Capital Gains and Taxes in Switzerland – All you need to know

Capital Gains in the Stock Market

Capital Gains are the gains you make when you sell stocks at a price higher than the amount you have bought it at. For instance, you purchased ten shares of an ETF at 100 USD, and you sold them at 200 USD. In this example, you have realized 1000 USD capital gains.

Capital gains are based on the appreciation of value. And they are only counted when you sell. If you have not sold yet, you could say that you have some unrealized capital gains.

In this article, I will mostly talk about stocks. But the exact same rules apply to bonds. There are no difference in capital gains between stocks and bonds.

Capital gains do not only apply to the stock market. They can apply to everything that appreciates. In theory, you could have capital gains when you sell anything at a higher price than the one you bought it at. However, for the sake of this article, we are going to focus on capital gains in the stock market.

Capital Gains Tax

What is very important with capital gains is that most countries have taxes on capital gains. It means that you need to take this tax into account when you invest.

However, in Switzerland, capital gains are generally tax-free It means that investing in the stock market for the appreciation of stocks or ETFs is very efficient. You can double your money without paying taxes on it. This appreciation will still increase your wealth tax later, so will any income. But it even means that income through capital gains is one of the only income that will not be taxed twice in Switzerland.

Not having to pay taxes on capital gains can make it much easier to retire early in Switzerland. Most countries will tax your capital gains. And in some countries, capital gains tax is very high. For instance, in France, you will pay a third of your capital gains as taxes! In Russia, you would pay 20% in taxes. But in our great country, you will generally pay 0% in capital gains tax!

You can read more about this on the official website of Switzerland. They are stating that gains in the value of privately owned shares and bonds are tax-free as long as the private investor is not classified as a professional investor

Now, I said that capital gains are generally not taxed in Switzerland. Indeed, by default, they are tax-free. But if you qualify as a professional investor, you will have to pay a capital gains tax.

Professional Investor status

By default, people are considered private investors by tax offices. Such an investor invests the money he is earning through another means in the stock market. It means he is not living from his investments. He is simply using the stock market to earn more money.

The federal tax office uses five different criteria for classifying private investors and professional investors.

1. Private investors should hold securities for at least six months before selling them.
2. Capital gains of private investors do not account for more than 50 percent of their income.
3. The total volume of transactions (purchases and sales) of a private investor does not account for more than five times the value of the investment portfolio.
4. Private investors invest with their own money, not with loans.
5. Private investors do not use derivatives (especially options), unless if it is for hedging the risks on their securities.

If you tick all of these criteria as a private investor, then your capital gains will not be taxed.

Local tax offices use these criteria as rules of thumbs. It means that tax offices can use their own rules. But generally, they are using these five rules or a subset of these rules. The first three rules are the most important to tick.

The third rule is straightforward to avoid; just hold your securities and do not try to time the market. If you invest passively in a few ETFs, the total transaction volume will always be much less than five times the value of your securities.

The first rule should be easy, as well. If you are a long-term investor, for instance, pursuing Financial Independence, you want to buy your shares with the intent to sell them in a very long time. So, you should have no issues with this rule.

The second rule is generally not bad. When you are working, you are very likely to get significantly more income than your capital gains. Therefore, your capital gains will not be taxed.

But if you are trying to become Financially Independent and live out of the stock market, this may be different.

Are FI People Professional Investors?

When you are Financially Independent and retired, you will not have much income. You may even have zero income for a long time. It means you will live out of your capital gains. But you do not want them to be taxed.

But since your capital gains make for more than half of your income, should you be considered as a professional investor?

In theory, you could, yes. But in practice, you will just check one of the criteria. And generally, people are not considered professional investors only by a single criterion. You should meet several of these criteria for your capital gains to be taxed.

And there is something else as well: dividends. If you invest in the global stock market, you will receive dividends. These are counted as income. So if you live half on your dividends and half on your capital gains, you should be fine.

In general, most ETFs have about a 2% dividend rate. Since most people retire on the four percent rule, they only need 2% coming from capital gains. This is a good split. But this can highly vary from one year to another, so we need to be careful.

Now, this is one place where distributing ETFs are much better than accumulating ETFs. If you only own accumulating ETFs, you will need to sell more of them to pay your bills. As such, you will generate more capital gains. Realized income is why I prefer distributing ETFs over accumulating ETFs.

Also, when you are in retirement, a little income will go a long way in helping you retire. So, if some income stream covers a quarter of your expenses, you only need dividends and capital gains for the other three quarters. In that case, it is very unlikely that your capital gains exceed your dividends and the side income.

Finally, there is something good with capital gains. You can control them. It means you decide when you gain capital gains. So, based on the 50/50 split, you can control how much capital gains you realize not to be considered a professional investor. Of course, this is not always possible. If you need the money for essential expenses, then, this should not prevent you from selling.

Given all this, I think that early retirees in Switzerland do not have to worry much about capital gains tax.

Conclusion

In general, we can assume that capital gains will not be taxed in Switzerland. It is an excellent thing because this means that a large part of your income will not be taxed in retirement.

Now, we still have to be careful not to be qualified as professional investors. But most of the rules for that are simply the rules of long-term passive investors (hold for more than six months and do not do many transactions).

The only thing that could happen is to be qualified as a professional investor in retirement because our capital gains make for more than half of our income. But in practice, this should not happen. Indeed, you should also receive dividends. And you may have a side income that will help in that matter as well.

Hopefully, this will help clear the matter of capital gains and taxes in Switzerland.

If you want more information, I have an entire article about taxes in Switzerland.