Freienbach named the best place to live in Switzerland in 2025
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Bilanz has shared its 2025 Gemeinderankings, listing the most and least desirable places to live in Switzerland. Freienbach, a small town on Lake Zurich, takes top place in 2025.
Bilanz releases its 2025 Gemeinderanking
Bilanz, in collaboration with consulting firm IAZI, has shared a list of the best and worst places to live in Switzerland in the 2025 Gemeinderanking. 960 Swiss Gemeinden (municipalities/communities), which each had over 2.000 residents, were compared using 56 individual indicators to decide the results.
The indicators are grouped into eight categories:
- Housing: cost of buying a house, rates of new housing construction, rental vacancy rate, cost of rent
- Labour market: rate of unemployment, number of new businesses
- Population structure: demographics, population growth
- Tax burden: tax yield, tax rates
- Mobility: availability of public transport, access to major roads and motorways
- Supply: number of doctors, pharmacies, hospitals, schools, shopping centres and supermarkets
- Security: crime rates
- Ecology: leisure activities, number of cultural venues and historical sites
Freienbach named the best place to live in Switzerland
Freienbach, a town on the shores of Lake Zurich in Canton Schwyz, has replaced Meggen, Lucerne, as the best place to live in Switzerland in 2025. This year’s winner moved up from seventh place in the 2024 ranking.
The town received the top spot thanks to a short commute time to Zurich, low taxes and plenty of companies which provide residents with job opportunities, reports Blick.
Other communities that made the top 10 share similar attributes to Freienbach, and are praised for their quality of life. The German-speaking cantons of Schwyz and Lucerne featured repeatedly in the top 10.
In contrast, cantons Ticino, Neuchâtel and Vaud featured frequently in the ranking’s bottom 10. Mümliswil-Ramiswil, south of Basel in canton Solothurn, placed last in the ranking due to “a small-scale local economy and a high tax rate of 123 percent”.
10 best places to live in Switzerland in 2025
The 10 best places to live in Switzerland, according to the 2025 Gemeinderanking, are:
- Freienbach, Schwyz
- Altendorf, Schwyz
- Maienfeld, Graubünden
- Horn, Thurgau
- Oberkirch, Lucerne
- Meggen, Lucerne
- Zug, Zug
- Hergiswil, Nidwalden
- Feusisberg, Schwyz
- Cham, Zug
10 worst places to live in Switzerland in 2025
The 10 worst places to live in Switzerland, according to the 2025 Gemeinderanking, are:
- Leysin, Vaud
- Courrendlin, Jura
- Val-de-Travers, Neuchâtel
- Tresa, Ticino
- Bellach, Solothurn
- Biasca, Ticino
- Sainte-Croix, Vaud
- Le Locle, Neuchâtel
- Riviera, Ticino
- Mümliswil-Ramiswil, Solothurn
Take a look at the complete 2025 ranking here.
Editor at IamExpat Media