One in 10 struggling financially in Switzerland: officials

Eight percent of people in Switzerland, one of the richest countries in the world, were living below the official poverty line in 2023, the Federal statistics Office (BFS) said on Monday.

One in 10 struggled to make ends meet.

Poverty mainly affected single people, one-parent families with under-age children, low-skilled individuals, households where no-one had gainful employment and foreigners, the BFS said.

A total 10.1 percent of people in the small Alpine nation "struggled to make ends meet" in 2023, the statistics office said, noting that the share of the population having difficulty paying essential bills had risen to pre-Covid pandemic levels.

After a dip during the pandemic, the number of households with at least two types of payment in arrears increased from 4.8 percent in 2022 to 6.3 percent in 2023, inching back up towards the 7.0 percent registered in 2019.

Late payments "most often" concerned taxes and health insurance, the BFS said.

The poverty line is the minimum level of income deemed to be sufficient to pay for essential items and services such as food, clothes, hygiene products, transport, rents and utilities.

In Switzerland, that meant around 708,000 people were living on a monthly income of fewer than 2,315 Swiss francs ($2,630).

For a household comprising two adults and two children, the Swiss poverty threshold was 4,051 francs in 2023.

The 2023 subsistence levels were higher than in previous years to take account of a rise in inflation and in rents, the BFS said.

The official poverty limit in Switzerland is significantly above that of most other European countries, however, due to the fact that the cost of living is markedly higher too.

Although a section of the population faced "economic hardship", people in Switzerland continued to have a higher average disposable income that in any other European country except Austria, Luxembourg and Norway.