Why the number of municipalities keeps falling

Most people picture Switzerland's municipalities as a fixed list you could memorise once and be done with. It isn't. A generation ago the country had roughly 3,000 municipalities; today it has 2'123, and that figure drops almost every year. Places are not vanishing — they are merging.

What a merger actually is

A Gemeindefusion combines two or more neighbouring municipalities into a single new one. The motive is usually practical: small municipalities struggle to staff a council, run a school and carry the administrative load alone, so they join forces. The new municipality gets one council, one tax rate and one BFS number — and the old ones cease to exist as independent bodies.

Does my address change?

Usually less than you'd fear. Your locality name and postal code normally stay the same, because those belong to Swiss Post and to the settlement, not to the political municipality — the distinction in a postal code is not a municipality. What changes is the municipality of record: the Gemeinde on official documents becomes the new, merged one, often with a new name.

This is also why older vote results and statistics still list municipalities that no longer govern anything — they were independent when the figures were recorded.

Why our count is current

Every "how many municipalities does Switzerland have" answer typed by hand is wrong the day the next merger takes effect. The number above is read from the same official dataset that powers every municipality page on this site, so it is current by construction rather than by memory.