← Home · 31 March 2026

What I Learned Parsing 108 Pages of Swiss Bank Price Lists

So you don't have to.

I just spent a weekend reading the retail price lists of six Swiss and Liechtenstein banks — ZKB, PostFinance, Migros Bank, UBS, Raiffeisen, and LGT — cover to cover. That's 108 pages of PDFs, 128 products, and 349 individual fee line items, now sitting in a tidy SQLite database.

Here's what I found. Some of it is useful. Some of it is baffling. All of it is real.

The things all banks agree on

Domestic payments via e-banking are free. Every single bank. Zero francs. This is the one thing the Swiss banking industry has collectively decided should cost nothing. It's like water at a restaurant — you'd cause a riot if you charged for it.

E-banking itself is free everywhere too. No monthly fee, no activation fee, no “digital convenience surcharge.” In 2026, charging for online access would be like charging for electricity at the ATM.

Account opening and closing: free across the board (with one notable exception — Raiffeisen charges CHF 50 to open a Mieterkautionssparkonto, which feels like a tax on moving apartments).

Every bank offers some version of: Privatkonto, Sparkonto, Debitkarte, Kreditkarte, 3a, Freizügigkeit. The vocabulary is nearly identical. The prices, however, are not.

The things that make comparison a nightmare

Everyone structures their prices differently

ZKB gives you a clean product-per-page layout. PostFinance leads with packages and buries individual product pricing deep in the document. UBS has three different product lines (key4 banking, UBS me, UBS me banking) that all contain the same underlying products at different prices. Migros Bank uses a giant matrix with 8 account types across two spreads.

LGT, being a private bank, doesn't even list credit card prices — they just say “we'll arrange Visa or Mastercard for you, see the card company's own price list.” Very genteel.

The same product costs different amounts depending on context

A UBS Privatkonto costs:

• CHF 0/month inside key4 banking
• CHF 3/month standalone with “Standard” (digital documents)
• CHF 7/month standalone with “Traditional” (paper documents)
• CHF 5/month standalone without enough assets
• CHF 0/month if you have CHF 10,000+ in total assets or a mortgage

That's five different prices for the same account. Good luck putting that in a comparison table.

Member vs. non-member pricing

Raiffeisen — being a cooperative — has a parallel universe of pricing for members. Members get free account management (vs. CHF 60/year), free debit card in the first year, 12 free instant payments, 12 free ATM withdrawals at other banks. The savings are real, but it means every fee table has to be read twice.

Packages vs. a la carte vs. hybrid

• ZKB: Packages (inklusiv Silber/Gold/Platin) but also individual products
• PostFinance: Package-first (Smart, SmartPlus), you basically must pick one
• UBS: Three overlapping product lines, modular add-ons, segment-dependent pricing
• Migros Bank: No packages at all. Everything individual.
• Raiffeisen: No packages, but member status acts like a hidden discount tier
• LGT: No packages, no tiers, just straightforward per-service pricing

The surprising bits

Debit cards aren't always free

I assumed debit cards were free everywhere in 2026. Wrong.

Raiffeisen and LGT both charge CHF 50/year for a debit card. Raiffeisen waives the first year for members, which softens the blow, but still — in a world where neobanks throw cards at you for free, CHF 50 feels anachronistic.

The FX markup gap is wider than you'd think

When you pay in a foreign currency with your debit card:

ZKB's 1.25% with a cap of CHF 1.50 per transaction is remarkable. Buy a CHF 500 hotel room abroad and you pay CHF 1.50 in FX fees, not CHF 6.25. That cap is genuinely unusual and genuinely good.

UBS at 2% is the most expensive of the lot. For frequent travelers, that adds up fast.

UBS has subscription-based FX pricing

UBS key4 FX lets you pay a monthly fee to reduce your FX spread:

• Basic: CHF 2/month → 1.2% spread
• Standard: CHF 5/month → 0.8% spread
• Premium: CHF 10/month → 0.4% spread

This is the Netflix model applied to currency conversion. I've never seen another Swiss retail bank do this. It's clever if you transfer money internationally regularly, but it's also the kind of thing that makes comparison spreadsheets cry.

Credit card Platinum pricing is wild

ZKB and UBS charge roughly CHF 500/year for a Platinum card. PostFinance undercuts them by nearly half. Of course, the benefits differ (UBS Platinum includes Reiseschutz Plus, concierge, lounge access), but the price gap is striking.

Meanwhile, Migros Bank offers a “Kreditkarte Visa Free” that costs literally CHF 0/year. No annual fee. Zero. The catch? No fancy insurance, no lounge access, just a credit card that works. Respect.

The “please don't forget about us” fees

Every bank has a fee for dormant or contactless accounts:

PostFinance wins the “most aggressive reminder” award at CHF 320/year. The idea is: if you disappear and leave money behind, the bank will slowly eat it. ZKB at least gives you 12 months free after a death before the fee kicks in, which is... considerate?

The foreigner tax

Every bank charges extra if you live abroad:

UBS has the longest list of waiver conditions I've ever seen — a full paragraph of “this fee doesn't apply if...” covering everything from having a mortgage to having an investment solution to being a new customer to having a salary account. It reads like a legal document that's trying very hard to not charge you.

LGT charges per booking

LGT is the only bank that charges CHF 0.30 per individual transaction (Buchungsspesen) plus a 0.10% turnover commission on debits. This is a private banking fee model — they don't want retail customers making lots of small payments. The quarterly account fee of CHF 25 (or CHF 120 for international clients) reinforces this. LGT is not trying to be your everyday bank; they're trying to manage your wealth while you quietly leave it alone.

LGT's FX spread tiers go to CHF 5 million

Most banks have FX pricing that tops out at “large amounts” with vague language. LGT publishes seven explicit tiers, from 1.50% (under CHF 100k) down to 0.10% (above CHF 5 million). This is a bank where “I'd like to convert five million francs” is a normal Tuesday.

The strange bits

Paper is the new luxury

UBS charges CHF 5/month if you want paper documents. PostFinance charges CHF 5/month for “Option Papier.” ZKB charges up to CHF 1.20 per letter.

We've reached the point where receiving physical mail from your bank is a premium feature. Your grandfather's monthly bank statement is now a subscription service.

QR-Rechnungen at PostFinance are priced by amount

Depositing cash at a PostFinance counter via QR-Rechnung costs between CHF 1.20 (up to CHF 50) and CHF 3.95 (up to CHF 10,000). Beyond that, it's CHF 1.25 per additional CHF 10,000. This is the most granular cash deposit fee schedule I've encountered. They really, really want you to use e-banking.

Raiffeisen's YoungMember gets a free Mastercard but no Visa

For young customers at Raiffeisen, the Prepaid Mastercard is free but the Prepaid Visa Card... doesn't exist. The footnote says “Visa Card: –”. Presumably the Visa deal didn't extend to the youth segment. Brand negotiations at work.

UBS has a “numbered account” fee

CHF 480 per quarter — CHF 1,920 per year — for a Nummernbeziehung (numbered account). The fact that this is still on the price list in 2026 tells you something about the clientele. James Bond's banking habits remain commercially relevant.

What would make this easier

After parsing all six banks, here's my wishlist:

1. Standardized fee identifiers. If every bank called their domestic transfer fee transfer_domestic instead of “Einzelzahlung,” “Vergütungsauftrag,” “Zahlungsauftrag,” and “Inlandzahlung,” we could compare in seconds.
2. Machine-readable price lists. One bank publishing their fees as JSON or CSV would start a revolution. Currently it's all PDFs — beautiful, branded, completely unusable by software.
3. One pricing model. The mix of monthly, quarterly, annual, per-transaction, and percentage-based fees makes apples-to-apples comparison genuinely hard. What costs more: CHF 3/month or CHF 60/year with 12 free transactions? Depends on how many transactions you make. That's the point, of course.
4. Fewer footnotes. The UBS price list has footnotes with footnotes. One page had 15 superscript numbers. PostFinance's package page has 10 footnotes that fundamentally change the pricing. The fine print isn't fine — it's the actual product.

The bottom line

Swiss banks are remarkably similar in what they offer and remarkably different in how they price it. The basic product vocabulary is shared — Privatkonto, Sparkonto, Visa Debit, Mastercard Gold — but the packaging, bundling, tiering, and conditional pricing creates a complexity that no human comparison table can fully capture.

That's why we built a database. 128 products. 349 fees. 6 banks. One SELECT statement.

The data is open, the schema is on GitHub, and an AI agent can answer “which bank is cheapest for a 25-year-old who travels frequently” in about 5 milliseconds. Which is roughly 107 pages faster than reading the PDFs yourself.

Data source: Official retail price lists from ZKB, PostFinance, Migros Bank, UBS, Raiffeisenbank Rigi, and LGT Bank. Valid as of Q1 2026. All prices in CHF unless noted. Your mileage may vary. Your bank's footnotes definitely will.