Weekly Resident in St. Gallen: How to Register, Deregister and What It Really Costs

Weekly residence means: you work or study in St. Gallen and sleep here during the week, but your centre of life stays elsewhere. At the weekend you travel back. In registration terms, St. Gallen is then your secondary residence, while your main residence stays where it is.

The City of St. Gallen requires you to register for this. The deadline is set in Art. 6 of the act on residence and settlement (sGS 453.1) and is 14 days from arrival. Register later and you risk a fine: the city states up to 200 francs.

One point stands out immediately, and it is often missed:

• The online procedure is open only to people whose main residence is in Switzerland. The city states this without any leeway. Anyone whose main residence is abroad cannot register as a weekly resident this way. Which route applies instead is not published on that page. There is no way around asking the residents' services directly.

There are two separate form tracks, one for students at the University of St. Gallen, the PH or FH OST, and one for employed people. The process and the fee are identical; only one supporting document differs.

The most important difference from an ordinary registration sits in a single sentence on the city's website, and it changes the whole schedule:

Registering a secondary residence is an application, not a notification. You submit something that is reviewed. The registration is only valid once the residents' services confirm it to you.

What that means in practice:

• Do not assume you tick a box online on moving day and are done.
• The 14-day deadline runs from your arrival, not from the confirmation. Anyone who waits until the last day and then gets a query has a problem.
• Gather the documents before you move in. Above all the certificate of origin, which you cannot obtain in St. Gallen.

Employed people additionally have to explain why they are claiming weekly residence at all. The city explicitly requires a statement for this. That is not a formality but the core of the review: anyone without a credible centre of life outside St. Gallen is not a weekly resident but someone moving in.

The city lists these documents:

• Proof of where you live. A rental contract, a sublease contract, a housing confirmation from the person providing the accommodation, or proof of ownership are accepted.
• Proof of why you are here. A matriculation confirmation from the school for students, an employment contract for employed people.
• The certificate of origin (Heimatausweis).

The certificate of origin is where most schedules fall apart. You do not get it in St. Gallen but from your main-residence municipality. Depending on the municipality that works online, by post or only at the counter, and it takes time. Anyone who moves in on Monday, wants to register on Tuesday and only then orders the certificate easily loses a week.

First action, before you even sign the rental contract: order the certificate of origin from your home municipality.

One gap worth knowing: the City of St. Gallen does not publish how long the certificate of origin is valid or what happens when it expires. Other municipalities state one to two years. That cannot be transferred to St. Gallen, which is why no figure appears here. When in doubt, ask the residents' services.

What often goes wrong with the housing proof: an informal sublease without proper details, or a WhatsApp promise instead of a document. The proof has to be able to evidence the housing situation. Anyone taking a room through a platform without receiving a proper contract finds out exactly here.

Registering a secondary residence costs money. The city refers to the fee schedule of the residents' services (SRS 416.3). The two online forms state the amount concretely:

50 francs per application, payable online. The same for students and employed people.

And the sentence that really matters:

The costs are not refunded if the application is rejected.

That is why the statement from employed applicants should be careful and why the documents have to be complete. A rejected application costs 50 francs and delivers nothing.

There is also a piece of misinformation circulating that you may encounter: automatically generated summaries sometimes claim the registration is free of charge. That is wrong. The city's own forms are authoritative, and they state 50 francs.

What the deregistration costs, the city does not say. It states no amount for deregistration, but nor does it write anywhere that it is free. So we claim neither.

Deregistration is the part almost nobody explains, and in St. Gallen it works differently from registration.

There is no online form for deregistration. Anyone registered as a secondary resident deregisters by e-mail to the residents' services.

The city requires three details in that e-mail:

• your personal details,
• the exact date of departure,
• your new address, meaning the address of your main residence.

On the departure date there is a clarification that makes all the difference in practice: what is meant is the date of the physical move-out, not the end of the tenancy. Those are two different dates, and most people instinctively give the wrong one.

An example. You move out on 20 September, but the rental contract runs until 31 October as agreed. The date to give is 20 September. Anyone reporting 31 October instead stays registered in St. Gallen six weeks longer than they actually lived here. That can trigger knock-on costs for taxes, for Serafe household allocation and for registering at the next location.

Two points the city does not publish, and we do not invent them:

• There is no explicit deadline for deregistration in the deregistration section. The 14 days are expressly tied to arrival in the text. Whether the same deadline also applies to departure cannot be deduced with certainty from the published text.
• What happens to the deposited certificate of origin after deregistration is stated nowhere.

For both, the information from the residents' services is authoritative. To be safe: deregister early and have the deregistration confirmed in writing.

Careful, do not confuse the two: anyone whose main residence is in St. Gallen and who moves away within Switzerland reports this via eUmzug. That does not apply to weekly residence in a secondary residence, where the route is by e-mail.

This is where the biggest misunderstanding around weekly residence sits, and it can get expensive.

Registering as a weekly resident does not decide your tax liability. The St. Gallen tax manual is unambiguous here: what counts are the actual circumstances, not the formal registration. Depositing your papers is only an indication and is not decisive on its own.

What follows from that depends heavily on your situation:

Single and in employment. Here the tax manual even states a natural presumption that the main tax domicile is at the place of work, so in St. Gallen. That presumption grows stronger once you have passed the age of 30 or have spent more than five years at the same place of work. It can be rebutted by regular, at least weekly, return to a place where you have close ties.

Married, returning regularly to the family. Here the opposite tends to apply: taxation is at the family's place of residence, not at the place of work. There is an exception for people in a management position.

Cohabiting at the place of work. Anyone running a joint household with a partner in St. Gallen has their main tax domicile here, despite weekly resident status.

Main residence abroad. Anyone working in Switzerland but living abroad is subject to withholding tax. The tax manual names weekly residents explicitly there.

This is not tax advice, and this article cannot assess your individual case. But the direction is clear enough to prompt the right question: anyone who is single, over 30 and has worked in St. Gallen for years should not assume that the weekly resident registration settles the tax question.

There is one point where the housing search and the administrative process interlock directly: without a housing proof that survives the review, there is no registration.

This is exactly where informal solutions fail. A room from a classified ad, agreed by handshake, without a contract, may be cheap. It is not enough for the application to the residents' services. And because the application costs 50 francs that are not refunded on rejection, that is not a theoretical risk.

What a usable proof delivers: it shows who lives where from when, and it is a document, not a promise.

At BoVita you get a furnished room at Stahlstrasse 3 in St. Gallen with a proper rental contract, issued so that the registration works with it. From CHF 620 per month, all-in: furnishing, utilities including communal electricity, high-speed internet and cleaning of the shared areas. The electricity you use in your own room and the Serafe fee are billed separately.

On the location: by bus it is 15 minutes to HSG and 12 minutes to FH OST. For weekly residents who are here during the week, that is exactly what counts, namely short journeys and no utility statement arriving a year later.

The order that saves time:

1. Order the certificate of origin from your main-residence municipality. First, not last.
2. Secure a room with a proper contract. Rental contract, sublease contract, housing confirmation from the accommodation provider or proof of ownership; nothing else is accepted.
3. Have the second proof ready: matriculation confirmation or employment contract.
4. As an employed person, prepare the statement: why does your centre of life remain outside St. Gallen?
5. Submit the application online, within 14 days of arrival, and pay the 50 francs.
6. Wait for the confirmation. Only then is the registration valid.
7. Assess your tax situation honestly, especially if you are single, over 30 or have been here for years.
8. Deregister by e-mail when you leave, using the date of the physical move-out, not the end of the contract.

The information given by the residents' services of the City of St. Gallen is always authoritative. This article explains the published rules and names the sources; it does not replace legal or tax advice.