Lex Koller Rules for Buying a Swiss Ski Property

Lex Koller is the reason a Swiss ski property purchase can be legally impossible in one commune and routine in the next. It is a federal authorisation regime administered canton by canton, and it decides whether a sale to a foreign buyer can proceed at all.

If you are still working out whether Switzerland suits you, our guide to Buying Ski Property in Switzerland for UK Non-Residents covers the ground rules, the resort landscape and the ownership costs. This article takes the layer below that: how the authorisation actually works, and what the permit does to you after completion.

What Lex Koller Is, and What It Is Not

Lex Koller is the informal name for the Federal Act of 16 December 1983 on the Acquisition of Immovable Property by Persons Abroad, known as the BewG in German and the LFAIE in French, SR 211.412.41.¹ It is applied through the Ordinance of 1 October 1984, the BewV or OAIE, SR 211.412.411.² Both are referred to here by their French short forms, LFAIE for the Act and OAIE for the Ordinance.

Authorisation is granted by the cantonal authority of the canton where the property lies, under art. 2 al. 1 and art. 15 al. 1 let. a LFAIE. The Federal Office of Justice (FOJ) publishes the governing guidance and can appeal a cantonal decision it considers wrong. That second point is what closed Zermatt to foreign buyers, and the Zermatt section below sets out how.

Lex Koller is regularly confused with Lex Weber, and the two do different jobs. Lex Koller controls who may acquire, by reference to nationality and domicile. Lex Weber controls how many second homes a commune may have, which is a planning cap on the stock itself rather than a test applied to the buyer.

A separate SnowOnly article on Lex Weber is in preparation. This one stays with the authorisation regime and does not cover the second-home cap.

Step One: Are You a Person Abroad?

The first question is about you, not the property. Two groups are caught by the authorisation regime under art. 5 al. 1 let. a and abis LFAIE and art. 2 OAIE: foreign nationals domiciled abroad, and foreign nationals domiciled in Switzerland who are neither European Union or European Free Trade Association (EU/EFTA) nationals nor holders of a valid C settlement permit. A United Kingdom (UK) resident buying an Alpine flat sits squarely in the first group.

Three groups are not caught. Swiss nationals, including dual nationals, wherever they are domiciled. EU/EFTA nationals with legal and effective domicile in Switzerland, and third-country nationals holding a valid C permit alongside effective Swiss domicile.

Effective domicile is where this test is won or lost. The FOJ applies the Swiss Civil Code definition at art. 23 and following: the place where the centre of your existence and personal relations lies, where you spend your free time, and where your family and social life sit.³ The guidance is explicit that a residence permit plus a communal registration certificate are not on their own sufficient, and that the burden of proving domicile falls on the buyer.

One counter-intuitive point is worth stating plainly. Having a Swiss spouse is irrelevant to this test. Domicile is assessed on where your life actually is, not on who you are married to.

Companies are caught on two separate grounds under art. 5 al. 1 let. b and c and art. 6 LFAIE. A company seated abroad is a person abroad even where it is Swiss-owned. A Swiss-seated company is caught if it is dominated by persons abroad, and dominance is presumed where persons abroad hold more than a third of the capital, more than a third of the voting rights, or have granted the company significant loans.

For a ski property, the company question usually resolves itself. Under art. 8 OAIE, holiday homes and aparthotel units may only be acquired by natural persons directly in their own name, so a company cannot hold one at all.

Trusts are genuinely unsettled and should be treated with care. Contributing a property to a trust is in principle subject to authorisation where a trustee or a beneficiary is a person abroad, and the FOJ notes several exceptions to that starting position. The same guidance states that there is no settled, uncontested practice in this area, so any trust structure needs specific Swiss legal advice on its own terms.

One point that often surprises buyers: owning Swiss property confers no right to a residence permit. The country guide covers the residency position in full.

Step Two: Is the Property in a Designated Tourist Place?

The second question is about the address. Under art. 9 al. 2 and 3 LFAIE, a person abroad may be authorised to acquire a holiday home or an apartment in an aparthotel, and the property has to lie in a place with a tourist vocation that the canton has designated. No designation, no authorisation, regardless of how obviously touristic the place looks.

The authorisation ground exists in 17 of the 26 cantons, according to the FOJ list. The five this article focuses on are the principal ski-property cantons: Valais, Graubünden, Ticino, Vaud and Bern. The ground also exists in twelve other cantons, some of which contain ski areas of their own, Andermatt in Uri among them, as the Andermatt section below sets out.

How a canton draws its map varies enormously. Ticino designates the whole cantonal territory as a tourist place under art. 2 al. 1 of its implementing act.⁴ That is a Lex Koller designation rather than a guarantee of availability, because communal planning rules on secondary residences still apply on top of it.

Vaud and Bern publish named lists, and Vaud's descends to individual parcels. Valais goes further again, opening a commune's named sectors or, where it names no sector, its whole building zone. Between them they show that eligibility is decided address by address rather than resort by resort.

On the Vaud list, Lausanne appears for aparthotel apartments only, and Puidoux appears only in the Signal sector, at nine named land-register parcels: RF 116, 117, 150, 196, 198, 199, 200, 201 and 3158.⁵ Two properties a few hundred metres apart can therefore sit on opposite sides of the line. An agent telling you that foreigners can buy in a given commune may be answering a different question from the one that decides your file.

Valais holds the largest cantonal quota, and it is also the canton whose map is hardest to read. Annexe 1 to the cantonal regulation on the acquisition of immovable property by persons abroad (the RAIE, RS-VS 211.410, in force since 1 January 2013) lists each open commune alongside the specific sectors within that commune which are open.⁶ Where a commune appears with no sector precision, its whole building zone is open, on the state of the building zones at 31 December 2014.

The named entries include Verbier, where the village itself is excluded, and Crans-Montana, where the open area is drawn above the 1,250 m altitude line. Nendaz and Siviez, Anzère, Thyon and Les Collons, Saas-Fee, Anniviers, Leukerbad and Bettmeralp all appear in the annexe. A Verbier address can therefore sit inside or outside the perimeter depending on which part of the resort it is in.

Sub-communal designation is why Valais does not publish a resort list a buyer can rely on. The canton directs buyers to a geoportal layer, "Zones vente aux étrangers", to check a specific parcel, and the Service du développement territorial issues the attestation confirming whether a property lies in a designated place.⁷ Ask for that attestation on the parcel number rather than on the resort name.

Bern's list sits in Anhang 1 to its cantonal implementing act. Grindelwald, Lauterbrunnen (which contains Wengen and Mürren), Saanen (which contains Gstaad), Adelboden and Lenk are all designated, and in any Bern commune not on that list a person abroad cannot acquire a holiday home at all.⁸

Designation is not the end of it. Art. 13 LFAIE allows cantons and tourist communes to impose their own restrictions on top of the federal regime. The FOJ names the available options: a total block in a locality, admitting only condominium acquisition (PPE in French, Stockwerkeigentum in German, the Swiss form of flat ownership) and only up to a set quota, capping the annual number of authorisations, or restricting the acquisition of dwellings already in foreign hands.

That article is the correct mechanism for explaining why a resort is described as closed, and it is where most of the folklore about Swiss ski resorts comes from.

Zermatt Is Closed. Klosters and St Moritz Are Not.

The commonly repeated claim is that Klosters, St Moritz and Zermatt are off-limit cantons. That statement contains two errors and one correct answer.

The first error is the label. All three are communes, not cantons. The second is the list: Klosters and St Moritz remain open to foreign buyers under Graubünden's own 2026 settings, subject to the property qualifying and to authorisation, as the next section sets out.

Zermatt is the correct part, and the reason is not price, prestige or scarcity of stock. Valais has never designated Zermatt as a tourist place for LFAIE purposes, on the reasoning that Zermatt does not need tourism promotion. Because the property has to lie in a canton-designated tourist place, no ordinary holiday-home authorisation under art. 9 al. 3 LFAIE can be granted there.

This was tested and settled. In judgment 2C_1082/2016 of 2 June 2017, the Federal Court upheld the FOJ's appeal against a Valais authorisation for the sale of an inherited Zermatt property from an Italian owner to a Dutch buyer.⁹ The court held that the canton's long-standing practice of permitting transfers of pre-Lex-Koller foreign-held property between foreign buyers outside designated places was unlawful.

The canton's own current law reads the same way. Zermatt appears nowhere in Annexe 1 to the RAIE, the regulation still in force that lists every designated place in Valais, so the position the Federal Court upheld in 2017 is the position on the canton's books today.

The practical consequence for a buyer is blunt. A foreign buyer can be authorised in St Moritz and in Klosters, but not in Zermatt: because Valais has never designated it, an ordinary holiday-home authorisation cannot be granted there, whatever the budget. Confirm the current designation of any commune you are considering with a Swiss notary before you make an offer.

Step Three: What Your Commune Allows

Graubünden publishes annual per-commune settings, and they are the clearest public example of art. 13 LFAIE in practice. The 2026 list comes from government decision RB 59/2026 of 3 February 2026, with the list state dated 8 January 2026, under art. 9 al. 3 BewG in conjunction with the cantonal implementing act.¹⁰

Three settings are published for each commune, and they move independently of one another. The first is the maximum percentage of a whole development, a Gesamtüberbauung, that may be sold to persons abroad in permits issued during 2026. The second is whether individual objects from Swiss sellers are allowed, and the third is whether resale between foreign buyers is allowed.

Two rows deserve attention. Sils i.E./Segl is a prime Engadine commune a few minutes from St Moritz, and it sits at 0% with no individual objects from Swiss sellers, while St Moritz sits at 100% for the development share, with individual objects and resale between foreign buyers both allowed. A buyer who has decided on the Upper Engadine, rather than on a specific commune within it, can find half the shortlist unavailable on paper.

Davos is the second. At 60%, no more than 60% of a development may be sold to persons abroad, so the foreign-buyer allocation in a single development can be used up. That shapes what a developer will offer to international buyers and when.

These settings are reviewed annually, so the current year's list is the only one that counts. Applications in Graubünden go through the Grundbuchinspektorat und Handelsregister Graubünden (GIHA), the cantonal land registry and commercial register inspectorate, in Chur.

Step Four: Is There Quota, and When Does It Actually Bind?

Each authorisation for a holiday home or an aparthotel unit is charged to the annual quota the Confederation allocates to the canton, under art. 11 LFAIE and art. 9 OAIE. The national annual maximum in current law is 1,500 units, distributed by Annexe 1 to the Ordinance.²

There are two significant exceptions to the charging rule. An acquisition is not charged to the quota where the seller had himself already obtained an authorisation for that same dwelling, under art. 9 al. 4 let. a LFAIE, though the acquisition still requires its own authorisation.¹¹ Quota units may also be allocated in advance to non-subject sellers as block permits, the autorisations de principe or Grundsatzbewilligungen, typically granted to developers.

The block-permit route explains how new-build serviced stock reaches foreign buyers in volume. Individual acquisitions under such a permit still need their own authorisation, but they are no longer charged to the cantonal quota. Ask the developer directly whether the development holds an advance block permit, and whether your specific unit still needs its own authorisation.

Unused units do not vanish immediately. Under art. 9 OAIE they carry into the following year, and by 31 October of that year the FOJ redistributes unused units to cantons that have exhausted their own allocation and have asked for more. A canton may not receive more than 50% above its annual quota this way, and units still unused at 31 December lapse.

The headline number is rarely the constraint that stops a purchase. Vaud's own official sheet records 134 of its 175 units for 2025 still unused as at 10 July 2026, and notes that the canton regularly requested additional units, up to a maximum of 87, but has had no additional allocation since 2010 because demand for holiday homes fell.¹² Actual use runs well below the headline allocations in most cantons.

That pattern is not confined to Vaud. Responding to the 2026 federal consultation, the Swiss Working Group for Mountain Regions opposed the proposed reduction of the quotas on the ground that they have not been exhausted for years.¹³ No national statistics on Lex Koller refusals are published, so the unused-quota position is the closest public measure of how hard the regime actually bites.

What binds in practice is local. The commune settings, the shape of the individual permit and the application calendar decide whether a specific transaction can be done in a specific window.

Securing a Quota Unit: the Application in Practice

Quota is better understood as a scheduling exercise than as a number. The sequence below is the general shape in the ski cantons, with the cantonal detail flagged where it applies.

Published decision standards are rare. Ticino's implementing act requires its commission to decide as a rule within 30 days of the file being complete, and separately allows the authority to give an applicant 30 days to cure an incomplete application before declaring it inadmissible.⁴ Bern publishes none, and Vaud works to sitting dates rather than to an elapsed-time target.

Valais declines to give a timescale at all, and says so on its own form. The canton states that in view of the insufficiency of the quota it gives no guarantee either that a quota unit will be obtained or as to how long obtaining one takes, and that it gives no information on the timing of a quota grant.¹⁴ That refusal is more useful to plan around than an estimate would be: the only fixed clock in Valais is the 30 days after the guarantee, and everything before it is open-ended.

One practical instruction is worth acting on early. Ask for the architect's net living area certificate. Brochure area and net habitable area are different measurements, and the second one is what the file is assessed on.

Step Five: Size Limits and the One-Home Rule

Art. 10 al. 2 and 3 OAIE set two thresholds.² Net habitable floor area, the Nettowohnfläche or surface nette de plancher habitable, as a rule may not exceed 200 m². For a holiday home not held in condominium, the total plot area as a rule may not exceed 1,000 m², so the plot cap does not bite on a flat.

What counts towards the 200 m² is defined, and buyers regularly get it wrong in both directions.

The phrase "as a rule" is doing real work in the Ordinance. The FOJ states that under settled practice, where an additional need is duly proven, up to 250 m² of net habitable area and 1,500 m² of plot may be authorised without difficulty, and that larger overruns are exceptionally possible.³ That is settled administrative practice and it confers no entitlement, so the additional need has to be evidenced in the file.

Art. 10 al. 4 OAIE adds a constraint that catches buyers who extend later. A subsequent additional acquisition, such as an adjoining unit, may only be made within the permitted area.

The one-home rule under art. 11 al. 1 OAIE aggregates the household. Where the buyer, their spouse, their registered partner or a child under 18 already owns a holiday home, an aparthotel unit or a secondary residence in Switzerland, authorisation can only be granted on condition that the first dwelling is disposed of before the new acquisition is entered in the land register.

The aggregation is narrower than most buyers assume. It covers spouse, registered partner and minor children, not a general family unit, and the age threshold is 18. This is why cantons require a signed declaration on the point, and why an existing Swiss property in a spouse's name is a question to raise with your notary before you offer.

What the Permit Restricts After Completion

Authorisation is not the end of Lex Koller's involvement with the property. Art. 11 OAIE allows the cantonal authority to attach charges to the permit, and one of them applies to almost every holiday home.

The distinction is between periodic letting and a permanent rental arrangement, not between a set number of weeks. A separate condition applies alongside that prohibition: the buyer has to remain able to use the dwelling himself at any time for the purpose relied on in the application. The two conditions are independent, so retaining personal use does not make a year-round letting arrangement lawful.

A different authorisation ground carries a stricter condition. Where a property is acquired as a secondary residence under art. 9 al. 1 let. c LFAIE, on the basis of close and protectable ties to the place, it may not be let to third parties at all, and it has to be disposed of within two years if the buyer stops using it as intended.

Lex Koller sets the ceiling on letting. Whether a particular short-let arrangement is lawful also depends on the property's use category and on communal rules. Rental Rules for Ski Property Owners covers short-let legality by use category.

Aparthotels, Business Premises and Managed Residences

Two legally distinct routes let a foreign buyer into serviced resort stock, and marketing material routinely collapses them into one. Keeping them apart is the whole point of this section.

The aparthotel route is a restriction on use, not freedom from Lex Koller. Buying into serviced stock as a way into a constrained resort means buying an obligation to hand your flat to the hotelier in high season, and art. 7 al. 2 OAIE attaches that obligation to the property rather than to you. The next owner inherits it, which also shapes who will buy it from you.

The business-premises exemption is read narrowly. Art. 3 OAIE excludes from the concept the commercial construction or letting of residential units that are not part of a hotel or an aparthotel, so hotel and aparthotel stock is not excluded from it. Staff housing is not covered under current law, on a 2021 Federal Court decision, which is precisely why the 2026 federal package proposes to ease that position.¹⁵

Residences at the Hard Rock Hotel Davos is a useful worked illustration of the managed-residence model. The developer markets the scheme as exempt from Lex Koller, and publishes commercial terms under which owners may use their apartment for up to eight weeks a year, the hotel lets it for the remainder, and the owner takes 60% of the rental income. Units are described as running from a 2.5-room, 65 m² net apartment to a 4.5-room, 113 m².¹⁶

Those terms are the developer's own, and they describe a hotel-operated asset with a rental obligation attached. Read alongside the two routes above, they show what the trade actually is: the flexibility a foreign buyer gains on entry is paid for in control over the property afterwards. No named development's Lex Koller status should be taken as settled from marketing material, so have the classification confirmed for the specific unit by your own Swiss lawyer before committing.

Andermatt is a genuinely exceptional case and should not be read across. A Federal Council dispensation covers the Andermatt tourism project perimeter, extended by a February 2021 decision to 31 December 2040, under which acquisition inside that perimeter is not restricted by Lex Koller.¹⁷ It is a project-specific federal dispensation with a defined boundary and an end date, not a general resort exemption.

Resale: Three Rules Buyers Confuse

Three separate rules govern what happens when a Swiss holiday home changes hands with a foreign buyer on one side of the deal. They point in different directions, and one of them is routinely reported backwards.

The third row is the correction that matters most. The widely repeated claim that a foreign buyer cannot resell a Swiss ski property for five years is the Valais rule stated backwards. The Conseil d'État's own explanation is that the period exists to deter speculation by non-subject owners before a resale to a person abroad may be authorised.¹⁸

None of this rules out a disposal restriction in an individual case. Art. 11 OAIE lets a cantonal authority attach charges to a particular permit, so the question to ask is what your own authorisation says.

A related point is often filed under Lex Koller and belongs elsewhere. Bern levies a property gains tax, the Grundstückgewinnsteuer, with a sliding surcharge on gains realised within roughly five years that falls as the holding period lengthens; confirm the current calculation for your own sale with a Swiss tax adviser.¹⁹ It applies to all sellers regardless of nationality, so it belongs with the tax position and not with the authorisation regime, and the tax depth sits in Tax Basics for Overseas Ski Property Owners.

Inherited property sits in a separate authorisation category again, which our article on Inheritance Tax and Succession Planning for Ski Property Buyers addresses alongside the cross-border succession position.

Where the Permit Sits in the Purchase, and What Happens If It Is Refused

The authorisation works as a suspensive condition on the deed, and the reason is a precise distinction in art. 26 LFAIE. The sequence below sets out what happens as the condition is met, and what follows if it is not.

How often any of this happens cannot be answered from published sources. No national series of Lex Koller refusals is published, and enforcement sits with the cantons under the FOJ's supervision, with no central register. The constraint a buyer is likely to meet is quota timing and the commune's own settings, not a decision on the merits.

The overlap with the mechanics of the Swiss deed is deliberately narrow. Land-register entry is only possible once the authorisation has been granted, and everything else about the deed, the notary's role and the sequence from offer to registration is covered in The Swiss Ski Property Purchase Process: Offer to Ownership.

One scheduling point is worth flagging. A permit timeline and a mortgage timeline have to be sequenced together, and Swiss Mortgages for Non-Residents covers the lending side. A refused or mistimed authorisation can cause a purchase to fall through, so the permit condition and the finance timeline should be sequenced with your notary and lender from the outset, a risk our article on Why Ski Property Purchases Fall Through examines across markets.

Live Policy: What Is Proposed, and What Is In Force

As at 20 July 2026, the federal tightening of Lex Koller is a proposal and the current regime is unchanged. Everything in this section is marked accordingly, and no entry-into-force date has been published.

The Federal Council opened a consultation on an amendment to the LFAIE on 15 April 2026, as an accompanying measure to the "No 10-million Switzerland" initiative.²⁰ The consultation closed on 15 July 2026. Submissions are being evaluated, after which a legal text goes to Parliament with a message, and no date has been published for that message.

Five measures sit in the preliminary draft. Primary-residence purchases by third-country nationals would require an authorisation, with an obligation to resell within two years on moving away. The business-premises exemption would be limited to buyers who operate the establishment themselves.

On holiday homes, cantonal quotas would be reduced and the draft would delete art. 9 al. 4 let. a LFAIE. A sale between persons abroad requires an authorisation today and would continue to; what would change is that it would be charged to the cantonal quota, where at present it is not.¹¹

Persons abroad would be barred from acquiring shares in listed residential property companies and units in regularly traded real estate funds and investment companies with variable capital. Conditions for hotel staff housing would be eased.

On the scale of the quota reduction, the law firm MLL Legal reported on 30 April 2026 that the preliminary draft would take the national maximum from 1,500 units to 750.²¹ The Swiss Working Group for Mountain Regions treated the halving as the operative figure in its consultation response of 9 July 2026, opposing it on the ground that the quotas have long gone unexhausted.¹³

Neither of those is the draft itself, so the number is best read as attributed and not as settled. No final cantonal allocation has been enacted. The explanatory report accompanying the consultation contains indicative figures, but these are not confirmed and remain subject to the outcome of the process.

Valais is moving in two directions of its own, and one of the two is already in force. Since 26 January 2026, on the account given by the Geneva firm Borel & Barbey, the Valais land registry has instructed notaries to stop executing sale deeds for the acquisition of a primary residence where the foreign buyer lacks legal and effective Swiss domicile at the moment of signature.²² Preliminary or conditional contracts pending a permit are no longer accepted.

That change concerns primary residences rather than holiday homes, so it does not affect a standard ski-home purchase. It matters to a UK buyer planning to relocate, and it shows cantonal practice moving ahead of federal law.

The second Valais development is a proposal, not law. A total revision of the cantonal implementing act would treat the entire cantonal territory as the LFAIE perimeter, with communes obliged to define the areas they wish to exclude, and would abolish the ten-year and five-year pre-possession period for non-subject sellers, though communes could reinstate a five-year period by communal regulation.¹⁸ Communes would also gain express powers to block authorisations and to create a pre-emption right at market value.

The draft sits with the Grand Council and its adoption is not confirmed as at 20 July 2026. Taken together with the federal consultation, it means the position is under review at two levels at once and in opposite directions.

The rules that bind a buyer today are stable, and the practical step is a small one: date-check the cantonal and communal position at the point you make an offer, because research done earlier in the search will already be out of date.

Next Steps

If you are working out the wider purchase sequence before you narrow down a canton, How to Buy Ski Property: The 5 Step Guide sets out the process from search to completion across Alpine markets.

If the authorisation requirement is what is giving you pause, it is worth seeing how a neighbouring market handles the same question. Buying Ski Property in Austria for UK Non-Residents 2026 covers the Grundverkehr approval regime, which is the nearest Alpine analogue to Lex Koller.

Before you make an offer, establish or confirm the following:

• The specific parcel sits in a canton-designated tourist place, checked on the parcel number rather than the resort name.
• Any current cantonal or communal restrictions on the parcel. In Graubünden this means the development-share percentage, the individual-object status and the foreigner-to-foreigner resale setting for the commune.
• Whether the development holds an advance block permit, and whether your unit still needs its own authorisation.
• The net habitable area against the 200 m² limit, using the architect's certificate rather than the brochure figure.
• Whether you, your spouse or registered partner, or a child under 18 already hold a Swiss holiday home, which the one-home rule would require you to dispose of first.
• For an aparthotel or other managed unit, the rental obligation and owner-use limits, and which of them bind a future buyer.
• A Swiss notary is instructed to sequence the Lex Koller permit as a suspensive condition on the deed.