Would love to hear advice and opinions on what would it cost, these days (April 2026), to live in the Geneva area for a non Swiss family of 4, 2 adults and 2 children (2 and 4 years old).
We do not speak German nor French and hold 3 EU passports and one Singaporean passport.
We would need:
-Apartment/House of 4 rooms
-Health insurance
-Nursery/Kindergarten , public one if possible
-No car needed, I guess, but SBB subscriptions for transport
-Monthly groceries, etc
I can’t comment specifically for Geneva - but be cautious with public kindergarten.
They have the WEIRDEST opening hours. E.g. in our area, the do Mornings (8:30-11:30) only, and then one day a week they have an afternoon (13:30-16:00).
We are expected to take them home for lunch in the 2 hours in between on the “afternoon” day.
There is a service where you can pay, and they cover the lunchtime on that day + the afternoons on other days - but this is private. So even with public kindergarten, if you are both working - expect to pay for private care.
We pay around 2000 for kita (pre-kindergarten / daycare) for 4days per week - and it wasn’t the most expensive I found…
Living in the Geneva area could mean: living in the GE canton, living in the VD canton, living in France, assuming that the centre of interest is the Geneva city.
Let’s assume the first option.
It’s just a rough estimate but I guess it’s better than nothing:
apartment rental ~3k CHF, for concrete options see immoscout24.ch
health insurance (note it works like a car insurance in Switzerland, i.e. you still pay a deductible and then 10%): ~400 CHF per adult for a min franchise, ~250 CHF per child for a max franchise (see comparis.ch), also note it’s assumed you have it from the day one of arrival, so there’s no point for postponing it the first 3 months
railway: you’d either have a half fare card (a 50% discount card) + tickets per trip or a subscription, compare prices on sbb.ch, i.e. typically if it’s 3 times to the office the first option is better; but another consideration is how much travel overall you want to do and how far, you need to consider all these aspects.
nursery: around 3000 CHF per child (+/- 200 CHF)
groceries: I’ve never experienced doing shopping in France - maybe it’s reduces the cost a bit - for Switzerland I’d assume 300-500 CHF per week.
Also, note that cantons have varying tax rates, and GE / VD are on the higher end (but probably still better than France?): Taxation in Switzerland - Wikipedia
Also, take tax calculators only as an estimate as deductions can change the situation quite a bit.
Also, a useful site is numbeo - it gets a lot of criticism, but still better than nothing.
I don’t insist on it, but it’s kind of cheap and children are sick quite often, also there’re such matters as orthodontics etc. but each to its own! The OP can also estimate a lower end one via comparis.ch
And I am not affiliated with them in any way really but for the child insurance max package I’m using Groupe Mutuel, and for the adult option something else. I.e. it’s a good idea to pick different ones sometimes.
Maybe I used min max wrongly
What I meant is that my preference is to choose the cheapest option available for adults and the most expensive option available for children (premium + extras).
