The relationship today

Trade, investment and people

Measured by trade, investment and migration, the relationship between Switzerland and Germany is closer today than at any time since 1914. Germany is Switzerland’s most important trading partner, with an annual trade volume that has exceeded 100 billion francs since 2021. Chemical and pharmaceutical products account for more than a third of Swiss exports to Germany. At the end of 2024 Swiss direct investment in Germany amounted to 81 billion francs and German direct investment in Switzerland to about 49 billion francs. More than 200 agreements form the treaty basis of the relationship.¹ An earlier overview by the Swiss embassy in Berlin, based on figures for 2019, counted around 2,000 Swiss companies in Germany with 458,000 employees and ranked Switzerland as the fourth-largest foreign investor in Germany. It also recorded about 60,900 cross-border commuters from Germany in early 2020 and 954 German professors at Swiss universities, 42 per cent of all foreign professors.²

The German community in Switzerland has grown to its largest size in history. According to the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, about 338,600 German nationals lived in Switzerland in 2025, making them the second-largest foreign group after the Italians.³ In absolute numbers this is well above the peak of 1910, although the share of the total population remains lower, since the Swiss population has more than doubled since then. In the city of Zurich, German nationals formed the largest foreign group at the end of 2019, accounting for 23.8 per cent of the 139,803 foreign residents, or some 33,000 persons.⁴ In the canton of Zurich as a whole, almost every third inhabitant holds a foreign passport, and the German community forms a correspondingly large part of that population.⁵

Germany in the Zurich financial centre

For the financial centre, the German presence has three dimensions. Germany is one of the most important markets for the cross-border wealth management of the Zurich banks, although neither the Swiss authorities nor the Swiss Bankers Association publish figures by the clients’ country of origin. Industry commentary estimates that nearly 40 per cent of the cross-border assets managed in Switzerland come from Western Europe. German clients, after the regularisation of the years 2010 to 2018, hold declared assets in Zurich for reasons of diversification and currency.⁶ Germans also form a large part of the workforce of the Zurich financial institutions, from client advisers and compliance officers to members of the executive boards of the big banks and insurers. German law firms, tax advisers and auditors, finally, work with Zurich counterparts on the cross-border matters that the German clientele generates, from relocations and succession planning to corporate transactions.

The flows run in both directions. Zurich-based insurers, whose history Part E describes, have long been active in the German market, while German insurers and asset managers maintain Swiss subsidiaries in Zurich. The Swiss franc remains a reserve currency for German companies and families. The Swiss capital market, described in Part H, remains open to German issuers. German listed companies and German private equity investors are active buyers of Swiss companies, as Swiss groups are of German ones.

Notes

1. Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, “Bilaterale Beziehungen Schweiz–Deutschland”, https://www.eda.admin.ch/de/bilaterale-beziehungen-schweiz-deutschland, which also records that more than 100,000 Swiss citizens lived in Germany in 2024 and describes the institutionalised dialogue between the Federal Assembly and the Bundestag since 2003. ↩
2. Embassy of Switzerland in Germany, “Erfolgsgeschichte Schweiz–Deutschland in Wirtschaftszahlen”, https://www.eda.admin.ch/dam/countries/countries-content/germany/de/Erfolgsgeschichte_Schweiz-Deutschland_in_Wirtschaftszahlen.pdf, with figures for 2019 and the first quarter of 2020. ↩
3. Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, “Bilaterale Beziehungen Schweiz–Deutschland” (cited above). Statista, “Anzahl der Deutschen in der Schweiz von 2014 bis 2024”, https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/150427/umfrage/in-der-schweiz-lebende-deutsche/, gives 329,883 for the end of 2024. ↩
4. City of Zurich, “Ausländerinnen und Ausländer in der Stadt Zürich: Zahlen und Fakten”, reference date 31 December 2019, https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/content/dam/web/de/lebenslagen/unterstuetzung-und-beratung/bilder/auslaenderbeirat/zahlen-fakten-auslaeder-stadt-zuerich.pdf. The absolute number is calculated from the percentage given there; the city had 434,008 inhabitants at that date. ↩
5. Canton of Zurich, “Bestand und Struktur der Bevölkerung”, https://www.zh.ch/de/soziales/bevoelkerungszahlen/bestand-struktur.html, which gives some 472,000 foreign nationals out of 1.63 million inhabitants at the end of 2025. The cantonal page does not break the figure down by nationality. ↩
6. altii, “Ende der Freistellung” (cited above), which gives the share of Western Europe in cross-border assets managed in Switzerland as nearly 40 per cent. No breakdown by individual country was found in an official source. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of September 2025.