It gets crowded on Zurich’s lakeside promenade in summer – but it’s not just because of German immigrants. (Archive)
KEYSTONE/Walter Bieri
More and more Germans are moving to Switzerland. Jobs, high wages and a quality of life like no other country in Europe attract them here. New figures now show: The German boom in Switzerland continues unabated.
Switzerland remains the most popular place to live and work for Germans in other European countries. At the beginning of 2025, there were around 329,900 German citizens living in Switzerland, as reported by the German statistics authority on Monday. This makes Germans the second-largest group of foreign nationals in Switzerland after Italians.
And the number continues to rise. At the beginning of 2025, 6300 more Germans were resident in Switzerland compared to the previous year, an increase of 1.9 percent. Within ten years, the number of Germans in Switzerland has grown by 10.7 percent or around 32,000.
Whether for study, work or the weather: according to the German statistics authority, no data is available on the reasons for living abroad in Europe. Germans who are also nationals of the country of destination are not counted as Germans living abroad.