UVG and daily sickness benefits
Accident and daily sickness benefit insurance for your staff.
Why this matters
If an employee is off sick for months, the business must continue paying her salary for a certain time – while also financing a replacement. Without daily sickness allowance insurance, the company carries both alone, and in a small team a single long-term absence can eat up the year’s result. Then there is the human conflict: when statutory salary continuation ends after a few weeks, the employer faces the choice of paying on out of goodwill or cutting a sick employee’s pay. A daily allowance solution takes exactly this harshness out of the situation.
The Swiss framework is split in two: accident insurance under the UVG is compulsory for all employees – occupational accidents are covered from the first hour of work, non-occupational accidents from a workload of eight hours per week with the same employer. The business pays the premium for occupational accidents; the premium for non-occupational accidents may be deducted from employees’ salaries. Daily sickness allowance, by contrast, is in principle voluntary, though many collective employment agreements prescribe it – and in practice it is part of the basic kit for any business with staff, because illness leads to long absences far more often than accidents do.
What you get out of it
Your staff are insured for accident and illness in line with the law.
Premiums compared — the same benefits cost very different amounts depending on the provider.
Salary continuation properly arranged, disputes with employees avoided.
What we take care of for you
- Comparison of UVG, supplementary UVG and daily sickness benefits
- Aligning waiting periods with your statutory duty to continue paying salaries
- Claims and absence reports (including SUNET) handled through us
- Annual payroll declarations under control
The advice is free for you — we are remunerated by the insurance companies through brokerage commissions and will disclose these on request.
Tips from our consultations
What we tell our clients time and again – free of charge, even before the first meeting.
The longer the waiting period until the first daily allowance, the lower the premium. Align the period with your salary continuation duty: if the business can bridge thirty or sixty days itself, you save year after year – without your employees feeling any gap.
If your business is subject to a collective employment agreement, it frequently prescribes a daily sickness allowance with specific benefits and premium splits. A policy that misses these requirements does not protect you from back-claims. Have the cover checked against the GAV before you sign.
Late sickness reports are among the most common causes of trouble when benefits are claimed – in the worst case, the insurer reduces them. Define internally who reports absences from which day, and put the process in writing. A clean reporting process costs nothing and works.
Your premiums are heavily based on past claims. A business with few absences holds good cards for lower rates – but only if you know your own record and put it on the table when comparing. Request the claims statistics from your insurer every year.