND accident and does not publish a split, so this is slightly broader than pure sickness. It excludes paid maternity leave, military and civil service, short-time work, and personal or family absence, which are counted separately. Second, it is measured per 100 percent full-time job, so it is not an average across a workforce containing part-timers (Switzerland has an unusually high part-time share). Sector range in 2025 was 6.0 days (information and communication; professional, scientific and technical services) to 10.1 days (construction) and 9.8 days (transport and storage); by occupation, 5.1 days for managers versus 12.2 days for plant and machine operators. Note also that the FSO's 2024 release reported 8.5 days for 2024 while the 2025 release puts 2025 at 8.2, so cross-release year-on-year comparisons can be distorted by revisions; take 8.2 as the current single best estimate rather than evidence of a decline.
Sources
Every figure above except the training allowance was checked against one of these.
Statutory maximum weekly working hours: 45 h for industrial workers, office staff, technical and other employees incl. sales staff in large retail; 50 h for all other workers (Art. 9(1) Labour Act, SR 822.11)
Swiss Confederation, Federal Chancellery (Fedlex, Classified Compilation of Federal Legislation)2023
Full consolidated text of the Labour Act used to verify Art. 9 (45/50 h ceilings) and Art. 20a (1 August federal holiday plus a maximum of 8 further cantonal holidays treated as Sundays)
Swiss Confederation, Fedlex (consolidated version applicable from 1 Sep 2023)2023
Statutory minimum paid annual holiday: at least four weeks per year of service, five weeks for employees under 20 (Art. 329a Code of Obligations, SR 220)
Swiss Confederation, Fedlex (English consolidated version applicable from 1 Jan 2026)2026
Canonical citation for the Code of Obligations, Art. 329a (four weeks / five weeks under 20) and Art. 329c (two weeks to be taken consecutively)
Official corroboration of both figures in English: 45 h ceiling for industrial workers, office staff, technical and other personnel and salespeople in large retail firms, 50 h for all other workers; minimum holiday of four weeks (five weeks up to the 20th birthday), at least two weeks consecutive
State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO), Swiss Confederation2026
Contractually agreed weekly working time of full-time employees 2025: 41 h 42 min (table T2/T3); actual weekly working time 40 h 03 min; health-related absences (illness or accident) 8.2 days per full-time job in 2025; holiday actually taken 5.2 weeks per year
Federal Statistical Office (FSO/BFS), Work Volume Statistics (AVOL), press release of 21 May 20262025
Landing page for the same FSO press release 'Over 8 billion hours worked in 2025', citing 8.2 sickness/accident absence days per full-time job and 40 h 03 min actual weekly hours
Federal Statistical Office (FSO/BFS), Swiss Labour Force Survey and derived statistics2025
FSO topic page for workplace absence statistics (definitions and time series for health-related absences per full-time job)
Common questions
- How many people does one 24/7 position need in Switzerland?
- 5 people. One position staffed every hour of the year is 8,766 hours, and one full-time employee in Switzerland is actually available for about 1,892 of them once 34.2 days of holidays, leave, sickness and training come out. That is a relief factor of 4.63, which rounds up to 5 whole people.
- What is a relief factor?
- The number of employees needed to keep one position filled continuously, once the days nobody works are taken out. It is coverage hours divided by the hours one employee is genuinely available. In Switzerland that is 8,766 divided by 1,892, or 4.63. A factor below the headcount you actually employ means the post runs on overtime.
- Why is a flat 25 percent absence buffer not enough for Switzerland?
- Because it overshoots here. A raw hours calculation gives 4.03 employees, and adding a flat quarter takes that to 5.03, against a derived answer of 4.63. That is 8.6 percent too high, because the rule of thumb assumes more leave and sickness than Switzerland actually loses.
- Does the statutory leave minimum reflect what employers actually give in Switzerland?
- It is a floor, not a norm. This page computes on the statutory minimum of 20 working days because that is the figure the law fixes and a source can be attached to. Most employers sit above it, and the sensitivity table on this page shows what the relief factor becomes at more generous entitlements, so a planner can find their own contract rather than taking the floor as the answer.
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