Swiss perspectives in 10 languages

Number of single-person households triples in Switzerland

People cooking in kitchen
The make-up of Swiss households is changing. Keystone / Luis Berg

At the end of 2022, there will be around four million private households in Switzerland. More than a third of them are inhabited by just one person.

Just under 30% of households each comprise couples without children and couples with at least one child under 25. The average household has 2.18 persons.

Thus, 17% of the resident population lives in one-person households, as the Federal Statistical Office announced on Thursday. Since 1970, the number of these households has more than tripled. Over the same period, the number of households with children under 25 has remained stable.

In the vast majority of households with children under 25, parents live together as a couple. Single-parent households account for about one-sixth of households with children.

In 73% of couple households with children, the parents are married couples. In one-tenth, the parents live in a consensual partnership. Same-sex couples with children account for 0.1%.

The traditional household form of the married couple with one or more children is most widespread in central Switzerland. Non-traditional household forms are more common in western Switzerland and in the urban canton of Basel City. The cantons of Geneva, Neuchâtel and Vaud have the highest number of single-parent households.

This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. You can find them here

If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to english@swissinfo.ch.

External Content
Your subscription could not be saved. Please try again.
Almost finished… We need to confirm your email address. To complete the subscription process, please click the link in the email we just sent you.
Daily news

Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox.

Daily

The SBC Privacy Policy provides additional information on how your data is processed.


Popular Stories

Most Discussed

News

Mark Thomson to become CERN's new General Manager from 2026

More

CERN selects new director-general

This content was published on The CERN Council has chosen British physicist Mark Thomson as the organisation's next director-general.

Read more: CERN selects new director-general

In compliance with the JTI standards

More: SWI swissinfo.ch certified by the Journalism Trust Initiative

You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here . Please join us!

If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.

SWI swissinfo.ch - a branch of Swiss Broadcasting Corporation SRG SSR

SWI swissinfo.ch - a branch of Swiss Broadcasting Corporation SRG SSR