Largest Employers in Zürich: The Figures for 2025

The answer first

The largest employer in the canton of Zürich is the canton itself: at the end of 2025 its administration had 41,937 employment contracts, a little over 30,000 full-time equivalents across the year, and almost two thirds of the contracts were in schools. Next comes the city of Zürich with 34,736 employees. Only then do ETH Zurich, the University Hospital and the University of Zurich follow, each with over 10,000 people.

If you search for the largest employers in Zürich, most lists you'll find measure something else: revenue, worldwide headcount, or how popular a company is as an employer. A group headquartered in Zürich with tens of thousands of staff around the world can top such a list even if only a small share of them work here. So we only used figures that show how many people an employer has in Zürich, each from its own report for 2025 or from official data. Most of these sources are in German; where there's an English version, we link that. At the end, we show who posted the most jobs with us in October 2026.

The largest employers in Zürich by staff

Among the employers for which we found a Zürich figure of their own for 2025, nine have more than 3,000 full-time equivalents, and all nine are publicly owned: administrations, hospitals, universities, the cantonal bank and SBB, the Swiss railways. The canton and the city of Zürich lead by a wide margin, followed by three universities and hospitals with roughly 8,000 to 11,000 full-time equivalents each.

The chart compares full-time equivalents because almost every employer reports that figure. Headcount is always higher, since many people work part-time. University Hospital Zurich has 8,034 full-time equivalents but 10,857 employees. Whenever you compare rankings, ask first what was counted.

Three entries need a note. ETH Zurich belongs to the Confederation, not the canton, and reports a single figure for its whole workforce: 10,775 full-time equivalents at the end of the year. Zürcher Kantonalbank reports the figure for its whole group. And SBB's open data show how many full-time equivalents it has in each canton. For Zürich that was about 5,805 in 2025; only the canton of Bern has more, with about 8,069.

The canton itself says it's number one. How it counts, though, is a story of its own.

The canton: 41,937 contracts, but fewer people

On the page of its HR office, the Personalamt, the canton of Zürich calls itself the largest employer in the canton. The exact figure is in its staff and pay statistics for 2025: 41,937 employment contracts on 31 December 2025.

But a contract isn't the same as a person. Someone with two contracts with the canton counts twice. The canton doesn't publish how many people that actually is. Counted in full-time equivalents across the whole year, apprentices and interns included, it comes to 30,262. The number of contracts, on the other hand, leaves out apprentices and interns altogether.

Schools make up the largest share. The public schools, from primary to lower secondary, alone account for 20,432 contracts, the upper secondary schools for 3,617 and vocational education for 2,943. The reason is simple: according to the HR office, all teachers are employed by the canton, including those at public schools who teach in a building owned by the municipality. The municipalities, however, pay 80 percent of public school teachers' salaries and related costs, as section 61 of the cantonal law on compulsory schooling, the Volksschulgesetz, sets out. So a teacher in Uster counts towards the canton, not the municipality.

Apart from the schools, the largest block is the cantonal police, with 4,202 contracts. The public prosecutor's office, the prison and probation service, the tax office and the civil engineering office are part of the administration too. Some of the canton's best-known names, however, aren't included.

The HR office's statistics cover only the seven directorates and the State Chancellery. University Hospital Zurich, the University of Zurich, the Cantonal Hospital Winterthur, ZHAW and Zürcher Kantonalbank manage their own staff and report separately. Together, these five employ another 35,679 people. If you want to work for the canton, look beyond the administration to these institutions as well. The second big public employer counts differently: in people.

The city of Zürich: 34,736 employees

The city of Zürich employed exactly 34,736 people at the end of 2025, according to the city council's annual report for 2025. Averaged over the year, that was 25,400 full-time equivalents. On top of that came 1,402 apprentices. At the end of 2021, the figure was 30,171. The two figures aren't fully comparable, though: the city has only included the senior doctors at its municipal hospital, Stadtspital Zürich, since 2023.

The city counts people, not contracts. In full-time equivalents, too, it stays behind the canton, with 25,400 against 30,262. The city's statistics office, Statistik Stadt Zürich, breaks down where city staff work by department. The largest is the school and sports department, with 11,371 people. It's followed by the health and environment department with 7,956, which includes Stadtspital Zürich, and the department of industrial services, which runs the city's utilities, with 4,544. The security department has 3,102 people.

For you as an applicant, this mainly shows one thing: the city hires for a very wide range of jobs, from nursing to engineering. On 17 October 2026 it was the employer with the most listings on our site for jobs in the city; more on that below. But first, the institutions that are about as big as a whole city department.

Hospitals and universities: about 10,000 people each

Behind the canton and the city, three institutions are almost level: ETH Zurich, University Hospital Zurich and the University of Zurich. Each employs more than 10,000 people, more than any company for which we found a Zürich figure.

University Hospital Zurich (USZ) had 10,857 employees at the end of 2025, 7.2 percent more than a year earlier. Two thirds work in its core business: 4,004 nurses, 1,993 doctors and 1,251 staff in medical-technical and therapy roles. The University of Zurich lists 10,323 employees and 7,882 full-time equivalents in its annual report. More than half of them are mid-level academic staff, the Mittelbau: 1,600 doctoral candidates, around 2,800 further positions for early-career researchers and 1,575 research associates.

The next tier is the Cantonal Hospital Winterthur with 4,115 employees and ZHAW, the Zurich University of Applied Sciences, with 3,729. According to its staff report, the city of Winterthur had about 3,817 full-time equivalents at the end of 2025. If you work in healthcare, you have several very large public employers to choose from in Zürich, plus private clinics, which we'll meet again further down in the listings.

Where are UBS, Google and the other companies?

The big private employers aren't missing from the ranking because they're small, but because they don't publish a figure for Zürich. UBS, for example, had 105,236 employees at the end of 2025, according to its own workforce overview, 33 percent of them in Switzerland. How many work in Zürich isn't stated there. Deriving a figure from that would be guesswork, and we don't guess.

It's similar with Google. On its page about Google, the investment promotion agency Greater Zurich Area mentions around 5,000 employees from 85 nationalities in Zürich, but gives no date. We found no verified figure for 2025. For Migros Zürich and the airline SWISS, too, we found no current public figure that counts Zürich alone.

The airport is a special case. According to the Integrated Report 2025 of Zurich Airport Ltd, more than 300 companies operate there, with around 35,000 jobs between them. That's about as many as the entire city administration, but it isn't a single employer. Zurich Airport Ltd itself had 1,984 employees in Zürich in 2025, not counting apprentices and interns. Everyone else works for the other companies on site, from airlines to shops.

How big a share of the job market do the big employers have?

Smaller than the figures suggest. The Federal Statistical Office counted 1,141,903 persons employed in the canton of Zürich in 2023, with 875,865 full-time equivalents between them; the cantonal figures are in the German version of the press release. In the city of Zürich alone, 545,938 people worked, according to Statistik Stadt Zürich. The nine employers in our chart add up to about 100,000 full-time equivalents. That's roughly one in nine full-time equivalents in the canton, if you set the 2025 figures next to those for 2023.

Large companies still play an important role. According to the canton's economic monitoring, firms with more than 250 employees make up less than one percent of companies in Zürich but provide 39 percent of jobs. On the other hand, 88 percent of the roughly 112,500 companies in the canton have fewer than ten employees. So most jobs in the canton are neither with the canton nor the city, but with thousands of small and medium-sized firms.

For your job search, that's good news. If you don't land a job with the very largest employers, most of the market is still open to you. Our own listings show which employers are actively hiring.

Who posts the most jobs with us

Our listings don't show how big an employer is, but who is hiring. The table below counts the open jobs on our site with a place of work in the city of Zürich, as of 17 October 2026. We left out recruiters and temp agencies, because with them you don't work for the advertiser itself. Where an employer posts under several names, we added the figures together.

Employer	Open jobs with us
City of Zürich	408, plus 44 at its care centres for older people
Klinik Hirslanden	287
Securitas	255, under three names
Canton of Zürich	244, under two names
University Hospital Zurich	208
Zurich Insurance	127, under two names
Klinik im Park	120
University of Zurich	111
Migros Zürich	71
Google	63
Swisscom	58, under two names
Zürcher Kantonalbank	51
ETH Zurich	38

Two things stand out. First, the big public employers match our list: the city, the canton, the University Hospital and the University are near the top here, just as in the ranking by staff. Second, hospitals and clinics are hiring a lot. Together with the Schulthess Klinik, the University Children's Hospital and the Psychiatric University Hospital Zurich, the hospitals and clinics on our list have more than 700 open jobs. The figures change every day as listings expire and new ones come in. They're a snapshot, not market statistics.

What this means for your application

With large employers, it pays to know the organisation before you apply. At the canton and the city, pay follows a fixed salary system, and part-time work is the rule rather than the exception. At hospitals and universities, it often matters which area you end up in, because an organisation with 10,000 people is made up of many small teams with their own managers. For every job ad, check whether it comes from the employer itself or from a recruiter, and who is named as the contact person.

A good approach is to start with the employer rather than the single job. On the employer pages in the table, you can see all of an organisation's open jobs at a glance. If you want to know whether a salary offer fits the industry, you'll find the official median salaries by industry in our post on salaries in Zürich. And if you work in nursing, medicine or another hospital job, you'll find all open jobs in the sector together under healthcare.

The next figures come in spring 2027, when the canton, the city, the hospitals and the universities publish their reports for 2026. We'll update this ranking then.