Temporary and Furnished Apartments in Switzerland: How They Work (and Zurich's New Rules)

Moving to Zurich without a flat usually means two contracts. First a furnished place, so you have an address to register at. Then your own lease.

This guide covers the first contract: what you are booking, what it costs, and what Zurich’s new rule changes. It is general information, not legal advice.

A furnished flat comes first because registration needs an address

If you move from abroad, you register within 14 days, and the city asks for a lease or sublease contract. Signing your own lease within two weeks is hard: on 1 June 2026, 0.11% of homes in the city of Zurich stood empty, and listings stayed online for 12 days on average.

How long you will need it is harder to say. Relocation providers commonly advise booking two to three months and say many expats stay two to six months. That is an industry estimate; no independent survey exists.

The full order, from registration to signing a lease, is in our guide to renting a home in Switzerland as a foreigner.

Serviced, business or sublet: know what you are booking

The city’s statistics office counts 5,320 “apartments”: furnished, professionally managed flats, usually let for shorter periods. That is 2.2% of the city’s housing stock, most of it in Kreis 1 and 4.

Behind the word “furnished” sit five different products:

Type	What it is	Examples
Serviced apartment	Furnished flat with services such as cleaning and linen	Glandon, Visionapartments, City Stay
Business apartment	Flats furnished and let by an operator, mostly to expats	Blueground, HITrental, PABS
Mid-term platform	Listings from many landlords, booked online	Wunderflats, HousingAnywhere, Spotahome
Furnished sublet	A tenant lets their own flat while away	UMS
Short-stay platform	Nightly or weekly bookings	Airbnb, booking sites

The names are examples, not recommendations.

Contracts: one month minimum, most costs included

Minimum stays and inclusions differ by provider. What four of them publish:

• Blueground: minimum 30 days; leases of 12 months or more are possible.
• Glandon: minimum one month, open-ended with one month’s notice. Cleaning every two weeks, linen change, Wi-Fi and TV, utilities, laundry and final cleaning are included. Deposit, reservation fee and first month are due before move-in.
• Wunderflats: one month is usually the minimum; most mid-term contracts run 3 to 11 months. Rent includes furniture, utilities and services.
• UMS sublets: minimum stays of 1 to 8 months, set per listing.

Tenancy law generally applies to furnished flats too. Two exceptions matter.

Holiday flats rented for three months or less fall outside the rules on residential leases (Art. 253a of the Code of Obligations). Whether a city flat counts as a holiday flat depends on the facts. And a furnished single room can be terminated with two weeks’ notice to the end of a one-month period (Art. 266e).

Where tenancy law applies, the deposit is capped at three months’ rent (Art. 257e).

Before you book, get these in writing:

• minimum stay and notice period;
• what is included: utilities, internet, cleaning, final cleaning;
• the deposit amount and where it is held;
• a rental or sublease contract in your name, for registration;
• for a sublet, the main landlord’s consent.

What it costs in Zurich: from CHF 2,100 for a studio

Wunderflats publishes the middle half of its Zurich listings: a quarter cost less, a quarter cost more.

Size	Monthly rent (middle half), CHF	Midpoint, CHF
Studio or 1 room	2,100–3,650	about 2,850
2 rooms	3,100–4,450	about 3,700
3 rooms or more	4,800–6,150	about 5,450

Source: Wunderflats, August 2026 data.

Three more data points:

• Spotahome: CHF 3,683 on average across its Zurich listings (March to August 2026), with up to 12% off for stays of 12 months or more.
• UMS sublets (27 September 2026): 2 rooms CHF 2,000–3,950; 3.5 rooms CHF 2,388–4,200.
• Length matters: in October 2025, Tsüri found a central flat at CHF 6,500 for one month, against CHF 4,300 a month for a nine-month booking.

For scale, the median net rent in existing city tenancies was CHF 1,424 for 2 rooms and CHF 1,578 for 3 rooms (April 2024). Those are sitting tenants’ rents, not asking rents. Nationally, Wüest Partner put the average business-apartment rent at CHF 2,500 a month in 2024, almost 40% above comparable regular flats.

Other cities, indicative only. These are small UMS samples of sublets, not serviced apartments (27 September 2026):

• Geneva: studio CHF 2,160, 2.5 rooms CHF 3,096 (4 listings).
• Basel: 2–2.5 rooms CHF 1,690–2,178, 3–3.5 rooms CHF 2,625–2,988 (10 listings).
• Zug region: 3.5 rooms CHF 2,520–3,960 (4 listings).

Zurich’s rule since 1 September 2026 targets owners, not guests

What it is. Flats let regularly and commercially for less than a year, such as Airbnb units, business apartments and temporarily let second homes, no longer count toward the minimum residential share (Mindestwohnanteil) of Zurich’s building and zoning ordinance.

• Building applications must now declare the rental duration.
• Converting a flat into a business apartment needs a building permit, even without construction work. Owners must report such uses.
• Letting your own home occasionally while you are away is exempt.
• Existing uses are not protected; the building authority acts on concrete tips. The city is adding five full-time posts for three years, from the fourth quarter of 2026.
• Violations lead to an order to restore the lawful use within a deadline, then a fine.

Four business-apartment companies fought the rule. The Federal Supreme Court dismissed their appeals in a judgment of 30 April 2026.

What it is not. It is not a city-wide ban: it only bites where a minimum residential share applies. In a building of 10 flats with an 80% residential share, at most 2 may now be let short-term; before, all 10 could be.

It is not a 90-day limit either. That is a separate initiative (next section).

What it means for you. You are not the addressee; owners and operators are. But supply and continuity of such units may change, and there are no documented enforcement cases yet. Ask the provider whether the unit is compliant.

The 90-day cap is a proposal, not a rule

The city initiative “Wohnraum schützen – Airbnb und Business Apartments regulieren” was submitted on 4 September 2025 by the SP, the Greens and the AL, and declared valid. It would cap short-term letting at 90 days a year per flat and steer business apartments into commercial zones.

The city council supports its goals and is drafting a counter-proposal, due to the city parliament by 4 January 2027. No vote date is set.

Elsewhere: Lucerne has limited short-term rentals to 90 nights a year since 1 January 2025. Basel-Stadt’s parliament forwarded a motion for a registration duty on 23 September 2026; it is a proposal only.

Three pitfalls: consent, registration, city tax

Subletting without consent. A sublet needs the main landlord’s consent (Art. 262). The landlord may refuse only if the terms are not disclosed, are abusive compared with the main lease, or cause significant disadvantages. In February 2024 a Zurich rental court upheld the extraordinary termination of a tenant who sublet through booking platforms without consent, after a written warning. If the main lease ends, your sublet ends with it. Voters kept these rules unchanged in November 2024. Ask to see the consent.

Registration. The city accepts a sublease contract as proof of housing. It does not say whether a hotel or serviced-apartment booking confirmation without a lease is enough; we could not confirm it. Ask the provider for a written rental or sublease contract, and check with the Personenmeldeamt (residents’ registration office).

City tax. The canton of Zurich has no statutory tourist tax; hotels in the regional hotel association levy a City Tax for Zürich Tourismus. Airbnb’s help page says it collects CHF 2.50 per person and night, while the trade paper htr reports an increase to CHF 3.50. The current amount, and whether it applies to monthly stays, is unconfirmed. Ask whether your price includes it.

From furnished flat to your own lease

Use the furnished months to do the paperwork in order: register, order your debt-collection extract, build your dossier, apply. When you move into your own flat, report the move within 14 days; online is possible.

The renting guide covers the dossier, the deposit and Zurich’s initial-rent form. Everything else on leases, deposits and viewings is in our housing guides.

Short on time? A home-search consultant does the viewings with you, or for you. Compare home-search agencies or those working in Zurich.

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