AHV Contributions When Not Working: 2026 Rules and Gaps

Updated: November 13, 2026

If you’re employed in Switzerland, AHV contributions come out of your salary automatically. If you don’t, you have to take care of them yourself: students, early retirees, people on a sabbatical, and spouses at home whose partner doesn’t work. If nobody pays, you end up with a missing contribution year, and that costs you pension for life.

We’ll look at who counts as non-employed, how much you pay in 2026, when your spouse’s contributions cover you, how to find gaps in your AHV account statement and how long you have to fill them. The timing matters right now: for missing 2021 contributions, the ordinary deadline runs out at the end of 2026.

In short:

Who pays: everyone insured in Switzerland who doesn’t work or earns very little, from 1 January after their 20th birthday until reference age.
How much: in 2026 at least CHF 530 and at most CHF 26,500 a year, based on your assets plus 20 × your pension income. Administration costs come on top.
Married couples: if your working spouse pays at least CHF 1,060 in contributions a year, including the employer’s share, your contributions count as paid. This doesn’t apply to unmarried couples.
Gaps: you can generally only pay missing contributions five years back. If you have a gap from 2021, contact your compensation office now. One missing year costs CHF 741 of pension a year at the maximum pension.

Who counts as non-employed for AHV?

For AHV purposes (Swiss old-age and survivors’ insurance, together with IV disability insurance and EO income compensation), you’re non-employed if you’re insured in Switzerland and have no earned income or only a small one. Typical cases:

Early retirees who stop working before reference age.
Students without a meaningful salary.
People on a sabbatical or travelling the world, as long as they stay insured in Switzerland.
Stay-at-home spouses and others doing unpaid family work.
Unemployed people without daily allowances, for example once their entitlement has run out. Unemployment daily allowances themselves have AHV contributions deducted automatically.
People receiving an IV disability pension. The IV pension doesn’t exempt you from contributions.

Contributions as a non-employed person start on 1 January after your 20th birthday and end with the month you reach reference age. That’s 65, and between 64 years and 3 months and 64 years and 9 months for women born from 1961 to 1963.

Moving here as the non-working spouse of someone with a job? As a resident, you’re normally insured from your arrival, so the rules below apply to you from your first year in Switzerland. People posted to Switzerland under a social security agreement can stay in their home country’s system. If your spouse pays enough Swiss contributions, they usually cover you, see the married couples section.

Students

Students living in Switzerland pay a flat minimum contribution of CHF 530 a year plus administration costs, either to their school or to the compensation office responsible for them. Foreign nationality alone doesn’t exempt you, your Swiss domicile is what matters. If you work alongside your studies and your contributions, including the employer’s share, reach CHF 530, you pay nothing extra. At a contribution rate of 10.6%, that’s about CHF 5,000 in salary a year. From 1 January after your 25th birthday, the normal rules apply: the calculation based on assets and pension income, and the comparison with salary contributions described in the next section.

Small income or part-time work

Having a job doesn’t automatically make you employed for AHV purposes. You count as permanently fully employed if you work at least nine months a year at 50% or more of normal working hours. If you work less, there’s a comparison: your contributions from salary, including the employer’s share, must reach at least CHF 530 and at least half of what you’d pay as a non-employed person. Otherwise you owe non-employed contributions, and you can have the salary contributions you’ve paid credited against them.

This mostly affects people with assets and a small workload, such as early retirees with a part-time board seat.

Early retirement: AHV contributions until reference age

If you stop working at 60, you remain liable for contributions until reference age. Whether you pay your own non-employed contributions depends on any salary contributions in the same year and on your spouse. A pension fund pension counts as pension income and is multiplied by 20. If you retire early in the year of your 58th birthday or later, you generally stay with your last employer’s compensation office.

AHV minimum and maximum contribution 2026

In 2026, non-employed people pay per person and year:

Contribution	Amount 2026
Minimum contribution	CHF 530
Double the minimum (threshold for married couples)	CHF 1,060
Maximum contribution	CHF 26,500

These amounts cover AHV, IV and EO together. The compensation office adds administration costs of up to 5% of the contributions.

If someone can’t pay the minimum contribution because of serious hardship, the compensation office can waive it on application. The canton of residence then pays the minimum. Simply not paying isn’t an option.

How the compensation office calculates your contribution

What counts is your net assets on 31 December of the contribution year and your pension income in the same year. Your annual pension income is multiplied by 20 and added to your assets. The total is the basis for your contribution:

Below CHF 350,000: minimum contribution of CHF 530.
From CHF 350,000: CHF 636, then CHF 106 more for every additional CHF 50,000, up to CHF 3,604 at CHF 1.75 million.
Above CHF 1.75 million: CHF 159 more for every additional CHF 50,000.
From CHF 8.95 million: maximum contribution of CHF 26,500.

Assets means net assets as per your tax assessment, after deducting debts. Swiss real estate is counted at the inter-cantonal repartition value, foreign real estate at market value. Pension fund and vested benefits balances don’t count as long as you haven’t withdrawn them. Investment income such as interest and dividends isn’t counted as income, because it’s already part of your assets.

Pension income is broader than a retirement pension. It includes Swiss and foreign pensions, pension fund and bridging pensions, maintenance from a former spouse (not child maintenance), daily allowances from health and accident insurance, and scholarships. Federal IV pensions and supplementary benefits don’t count.

Worked examples for 2026

Situation	Assets	Annual pension income	Basis	Contribution 2026
Sabbatical, single	CHF 200,000	None	CHF 200,000	CHF 530
Early retiree, single	CHF 500,000	CHF 30,000 pension fund pension	CHF 1,100,000	CHF 2,226
Early-retired couple, both non-employed, same figures combined	CHF 500,000	CHF 30,000	CHF 550,000 each	CHF 1,060 each, CHF 2,120 together

All amounts are before administration costs. For a married couple, the compensation office assigns each spouse half of the combined assets and pension income, whatever the marital property regime.

Provisional and final contributions

Because the tax assessment comes later, the compensation office first bills provisional contributions, usually quarterly. They must be paid by the 10th day after the end of the quarter. Once the tax assessment is available, the office sets the final contributions. Overpayments are refunded, and you generally pay any balance within 30 days. Late contributions carry 5% default interest a year. If your assets or pension change significantly, tell the office straight away so the provisional bills are right.

Married: when your contributions count as paid

If you’re married or in a registered partnership and your spouse works, you often don’t need to pay anything. Your contributions count as paid if your spouse is employed for AHV purposes and pays at least CHF 1,060 in contributions a year, including the employer’s share. At a 10.6% contribution rate, that’s an AHV salary of about CHF 10,000 a year.

Three things to know:

Cohabiting doesn’t count. Unmarried couples each pay for themselves, however long they’ve lived together.
Spouse with a small workload. If your spouse isn’t permanently fully employed, the office first runs the comparison above to see whether they count as employed at all.
Both non-employed. Then each of you pays your own contribution, based on half of your combined assets and pension income. This mainly affects couples who both retire early.

Childcare and care credits (Erziehungs- and Betreuungsgutschriften) don’t change this: they don’t exempt you from paying contributions. Years for which you get such credits do count as contribution years for your pension.

Registering with the compensation office

As a non-employed person, you register yourself with the compensation office (Ausgleichskasse) of your canton of residence or the AHV branch office of your municipality. Nobody sends you a bill automatically. The official guide for non-employed persons shows you the right route and forms. Forms and online calculators differ between offices, but the rules are the same throughout Switzerland.

Not registering doesn’t make the debt go away. If the compensation office later finds that contributions are missing, it claims them retroactively, generally for five years and with default interest. So register in your first year without earned income, even if you only expect to pay the minimum.

Ordering and reading your AHV account statement

Your individual account (IK) at the AHV shows whether you have gaps. You order the statement free of charge through the account statement request form. You need your AHV number (13 digits, starting with 756) and your postal address.

Every compensation office that has ever received contributions for you keeps its own account. If you’ve changed jobs a few times, you have several. In the form, pick one office and ask for the complete statement (Gesamtauszug). That office then collects the entries from all offices.

The statement doesn’t list how many francs you paid each year. It shows the income credited to your AHV account. For non-employed people, the office converts the contributions into a corresponding income. The key columns:

Column	Content	What to check
2	Income code	1 or 2 for salary and contribution-liable benefits, 4 for non-employed contributions
3	Care credits	Only relevant if you’ve applied for care credits
4	Contribution months	A full year has 12 months
6	Income	The income credited for that year

If a whole year is missing or a year has fewer than 12 months, take a closer look. Not every gap in the statement is a real gap:

The current year is always missing, and last year may still be in progress.
Non-employed contributions only appear after the final assessment.
Married people: if your spouse paid enough, your contributions count as paid, even without your own entry.
Childcare credits never appear on the statement. They’re only added when your pension is calculated.

If you find a mistake, ask the office that keeps the account to correct it within 30 days of receiving the statement. Salary certificates and payslips help as evidence. If you want to know how much your pension will be, you can also request a pension projection. It’s normally free. If you’re under 40 or request several within five years, it can cost up to CHF 300.

Contribution gap or insurance gap?

This distinction decides whether you can pay anything back.

Contribution gap: you were insured in Switzerland but didn’t pay contributions. For example while studying after your 20th birthday, on a sabbatical or in the year after unemployment benefits ran out. You can generally pay these contributions within five years.
Insurance gap: you weren’t insured with the AHV at all, for example because you lived abroad or only moved to Switzerland later. You can’t buy these years back.

This matters for most expats. If you move to Switzerland, you pay pro-rata contributions for the year you arrive. Years abroad don’t fill gaps in your Swiss AHV record. With countries that have a social security agreement, such as the EU, each country pays a pension under its own conditions for the insurance periods you built up there. The Federal Social Insurance Office explains this in its overview of the old-age insurance system.

Paying AHV contributions retroactively: 2021 gaps until end of 2026

The compensation office can normally only assess missing contributions within five years after the end of the contribution year. For 2021, this ordinary period ends on 31 December 2026. After that, the year is generally lost for good, even if you’d like to pay voluntarily.

What matters is that the office issues its assessment before the deadline. A letter on 30 December is unlikely to be enough. If you have a gap from 2021, contact the compensation office of your canton of residence now, with your account statement and details of your assets and income in that year. For non-employed people, the deadline exceptionally runs longer if the tax assessment for the contribution year became final late: until at least one year after the end of the year in which that happened.

Back payments follow the rules of the contribution year, plus 5% default interest a year from 1 January after the contribution year. For 2021, that’s about five years of interest. If the back payment fills a real gap and you owe the minimum contribution, it’s still clearly worth it, as the calculation below shows.

Gaps in pillar 3a are a separate system with their own rules. How to catch up on contributions from 2025 onwards is explained in my guide to pillar 3a catch-up contributions.

Youth years and other ways to fill gaps

Once the deadline has passed, these rules can offset a gap fully or partly:

Youth years. If you paid contributions between 1 January after your 17th birthday and the end of the year you turned 20, for example during an apprenticeship or a side job, those years can fill up to three later gaps. The compensation office takes this into account when calculating your pension.
Contribution months in the pension year. Contributions from the year your pension entitlement starts, but from before the pension begins, can also fill gaps.
Working after reference age. Since 2024, contributions from up to five years of work after reference age can fill gaps. In each of those years, your income must reach at least 40% of your average earned income at reference age (unsplit, not revalued, without childcare and care credits), and your contributions must reach at least the minimum, CHF 530 in 2026. You can only apply for the recalculation once.

Years with childcare or care credits also count as contribution years. There’s no general way to buy back contribution years.

What one missing contribution year costs

A full AHV pension requires 44 contribution years, fewer for women in the transitional cohorts. Each missing year cuts the pension by at least 1/44, or about 2.3%. The maximum single pension in 2026 is CHF 2,520 a month and the minimum CHF 1,260. From December 2026, there’s also a 13th old-age pension each year, worth one twelfth of the annual pension.

Assumptions: income high enough for the maximum pension, otherwise complete contribution record, pension for a full year.

Contribution years	Pension per month	Pension per year incl. 13th pension
44, complete	CHF 2,520	CHF 32,760
43, one year missing	CHF 2,463	CHF 32,019
Difference	CHF 57	CHF 741

Over 20 years of retirement, that’s almost CHF 15,000. At the minimum pension, one missing year costs about CHF 29 a month. A back payment uses the minimum contribution of the gap year, CHF 503 for 2021, plus administration costs and default interest. If it fills a real gap, it pays for itself within a few years of retirement. With more assets the contribution is higher, but you owe it either way.

Gaps also matter for married couples. The two pensions together are capped at CHF 3,780 a month, and with an incomplete record the cap is lower.

The AHV is the first pillar. How to save more for retirement and cut your taxes with the third pillar is explained in my guide to the third pillar.

Conclusion: AHV contributions when you’re not working

If you don’t work, you have to keep an eye on the AHV yourself. A missing year happens quickly and costs you pension for life. My recommendations:

You’re stopping work or taking a sabbatical: register with the compensation office in the same year. If you’re married and your spouse counts as employed for AHV purposes and pays at least CHF 1,060 in contributions including the employer’s share, you don’t pay anything yourself.
You live with an unmarried partner and don’t work: you pay yourself, your partner’s salary doesn’t cover you.
You want to know whether you have gaps: order the complete statement of your individual account and check column 4 for years with fewer than 12 months.
You have a gap from 2021: report it to the compensation office now so it can still assess the contributions in 2026. If it fills a real gap and you owe the minimum contribution, the back payment pays for itself within a few years of retirement.
You’re retiring early: budget for AHV contributions until reference age. For a single person with CHF 500,000 in assets and a CHF 30,000 pension fund pension, that’s CHF 2,226 a year in 2026, plus administration costs.