Hi, I currently live in Zurich. I'm going to leave Switzerland permanently this summer. When deregistering, I'll have to pay taxes for the part of the year I was staying here in 2022. Wondering if it makes sense to first get a 1- oder 2-month rental in a low-income-tax canton like Zug before moving away, registering my primary residence there, and then finally deregistering in Zug to save income tax. Does anyone have an opinion on this?
Unless your tax bill runs into 100,000s you are wasting your time...
Consider also that your health insurance may go up! Plus moving costs and rent costs.
When you change cantons, your place of residence as of December 31 applies to the whole calendar year for tax purposes.
The place or residence is where you intend to stay permanently. If you are in canton Zug for just a month, this might be ruled out and right of taxation remains with the previous place of residence. If you search, you should be able to find cases which went to court. Btw. it was Canton ZG vs. the tax payer. They do not want to be a complicit in an illegal activity.
Our tax people discussed this option with us at one time. Does your visa allow you to move cantons?
Thanks for all the responses. In addition to asking here, I also called the excellent tax experts at Excent. The guy over there basically said that I could try, but he would recommend not doing it as high-tax cantons such as Zurich get suspicious when people move to low-tax cantons. Zurich might start checking if I "properly" moved, leading to all kinds of trouble down the road. Not worth trying from my perspective . Basically, what user "aSwissInTheUS" said above.
For all cantonal tax authorities and curious minded readers, I didn't want to do something illegal, just wanted to check since Swiss tax law includes various kinds of interesting loopholes that are absolutely legal and practicable ... so just wanted to check if this is the case here, which it doesn't appear to be.
Well it's absolutely not illegal and will not lead to any penalty just potentially a lot of pain for nothing. Tax saving would need to be substantial to try and do it.
Zurich is not a high tax canton. It’s below the Swiss average for personal taxation. If you want a giggle go and look at the French speaking cantons’ tax rates!