Four layers that must not be merged
Commentary on the Lex Koller since April 2026 has tended to compress four distinct things into a single narrative: the law that is actually in force, the preliminary draft placed in consultation, the positions expressed by cantons, parties and organisations in that consultation, and the separate parliamentary motion running alongside. They have entirely different legal weight, and an investor who treats them as one will either over-react to a draft that may not survive or under-react to a political direction that is unusually consistent.
The law in force is the Federal Act on the Acquisition of Real Estate by Persons Abroad, still commonly called the Lex Koller. It has not changed. Every acquisition being contemplated today is governed by it, and by the cantonal implementing legislation and practice of the canton in which the property is located.
The preliminary draft is a Vorentwurf — an avant-projet. It was opened for consultation on 15 April 2026 and the consultation closed on 15 July 2026. A preliminary draft has no legal force whatever. It does not bind the Federal Council, which will normally revise it in the light of the consultation before adopting a dispatch to Parliament, and it does not bind Parliament, which may amend or reject whatever it receives.
The consultation record is evidence, not law. Its value to an investor is predictive: it shows which elements of the draft attracted concentrated, technically argued opposition from the very authorities who would have to enforce them, and which attracted only diffuse or ideological objection. Finally, TCC analysis is analysis, and is identified as such throughout this Insight.
Where the revision comes from
The revision is not a free-standing housing-policy initiative. On 29 January 2025 the Federal Council instructed the Federal Department of Justice and Police to prepare a consultation draft tightening the Act, as part of the accompanying measures adopted in the context of the popular initiative on limiting Swiss population growth, which the Federal Council recommended rejecting. The revision is therefore, in its political genesis, an answer offered to a broader anxiety about immigration, density and housing supply rather than a technical correction of the real-estate regime.
This matters for how the proposals should be read. Measures designed as a political response to a pressure that is only loosely connected to their subject matter are structurally vulnerable at the point where the legislature asks what each measure will actually achieve. Several cantonal and party submissions did precisely that, and the answers were not favourable to the more expansive parts of the draft.
The Federal Council's own framing was notably modest in tone: it presented the package essentially as a return to the original purpose of the legislation, rather than as a new restriction. That framing is itself an argument, and one that becomes harder to sustain in respect of the elements that would reverse liberalisations adopted deliberately, in full knowledge of their effects, between 1997 and 2005.
The regime currently in force
The Act subjects the acquisition of real estate in Switzerland by "persons abroad" to authorisation by the canton in which the property is situated, unless a statutory exception applies. The category of persons abroad captures foreign nationals without qualifying Swiss residence status, entities with their seat abroad, and Swiss entities that are in fact economically dominated from abroad. Enforcement is decentralised: there is no federal permit authority, and cantonal practice on characterisation, evidence and conditions is a material variable in any transaction.
Nationals of European Union and EFTA states who are resident in Switzerland are, for the purposes of this regime, treated in substance as Swiss residents by reason of the Agreement on the Free Movement of Persons, and are not caught by the authorisation requirement. That privilege sits on an international commitment and is not touched by the 2026 draft, which addresses only third-country nationals — a point frequently lost in general reporting.
Three further features of the law in force define the space in which the draft operates. First, a person abroad who holds a valid Swiss residence permit may today acquire a dwelling for use as their actual principal residence without authorisation, whatever their nationality; this exception dates from the liberalisation of 1997. Second, real estate acquired for commercial or business use has since the same liberalisation been exempt from authorisation without restriction, including where it is acquired purely as an investment and then let. Third, holiday homes and units in aparthotels remain inside the authorisation regime and are subject to annual cantonal quotas set by the Federal Council, within tourist localities designated by cantonal law, with unused units capable of being carried forward to the following year.
A fourth feature is the one most likely to be overlooked, and it is the technical hinge of part of the draft: under current practice, a resale of a quota-authorised holiday home from one person abroad to another does not consume a fresh unit of the cantonal quota. The stock of foreign-held holiday homes therefore circulates within the foreign buyer pool without further quota consumption.
Collective vehicles as the law stands
Shares in stock-exchange-listed Swiss residential real-estate companies, and units in real-estate funds and real-estate SICAVs whose units are regularly traded on the market, are outside the authorisation regime. The legal rationale is structural rather than indulgent: the owner of the land is the Swiss fund or Swiss company, and the acquisition of a listed share or a traded unit creates neither ownership of nor a real right over Swiss soil. The Act's stated purpose — preventing foreign domination of domestic land — is not engaged by a security that confers no interest in the land itself.
That exemption is not an accident of drafting. It reflects successive deliberate decisions, consolidated in the liberalisations of 1998 and 2005, to allow Swiss listed real-estate vehicles and Swiss-regulated collective investment schemes to raise capital on international markets. A very substantial part of the institutional capitalisation of Swiss residential real estate depends on it.
TCC analysis: this is the point at which the draft moves from restricting who may own Swiss land to restricting who may hold a Swiss financial instrument, and the two are not governed by the same logic. Any measure in this area has to answer a question the draft does not obviously answer — how a prohibition on foreign holdings in a listed vehicle increases the supply of housing, as opposed to reducing the capital available to build it.
Status of the text
On 15 April 2026 the Federal Council opened the consultation and published, alongside the preliminary draft, an explanatory report and a regulatory impact assessment. The consultation closed on 15 July 2026, and on 27 July 2026 the Federal Office of Justice published the submissions received in four bundles covering cantons and municipalities, political parties, and organisations and private parties.
As at 14 September 2026 no consultation results report and no dispatch to Parliament had been published in the official dossier. The measures described in this Part are therefore proposals under consideration. They are set out here because their content defines the risk that a long-horizon investor is being asked to price — not because any of them currently applies.
Third-country nationals and the principal residence
The draft would withdraw, for third-country nationals, the current exemption permitting a resident permit holder to acquire their actual principal residence without authorisation. Such an acquisition would newly require cantonal authorisation. The category is defined by nationality rather than by residence: a non-EU/EFTA national lawfully resident and taxed in Switzerland would be inside the new requirement, while an EU national in the same factual position would remain outside it.
The draft couples this with a disposal obligation. Where the owner ceases to reside in Switzerland, the property would have to be sold within two years of departure. This is the element with the most direct consequences for individual mobility, because it converts a decision to leave Switzerland into a forced disposal within a fixed window — irrespective of the state of the market at that moment, of the owner's reasons for leaving, or of an intention to return.
TCC analysis: for internationally mobile executives, entrepreneurs and family principals from third countries, this is the provision that changes the calculus of buying rather than renting during a Swiss assignment. It should be noted precisely, however, that the constraint bites only on departure and only on third-country nationals, and that the regulatory impact assessment relied on in the consultation put the nationwide volume of relevant purchases at roughly one thousand per year — a figure that several cantons used to argue that the measure cannot materially affect the housing market it is meant to address.
Commercial property: own-use versus pure investment
Under the draft, acquisition of commercial property by a person abroad would remain free of authorisation where the acquirer itself operates the business conducted on the premises. Acquisition as a pure investment — to let or lease the property to others — would cease to be exempt and would in principle be prohibited.
This is a genuine reversal. The 1997 liberalisation deliberately removed commercial real estate from the regime as a matter of economic freedom, with no distinction between owner-operators and investors. Reinstating the distinction requires the cantonal authorities to characterise, at the point of acquisition and thereafter, whether a building is used by its owner or let to third parties.
The practical difficulty is that modern commercial assets rarely sit cleanly on one side of that line. Mixed-use buildings, partial sub-letting, sale-and-leaseback arrangements, group companies occupying premises owned by a sister entity, logistics and data-centre assets held by specialised investors and operated under long leases, and hospitality assets held separately from the operating business are ordinary market structures. Each would require a characterisation, and the characterisation could change during the holding period.
TCC analysis: this measure has the widest reach of the entire draft in terms of transaction value, and the weakest connection to residential supply. It attracted concentrated, technically reasoned opposition in the consultation precisely because the authorities who would have to apply it identified the enforcement problem immediately. In our assessment it is the element least likely to survive in the form proposed.
Holiday homes, aparthotels and the quota mechanism
Two measures are proposed. The annual cantonal quotas for authorisations to acquire holiday homes and aparthotel units would be reduced. Separately, the authorisation requirement would be reintroduced for resales between persons abroad, so that a transfer from one foreign owner to another would newly consume a unit of the cantonal quota rather than passing outside it.
The second measure is, technically, the more consequential of the two even though it attracts less attention. It does not merely reduce the number of new foreign entries into the tourist housing stock; it reduces the liquidity of the existing foreign-held stock, because every exit now depends on the buyer obtaining a quota unit in a pool that is simultaneously being reduced. Combined, the two measures compress supply and demand within the same constrained channel.
The quota mechanism itself is decentralised and lumpy. The Federal Council allocates units canton by canton; cantons designate the tourist localities within which acquisitions may be authorised; municipalities may restrict further; and unused units may be carried forward. The consequence is that the practical effect of a reduction would differ sharply between cantons and between localities within the same canton, and would be felt first in the Alpine markets that depend on it.
TCC analysis: the holiday-home measures sit closest to the political core of the reform and are the most likely to survive in some form, but the resale trigger is the element that should be modelled by anyone currently holding a quota-authorised property as part of a medium-term exit plan. A change in the resale regime would affect the realisable value of the asset, not merely the conditions of its acquisition.
Listed residential real-estate companies, funds and SICAVs
The draft would in principle prevent persons abroad from acquiring shares in stock-exchange-listed Swiss residential real-estate companies, and units in real-estate funds and real-estate SICAVs that are regularly traded on the market. This reverses the exemptions consolidated in 1998 and 2005 and represents the most significant departure from the Act's original architecture.
The structural objections are serious and were raised in the consultation with supporting figures. Foreign holdings in the listed Swiss real-estate companies concerned represent a modest share of registered voting rights, so the measure's effect on control is limited. Its effect on capital access is not: enforcing a nationality filter on a freely traded security is either administratively impossible or requires transfer restrictions that reduce marketability, with the foreseeable responses being de-listing, migration to unlisted or foreign vehicles, and a loss of the transparency that listing itself provides.
There is also a doctrinal objection, made in cantonal submissions, that the measure conflicts with the purpose provision of the Act: the fund management company or the listed company is a Swiss legal entity and is the owner of the land, so a foreign investor holding a traded security acquires no interest in Swiss soil at all. Extending the Act to such holdings would, on that view, detach it from the interest it exists to protect.
TCC analysis: for institutional and family-office investors with Swiss real-estate exposure taken through listed vehicles or Swiss collective investment schemes, this is the element to monitor most closely, because its implementation mechanics — not its policy merits — determine whether existing positions could be affected. It is also, for the same reason, among the elements most exposed in the legislative process.
Hotel staff accommodation: the liberalising element
One component of the draft moves in the opposite direction. Implementing a motion adopted by Parliament on 25 September 2023, the draft would allow cantons to permit hotels operated by persons abroad to acquire accommodation for their staff without authorisation, subject to a requirement to resell within two years if the accommodation ceases to be used for that purpose.
This element enjoys broad support, including from cantons that oppose the package as a whole, and responds to a documented operational constraint in Alpine and resort hospitality. Its presence in the same vehicle as the restrictive measures is significant for the politics of the reform: it gives the Federal Council a component that is likely to survive even if much of the remainder does not, and it gives Parliament a reason to keep the revision alive rather than to reject it outright.
What the cantons said
The submissions published on 27 July 2026 show that the draft did not receive the reception a housing-policy measure might have been expected to receive. The most instructive category is the cantons, because they are neither an interest group nor a party: they are the authorities that would have to operate whatever is enacted.
The canton of Zug opposed the package as a whole while supporting the hotel staff accommodation element, and made four specific requests: abandon the reintroduction of authorisation for commercial property held as an investment, on the ground that it is a marginal issue unconnected to the housing shortage and creates an unworkable distinction between own-use and letting; abandon the disposal obligation for principal residences of third-country nationals, warning of circumvention through residence-by-investment programmes and corporate structures as well as of reciprocal treatment of Swiss nationals abroad; abandon the restriction on listed residential real-estate companies, warning of de-listing and of damage to large densification projects; and abandon the restriction on regularly traded fund and SICAV units as inconsistent with the purpose provision of the Act. The figure most often cited in the consultation for the capital-markets measure — that persons abroad hold around 6.5 per cent of the registered voting rights in the listed Swiss residential real-estate companies concerned — comes from the Federal Council's own regulatory impact assessment and was relied on by industry respondents; we have not independently verified the precise figures used in Zug's own submission or the nationwide volume of principal-residence purchases affected, and we do not present those specific numbers as confirmed.
That submission is worth reading in full by anyone exposed to the reform, because it is an enforcement authority explaining, measure by measure, why it does not believe the measures will work. History supports the caution: a comparable tightening draft placed in consultation in 2017 was abandoned by the Federal Council itself in June 2018 after an unfavourable consultation, and a 2021 National Council motion to revive it was rejected by the Council of States in March 2022 by 26 votes to 11 with 3 abstentions — a point of considerable predictive value.
TCC analysis: the cantonal objections are of a particular kind. They are not objections of principle to regulating foreign acquisition; they are objections of feasibility, proportionality and enforcement cost, supported by the Federal Council's own impact assessment. Objections of that kind tend to survive the political process better than objections of principle, because they can be adopted by legislators who are otherwise sympathetic to the policy.
Parties, and the shape of the coalition
The party submissions divide along a line that does not map neatly onto the usual left-right axis of housing policy. Die Mitte rejected the draft, sharing the concern about housing pressure but opposing the reintroduction of authorisation for commercial property, the restriction on listed companies, funds and SICAVs, and the new authorisation requirement for third-country nationals actually resident in Switzerland, while acknowledging the tension in individual tourist localities. The Green Liberals identified a substantial need for clarification as to how the draft would in fact relieve the housing market. The Swiss People's Party, the Social Democrats and the Greens, from more than one direction, support tightening — the first two chiefly on grounds of foreign acquisition of Swiss assets and institutional ownership of rental housing respectively, with the Greens aligning with the Social Democrats on the capital-markets measures. FDP.The Liberals, together with Die Mitte, opposed the package, arguing that a shortage of rental and owner-occupied housing cannot credibly be addressed by restricting foreign acquisition.
Tenant organisations argued in favour of the reform in August 2026, relying on the growth of institutional ownership of Swiss rental housing over the past two decades and on the scale of foreign capital inflow through listed vehicles since 2005.
TCC analysis: a reform opposed by the centre-right and supported by both poles is not a reform that fails; it is a reform that is reshaped. The coalition that exists is sufficient to keep a restrictive core alive, and insufficient to carry the technically contested elements. That is the single most useful structural conclusion an investor can draw from the consultation record.
Motion 24.3961 and the parliamentary signal
Running alongside the Federal Council's own draft is a parliamentary motion submitted on 23 September 2024 by National Councillor Thomas Aeschi, entitled "Tightening of the Lex Koller". In its original form it asked the Federal Council to submit legislation reversing the liberalisations of the past four decades and returning, in substance, to the pre-1985 regime under the former Federal Act of 1961/1973 as last tightened in 1983 (commonly referred to as the "Lex Friedrich"), covering principal residences, second homes, holiday homes, apartment buildings and commercial property; to extend the tightened regime to all third-country nationals resident in Switzerland and to persons not resident in Switzerland, with a variant extending it to resident EU and EFTA nationals as well; and to require owners who cease to satisfy the new criteria to dispose of their Swiss property or holdings within a defined period, with progressively increasing annual fines for non-compliance.
The Federal Council proposed rejection of the motion, on grounds that a full return to the pre-1985 regime is not practicable given Switzerland's subsequent international commitments, including the free movement privileges of EU nationals; that it would conflict with the hotel staff accommodation motion already adopted; and that it doubted that the earlier liberalisations are the cause of present housing-market tightness.
On 18 August 2026 the Economic Affairs and Taxation Committee of the National Council recommended adoption of the motion's principal demand (point 1) by 14 votes to 8 with 1 abstention, according to the committee's official press release of that date; points 2 and 3 of the motion were withdrawn. The motion, as amended, is pending before the National Council in plenary; it had not been voted in plenary as at 14 September 2026.
TCC analysis: the narrowing of the motion is the signal, not the vote. The withdrawal of the disposal obligation and the penalty regime, while the core demand commands a committee majority, tells the market which elements command support and which do not. A plenary adoption would function as political pressure on the Federal Council to maintain a restrictive core in its dispatch; it would not itself change the law, and the motion and the draft remain separate instruments proceeding on separate tracks.
What is realistically capable of surviving
The following is TCC's assessment, not a prediction of outcome, and is offered because clients are entitled to a reasoned view rather than a list of possibilities.
Most likely to survive in substance: the hotel staff accommodation liberalisation, which is uncontested and implements an instruction Parliament has already given; and a tightening of the holiday-home regime in some form, because it is the element most directly connected to the political pressure behind the reform and the least disruptive to the wider economy.
Contested but not implausible: the authorisation requirement for principal residences of third-country nationals, stripped of the two-year disposal obligation. The disposal obligation is the element that drew the strongest cantonal criticism, that raises the clearest questions of proportionality and of reciprocity, and that the motion's own sponsor abandoned in committee.
Least likely to survive in the form proposed: the reintroduction of authorisation for commercial property held as an investment, and the restriction on foreign holdings in listed residential real-estate companies, funds and SICAVs. Both were opposed across cantons and centre-right parties on grounds of workability and capital-market effect rather than ideology, and both would require enforcement mechanisms whose costs have not been demonstrated to produce a corresponding housing benefit.
Timing: with the consultation closed in July 2026, the submissions published in July 2026 and no results report or dispatch published as at 14 September 2026, the realistic legislative horizon runs through parliamentary debate in the sessions that follow, with any entry into force some way beyond that. No investor should plan on the basis of an imminent change in the law; equally, no investor with a ten-year horizon should assume the regime will be unchanged throughout it.
Transaction and structuring implications now
The first implication is that today's transactions are governed by today's law, and that the current rules have been stable and are being applied normally. Deferring a well-conceived acquisition because of a preliminary draft is rarely the right response; accelerating a poorly conceived one for the same reason is worse.
The second is that transitional provisions are the variable that will determine whether existing positions are affected. The draft, as summarised in the official materials, contains specific two-year disposal deadlines in the two contexts described above; the detailed transitional regime for positions already held is contained in the draft text itself and was not independently verified article by article in our research, and we do not present it as settled. Any acquisition being planned on a long horizon should be documented in a way that makes the acquirer's status, the use of the property and the date of acquisition clearly evidenced, because grandfathering, where it is granted, is granted on evidence.
Third, characterisation discipline matters more than structure. For commercial assets, the distinction between own-use and letting is the pivot of one proposed measure, and the documentation of actual use — leases, occupancy, group arrangements, operating agreements in hospitality — is what a cantonal authority would examine. For collective vehicles, the question is what precisely is held: a listed share, a traded fund unit, a direct participation in a property-owning company, or a direct interest in land. These are already treated differently, and the draft would widen the difference.
Fourth, cantonal practice remains decisive. Because enforcement is cantonal, the same draft would produce different practical outcomes in different cantons, and current cantonal practice already varies on characterisation, on the designation of tourist localities and on conditions attached to authorisations. Transaction planning that ignores the cantonal layer is incomplete under current law and would be more so under the draft.
Fifth, structures designed to obscure the position of a person abroad are not a response to this reform. The authorisation regime looks to economic domination, not to formal title, and the political direction of both the draft and the motion is towards more scrutiny of indirect holdings rather than less. Clean characterisation, documented from the outset, is the only approach that improves with time.
The TCC perspective
The most useful thing an adviser can say about the Lex Koller revision in September 2026 is what is not true. It is not true that the rules have changed. It is not true that foreign buyers are now required to sell on leaving Switzerland. It is not true that holdings in Swiss listed real-estate vehicles are restricted. Each of these appears in the draft; none is law, and the consultation record indicates that at least two of them face serious institutional resistance.
What is true is that the direction of Swiss policy on foreign real-estate acquisition has hardened, that the hardening has cross-party components, and that a legislature which rejected comparable tightening in 2017 and in 2022 is now being asked again, in a materially different political climate and with the Federal Council itself, rather than a single parliamentarian, holding the pen. That combination warrants attention from anyone whose Swiss real-estate exposure is intended to last.
TCC Tax & Corporate Consultants SA follows this file at the level of the primary sources — the official dossier, the published submissions and the parliamentary record — and distinguishes in its advice between what is in force, what is proposed and what is merely possible. For clients with existing Swiss real-estate positions, with acquisitions in preparation or with exposure through Swiss collective vehicles, the appropriate response now is a documented review of characterisation, of cantonal position and of holding horizon, so that a decision taken when the dispatch is published is a confirmation rather than an improvisation.