Swiss Company Register: How to Search Zefix and Verify Swiss Companies (2026)

1. How the Swiss company register works

Switzerland's register is federated, like the country. Each of the 26 cantons runs its own Handelsregister (registre du commerce, registro di commercio), and that cantonal office holds the legally authoritative file: the entry itself, articles of association, and the full history. Public access is a statutory right, so anyone may search without giving a reason.

Sitting on top is Zefix, the Central Business Name Index run by the Federal Commercial Registry Office (EHRA). It indexes every entity from all 26 registers and links each record to its cantonal extract. Every entry, change and deletion is also published in the SOGC (SHAB), the Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce, the free archive that lets you reconstruct any company's history.

The join key across everything is the UID (format CHE-123.456.789): one identifier for the register, VAT, customs and social insurance. With the MWST/TVA/IVA suffix it is also the VAT number.

2. How to search Zefix step by step

Searching is free, unlimited, and needs no registration. The interface speaks German, French, Italian and English.

1. Open zefix.ch

   Type the business name or UID. Autocomplete suggests matching entities while you type, including foundations and branches.

   

2. Narrow the match

   Tick exact search to suppress fuzzy hits, or toggle advanced search to filter by canton, legal form or seat. Useful for common names, and it searches former names too.

3. Open the record

   It shows address, legal form, seat, status (active, in liquidation, deleted), the UID, the older CH-ID, the FCRO-ID and the auditors.

   

4. Click the cantonal excerpt

   That gives you the full register extract from the canton where the business is seated: purpose clause, capital, directors, signatories. Free as a PDF in most cantons.

5. Check the SOGC publications

   The entry history: every change of directors, capital or address since registration, with dates.

3. What data is public and what it costs

Nearly everything on the register side is free. Watch out for commercial resellers charging up to €295 for documents the official registers give away.

That last pair is the Swiss peculiarity: the register is exceptionally open about legal facts and exceptionally closed about money. No revenue, no accounts, no employee counts, anywhere in the official sources.

4. Swiss legal forms, briefly

The suffix tells you the structure, and, crucially, how much ownership the register reveals.

5. How to verify a Swiss company: a practical checklist

1. Confirm the registration

   Search Zefix and match the exact name, legal form, seat and UID against what the business gave you. Check the status field: "in liquidation" still legally exists but is winding down; "deleted" no longer exists. For a quick first pass with revenue data included, use our free company lookup.

2. Pull the cantonal extract

   The free PDF lists directors and, critically, signing authority: who may bind the business, alone or jointly. Verify the person you are dealing with actually appears there.

3. Establish ownership, where possible

   GmbH: members and quotas are in the extract. AG: the register will not tell you; ownership sits in the internal share register, open only to banks and authorities. Plan KYC accordingly.

4. Read the SOGC history

   The gazette archive shows every mutation with dates: director churn, capital changes, seat moves between cantons, and any bankruptcy proceedings or calls to creditors.

5. Check the regulator, if relevant

   A register entry is not a licence. For banks, insurers and asset managers, confirm the FINMA authorisation separately. The commercial register says nothing about regulatory status.

6. Limitations of the official register

For single lookups, Zefix is excellent, arguably Europe's most pleasant register portal. The limits are structural:

• No financials, at all. Swiss private businesses do not file accounts with any public register. Revenue, profit and employee counts are simply absent, the single biggest gap versus Germany or the UK.
• AG ownership is invisible. Shareholders of a corporation are never published, and the coming LETRA transparency register will not be public either.
• Authoritative data sits in 26 places. Zefix indexes core fields; the full extract, articles and documents live at the canton, with per-canton portals, languages and fees for certified copies.
• No firmographics. The purpose clause is free text, not an industry code, and there is no size classification.

Verifying one Swiss counterparty is a five-minute job. Building a market view of Swiss businesses, or getting any revenue signal, is where the official sources stop.

7. Access Swiss register data programmatically

Credit where due: unlike most registers, Zefix offers an official, free REST API with the same core data as the website, covering name, UID, legal form, seat, status and SOGC publications. If register facts are all you need, use it.

What it cannot give you is what the register itself lacks: revenue, employees, industry codes, and one consistent schema across borders. CompanyData maintains records for all 1,364,087 Swiss legal entities, sourced from Zefix, the cantonal registers and the SOGC, enriched with modelled revenue and normalized to the same format as 200+ other countries. The Zefix API serves them by UID, name or address, with free trial credits to start, and the same Company Data API covers every other market.

GET /api/company/search?nationalId=CHE-105.909.036

{
  "name": "Nestlé AG",
  "legalForm": "AG",
  "uid": "CHE-105.909.036",
  "city": "Cham",
  "canton": "ZG",
  "status": "Active",
  "employees": 277000,
  "revenueRange": "> CHF 10B"
}

8. Switzerland vs other company registers

Switzerland is the easiest register in Europe to search and the hardest to get financials from: