A court-ordered fix to a two-tier tax
On June 23, 2026, Switzerland's Federal Council opened a formal consultation on a partial revision of the Radio and Television Ordinance (RTVV), rewriting how the country's roughly CHF 180-million-a-year corporate broadcasting fee is split among businesses. The trigger was explicit: the Federal Council's own explanatory materials cite the Bundesgericht's ruling of November 27, 2024, which found that the fee's degressive tariff structure "gegen das Gebot der Rechtsgleichheit verstösst" — violates the constitutional principle of equality before the law — and is therefore unconstitutional.
The corporate fee is collected by the Federal Tax Administration (ESTV) alongside routine VAT filings and funds SRG SSR and other Swiss broadcasters, regardless of whether a paying company owns a radio or a television. Every VAT-registered firm with global turnover above CHF 500,000 has owed it since a device-independent system replaced the old per-receiver levy on January 1, 2019.
What the old model actually got wrong
The equal-treatment concern here is real, and worth taking at face value before arguing with the fix. The Federal Administrative Court, ruling on November 17, 2023 in case A-4741/2021, documented just how skewed the prior 18-bracket degressive schedule had become: a company turning over CHF 5–20 million paid roughly 0.04% of revenue in fee, while a company turning over CHF 1 billion paid at most 0.004% — a tenfold gap in effective rate, falling hardest on mid-sized firms rather than the largest ones. That court also found the practice of letting groups of 30-plus companies pool into a single low fee category unlawful for lacking adequate legal basis. A fee schedule that taxes a mid-cap manufacturer at ten times the effective rate of a multinational is not a rounding error; it is exactly the kind of arbitrary line-drawing Article 8 of the Swiss constitution is meant to catch, and the courts were right to say so twice.
The fix: more brackets, identical total
The consultation draft replaces the 18-tier degressive schedule with 60 more finely graduated, mildly progressive revenue tiers. Under the new model, businesses with turnover above roughly CHF 111 million will pay more than they do today, while small and mid-sized firms see their share fall. Separately — bundled into the same ordinance revision but running on its own timeline — the minimum turnover that triggers liability at all rises from CHF 500,000 to CHF 1.2 million starting January 1, 2027, which the Federal Council's own materials describe as narrowing the liable population from roughly one in three VAT-registered companies to roughly one in five. The new tariff table is due to take effect January 1, 2028, and the consultation itself stays open until October 27, 2026 for cantons, parties, and business associations to weigh in.
Crucially, the Federal Council has fixed the total revenue target at approximately CHF 180 million a year, unchanged. This is not a tax cut for business as a whole — it is a reallocation exercise, designed to survive judicial review by smoothing the curve rather than by asking whether the curve should exist in this shape at all.
The question the consultation doesn't ask
Here is where the reform, while legally sound, is also too modest. The corporate broadcasting fee is not a user fee — it applies whether or not a firm ever tunes in — and it is not sized to the actual cost of public broadcasting; it is sized to whatever revenue target the Federal Council legislates, then apportioned by turnover bracket after the fact. That makes it functionally a ring-fenced turnover tax wearing a media-funding label, and the 2026 revision doesn't touch that structure — it just makes the apportionment formula defensible in court. A genuinely proportionate approach would ask whether financing public broadcasting through a mandatory, revenue-indexed levy on every mid-sized and large company in the country — divorced from consumption, benefit, or ability to opt out — is still the right instrument in 2026, rather than simply re-slicing who inside that levy pays what.
The raised CHF 1.2 million liability floor is a genuine, welcome improvement: it removes a real slice of small businesses from the compliance net entirely, which is the correct direction of travel and deserves credit on its own terms. But the headline change — 60 brackets instead of 18, weighted more heavily against firms clearing CHF 111 million — solves the narrow legal problem the courts identified (arbitrary, unequal treatment within the fee) while leaving the larger policy question (whether growing companies should fund state media in proportion to size, unrelated to use) completely unexamined. For a country whose broader media-funding debate has proven politically live, that is a missed opportunity to have the substantive conversation rather than the compliance-driven one.
Businesses, cantons, and industry associations have until October 27, 2026 to respond to the consultation before the Federal Council finalizes the ordinance for its planned January 1, 2028 entry into force.