I need some advice on a situation I’m currently facing regarding my B permit in Switzerland. I recently renewed my permit and was living in Zurich with my wife. However, she has since deregistered and returned to the UK. Due to my work, I now travel across Switzerland and other parts of Europe frequently. As a result, I decided to move out of our three-bedroom apartment in Zurich since it was no longer necessary.
Now, my local Gemeinde is threatening to deregister me and change my status to “unknown.” I’m struggling to understand what this means for my permit and what steps I can take to address this issue.
To give you a bit more context:
When I’m in Geneva/Zurich or Basel, I stay with a friend (I can’t register here)
In the UK, I have a house.
When traveling in Europe, I stay in hotels.
Given my travel schedule and accommodations, maintaining a fixed apartment in Zurich seems unnecessary. However, I’m concerned about the implications of being deregistered and what it might mean for my B permit.
Has anyone faced a similar situation or can offer any advice on how to navigate this? Any insights on how to maintain my permit status without a permanent residence in Zurich would be greatly appreciated.
My ideal outcome I think would be to pay someone a fee every month to register at their apartment but never stay there.
You need a fixed address for taxes, health insurance, etc. If you have no fixed abode they will not support your B permit. Can’t you find room in a shared, cheap apartment to tie your B permit down?
Yes without address you cannot keep your permit and all other things, there are many people who try to establish residence here for tax purposes without any intent to live, so some manage to find a person willing to register them for a ‘fee’, but beware it is difficult and swiss will not go for it, since it is borderline illegal, the best bet is to have a friend who can do it or some wg of students in need for money will overlook ‘your absence’.
Also are you non-EU or EU nationality and who was/is the main permit holder.
You MUST have a Swiss address or you can’t keep your permit. There is no getting around this. You could just rent a room in shared accommodation that you can register yourself with the gemeinde, but you must have that as a minimum to be able to keep your permit.
I knew someone who did this: but he was subletting from the person who officially rented the apartment and kept one room in it for his things, but he was never at the apartment.
I met also another guy who wanted to flatshare with me but not have his name on any documents (as he didn’t want to jeopardise his residency status for naturalization purposes).
The permit is a residence permit hence you must reside somewhere in Switzerland. Depending on your status you might have to reside in Zürich Canton and require permission to reside elsewhere.
I have a full B permit it has just been renewed for an additional 5 years, I’m British. I have a friend who’s apartment I can register at but that’s not till the end of August.
Get an AirBnB till the end of August? Clearly the gemeinde know your situation is uncertain, residence-wise, so I would tread carefully. Forking out for something temporary but acceptable to the gemeinde now will save you a world of pain if they decide to get difficult.
But are you the main permit holder or was your wife? If she was then as she’s deregistered and left you can no longer stay here. You/your employer (depending on whether you arrived before or after Brexit) would need to get a new independent permit and that might be difficult if you arrived after Brexit as Swiss employers have to show they can’t find a Swiss/EU national to do the job.
Not alone must you have a place of residence, you need to be able show that you are resident. If you spend most of the time out of Switzerland and it is documented i.e. flights coming and going you may still have an issue as the permit is for a resident.
I’ve heard this a few times, but have you ever heard anyone having an issue because the authorities pulled out such logs? How exactly is this being checked? Airtickets? SBB tickets? Car plates at the border?
I have personally never been stopped at the border, the few times I travelled to Germany and Italy. So what would stop someone from renting a place in CH to get the residence permit and commute every day to Italy/Germany/France?
ohhh, who would care about people having a secondary residence in France?
The French authorities that want you to become tax resident in their municipalities. Just imagine a Swiss salary taxed with French rates…juicy, mmm
How?
In Ferney-Voltaire, in the Pays de Gex, Daniel Raphoz, the mayor, believes he has proof that certain residents are not weekend dwellers after reading the abnormally high water consumption readings. The councilor observed in 2017 a loss of 117 cross-border workers in the town and at the same time an increase in second homes. “Collaboration with customs services and our Swiss neighbors is better. The lists of G permits [border permits] with identities are communicated in Haute-Savoie, we are requesting the same service for the department of Ain,” he indicates.
Waaay back before the bipartisan agreements between CH and neighbours we were living in France but retaining a Swiss residency like this. Actually renting an apartment though, not just faking an address, and we’d stay over in Basel a few days a month. At that time there was no real alternative, as G permit holders were not allowed to stay over in CH, not even in a hotel, so whatever we would do we could not satisfy all the requirements to be either Swiss or French resident. Staying Swiss was the easier option.
Anyway, yes, at one point when being checked by French customs my wife cracked and told them that we had a French house. We then had to go along for interviews armed with utility bills from both addresses if we were to prove that the French one was only used at weekends. We did not fight it and the net result was just a couple of thousand to pay as VAT on the undeclared vehicles. French Bureaucracy was such that it did not go any further, we never re-registered the cars under French plates, we never became French instead of Swiss taxpayers.
A couple of years after this the agreements came into place so the situation resolved itself.
ETA: At that time simply buying a house in Switzerland was not feasible. Too few available, too expensive and no idea about whether we’d have got a mortgage on B permits. The other option of just not buying a house really never occurred to us.
