Basel-Stadt

Basel-Stadt is a city canton of 204,157 residents on the Rhine, where Switzerland borders France and Germany. It counts 201,823 jobs, almost as many as it has residents, and produced GDP of CHF 41.2 billion in 2022, 5.2% of the Swiss total. At CHF 209,782, GDP per head is the highest of the 26 cantons, a figure lifted by the many people who commute into the city from Basel-Landschaft, Germany and France. Real growth in 2022 was only 1.6%, however, and unemployment of 4.5% in August 2026 was the third-highest in Switzerland.

Basel is the headquarters of the Swiss pharmaceutical industry. Chemicals and pharmaceuticals employ 17,595 people, 8.7% of all jobs and 6.1 times the Swiss share, the highest concentration of any canton, although employment in the sector fell by 4.8% between 2019 and 2024. Novartis and Roche have their head offices in the city, as do the manufacturing partner Lonza, the dental-implant maker Straumann and the insurer Helvetia Baloise. Health and social care (18.0%) and legal, consulting, engineering and R&D services (11.6%) are the largest employers after pharma, and finance is above average at 1.3 times. As a city canton, it has the lowest job shares in construction and in wholesale and retail trade of any canton.

Basel-Stadt taxes very large profits at a higher rate, introduced in connection with the global minimum tax. KPMG puts the maximum effective corporate tax rate at 14.53% for 2026 (2025: 13.04%); profits up to CHF 50 million are taxed at 13.04%. The top income tax rate is 39.75%. The median gross monthly wage in Northwestern Switzerland was CHF 7,156 in 2024.