Opening a marketing agency in Geneva needs no permit. The cantonal trade police publishes the list of activities it licenses, and communication, advertising and marketing agencies are not on it; the industry regulates itself and no title is protected. An art director, a public relations consultant or a search specialist leaving a Geneva agency can incorporate and invoice within the month.
What complicates these files is something else entirely: a cross-border freelancer with a single client whom the social insurance treats as an employee, a campaign invoiced to a French client without understanding why Swiss VAT disappears, a logo delivered while nobody holds the rights, a bulk mailing that turns into a criminal complaint. RISTER® works with Geneva agencies from incorporation through to payroll and VAT, and this guide sets out what the law asks of an agency, article by article.
Contents
- No permit in Geneva: the trade police list and self-regulation
- From freelancer to agency: when to incorporate in Geneva
- Cross-border freelancers and social insurance: the most common risk
- VAT: foreign clients, French freelancers and acquisition tax
- Who owns the campaign: the three chains of assignment
- What a campaign may not say: unfair competition, prices, data
- Contracts, disbursements and accounting in a Geneva agency
- Mistakes we see on these files
No permit in Geneva: the trade police list and self-regulation
Geneva lists the commercial activities that require authorisation from its trade police: itinerant trade, second-hand goods, public establishments, off-licence sales of alcohol and tobacco, taxis and private hire vehicles, vending machines, professional lenders and credit brokers, public auctions. Nothing there concerns an agency. Setting up a marketing agency in Geneva therefore runs through the commercial register, the social insurance and, where applicable, VAT registration, and through nothing else.
Advertising itself is supervised by the industry. The Swiss Commission for Fairness presents itself as a neutral and independent institution of the communication industry whose purpose is to guarantee self-regulation in advertising; its three chambers bring together consumers, media and advertisers on equal terms, and anyone may file a complaint against an advertisement they consider unfair. Its decisions are recommendations without state enforcement, based on its own Rules and on the ICC Code. For a Geneva agency, that is often where a dispute with a competitor or a consumer association lands first.
This freedom of entry is also an absence of guardrails: nobody checks that a founder knows the unfair competition, price indication, copyright or social insurance rules before the first campaign goes out.
From freelancer to agency: when to incorporate in Geneva
Most Geneva agencies start as a self-employed professional who hires a first colleague or joins forces with a second creative. That is the moment incorporation earns its keep, for reasons specific to this trade:
- Liability for a campaign: a misleading claim, an image used without rights or a prospect list used without consent engage the company; in a sole proprietorship they engage the founder’s own assets.
- Partners: a duo, a partnership with a video studio or an incoming investor are expressed in shares, with a shareholders’ agreement covering departures, which are frequent in the industry.
- Tenders: international organisations, public bodies and the groups established in Geneva ask for a commercial register extract and accounts. A GmbH or an AG answers that.
- Exit: an agency whose contracts, rights and brand sit in a company can be sold; a sole proprietorship simply closes.
The choice between GmbH and AG, the capital, the articles and the registration follow the general rules set out in our comparison of creating a GmbH or an AG in Geneva. One point is specific to agencies: the name. A company name entered in the commercial register does not prevent a third party from using the same name for communication services. Only a trade mark does, and « a trade mark right is established on entry in the Register » (Art. 5 Trade Mark Act), for any sign « capable of distinguishing the goods or services of one enterprise from those of other enterprises » (Art. 1 para. 1). File before the website goes live, not after the first infringement.
Cross-border freelancers and social insurance: the most common risk
Geneva has a particularity: a large share of the graphic designers, developers, copywriters and video makers agencies work with live in neighbouring France and present themselves as freelancers. Swiss social insurance law does not look at the contract, it looks at the situation. The official guidance on contributions of self-employed persons sets out the criteria: a self-employed person bears the economic risk, organises the business freely, trades under a business name and works for several principals; someone with a single principal is, according to that guidance, generally treated as an employee. The decisive sentence: the economic circumstances are determinative, not the contractual arrangements.
A freelancer who spends the day in the agency, on its equipment, under the creative director’s instructions, for its clients alone, is an employee of the agency. The income then becomes determining salary, covering income « derived in Switzerland or abroad from the exercise of an activity, including incidental income » (Art. 6 para. 1 of the old-age insurance regulation), and the compensation fund may claim employer contributions on fees already paid. The mandate and the contract for work, defined in Art. 394 and 363 of the Code of Obligations, protect only where they describe reality: several principals, a genuinely borne risk, an organisation belonging to the freelancer. Our standing advice on every file: keep, for each freelancer, evidence that they have other principals.
Two further consequences are specific to Geneva. A reclassified freelancer becomes a cross-border employee, with the formalities that entails. And the Geneva minimum wage applies to every employee of the agency, including the junior hired as an “intern” for real work; its amount is updated each year and we keep it current in our guide to the salary levels in Switzerland.
VAT: foreign clients, French freelancers and acquisition tax
An agency’s VAT position is read in Art. 8 para. 1 of the VAT Act: the place of supply of a service is where the recipient « has its registered office or a permanent establishment for which the service is provided ». The Federal Tax Administration lists advertising services among those following that rule, and paragraph 2 provides no exception for them.
| Case | Consequence |
|---|---|
| Campaign invoiced to a Geneva or Swiss client | Swiss VAT at the standard rate of 8.1% |
| Campaign invoiced to a business established in France or elsewhere abroad | Supply located abroad, no Swiss VAT; the amount counts towards the 100,000 franc threshold |
| Fees of a freelancer established in France and not on the Swiss VAT register | Acquisition tax owed by the Geneva agency |
| Licences of foreign tools and platforms not registered in Switzerland | Acquisition tax owed by the Geneva agency |
The registration threshold is computed « on Swiss territory and abroad » (Art. 10 para. 2 let. a VAT Act): a Geneva agency earning most of its turnover from French brands is liable from 100,000 francs even though its invoices carry no VAT. It also has every reason to register voluntarily before that point, so as to recover input tax on rent, software and equipment, as we explain in our complete guide to VAT in Switzerland.
Acquisition tax is the point Geneva agencies miss most often, precisely because of the border. It covers services located in Switzerland « supplied by businesses with their registered office abroad that are not entered in the register of taxable persons » (Art. 45 para. 1 let. a VAT Act). The designer in Annemasse, the editor in Lyon, the partner agency in Paris: every VAT-free invoice received from abroad is an acquisition to declare. A registered agency does so in its return; an unregistered one becomes liable beyond 10,000 francs of acquisitions in a calendar year. Conversely, a French agency wishing to serve Geneva clients over time falls under our fiscal representative service.
Communication agency in Geneva
A company that owns its work and knows its VAT
Incorporation of the GmbH or AG, trade mark filing, a VAT position matched to Geneva and French clients, acquisition tax on cross-border freelancers, payroll, permits and social charges, accounting for work in progress and media buying: RISTER® structures your agency and keeps its books, alongside your intellectual property counsel.
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Who owns the campaign: the three chains of assignment
Under Swiss law « the author is the natural person who has created the work » (Art. 6 Copyright Act). The agency, a legal person, is never the author of anything. The logo, the film, the visual identity and the copy belong to whoever made them, until an act transfers them, and protection begins with the concept, since drafts, titles and parts of works count as works in their own right whenever they show individual character (Art. 2 para. 4). A concept pitched for a tender and not selected remains the property of the person who devised it.
Rights are assignable, but one at a time: the assignment of one right « does not include the assignment of other partial rights, unless such was agreed » (Art. 16 para. 2). The right to use a visual on a website carries neither the right to print it, nor to adapt it, nor to run it on another medium. Only one transfer happens automatically in the statute, and it concerns software alone: where a computer program is created under an employment contract in the course of professional duties, « the employer alone shall be entitled to exercise the exclusive rights of use » (Art. 17). For everything else, the employment contract must provide for assignment, a freelancer needs a written contract, and the author keeps the right to be recognised as such (Art. 9), a point to settle when the campaign is to be signed by the agency or by the client.
An organised Geneva agency therefore maintains three chains: freelancers to agency, employees to agency, agency to client, each in writing, with scope, term, territory and right of modification. When one is missing, the client has paid for a campaign it cannot exploit, or the agency has sold what it did not own.
What a campaign may not say: unfair competition, prices, data
The Unfair Competition Act targets whoever designs the campaign as much as whoever commissions it. A person acts unfairly who makes incorrect or misleading statements about their services or prices, « or who by such statements favours third parties over their competitors » (Art. 3 para. 1 let. b): the agency writing the claim favours a third party. Comparative advertising is lawful unless « incorrect, misleading, unnecessarily harmful or parasitic » (let. e).
Bulk messaging is the most common failing of digital agencies. It is unfair to send or arrange to be sent « mass advertising without direct connection with any requested content by telecommunication » while failing « to obtain the prior consent of the customer, or to indicate the correct sender or a simple and free of charge option of refusal » (Art. 3 para. 1 let. o); only existing customers, duly informed, may receive offers for the sender’s own similar services. Wilful unfair competition is an offence prosecuted on complaint and « liable to a custodial sentence not exceeding three years or a monetary penalty » (Art. 23 para. 1). For an online shop, letter s adds duties of identification and order processing, covered in our guide to setting up an e-commerce company in Geneva.
The price indication ordinance requires, as soon as advertising mentions prices in figures, that the prices actually payable be indicated, that the essential criteria appear in the advertising medium itself, and that a crossed-out price be used only in self-comparison, as a launch price or against what competitors genuinely charge (Art. 13, 14 and 16, available in French, German and Italian). Reductions in figures apply to services by analogy (Art. 17 para. 3).
Data protection bounds targeting: the controller « shall inform the data subject in an appropriate manner when collecting personal data », whether or not the data is collected from them (Art. 19 para. 1 FADP), and high-risk profiling as defined in Art. 5 let. g requires express consent when carried out by a private person (Art. 6 para. 7 let. b). The FADP is not the European regulation that French advertisers know; a Geneva agency working on both sides of the border keeps the two regimes separate.
Contracts, disbursements and accounting in a Geneva agency
Strategic advice or social media management is a mandate; delivery of a website, a film or a visual identity leans towards a contract for work, with its warranty for defects. Absent a clear qualification, the rules of mandate apply to work « not governed by the statutory provisions of other contracts » (Art. 394 para. 2 CO), letting the client terminate at any time. The clauses to write before the first invoice: assignment of rights to the client, the fate of concepts not selected, the treatment of disbursements and media buying advanced for the client, and confidentiality, which the statute imposes on employees « even after the end of the employment relationship » (Art. 321a para. 4) but which must be stipulated with a freelancer.
Agency accounts carry two lines other service companies do not: work in progress, those weeks of salary already paid for a campaign invoiced on delivery, and clients’ money passing through the agency for media space, printing or production, to be documented separately from fees and with its own VAT treatment. We keep those accounts, the payroll and the tax filings through our general administration, accounting and payroll service. An agency building its own tools moves towards the questions we cover for a SaaS startup in Geneva, and a consultancy selling intellectual services follows the VAT logic described for an engineering company in Geneva.
RISTER advice
Before the first campaign, sign the three chains of assignment and decide on voluntary VAT registration. Before the first cross-border freelancer, ask for evidence of their other principals and keep it. Those two steps prevent almost every file we have seen go wrong.
Mistakes we see on these files
The first is engaging a cross-border freelancer with a single principal, full time, on the agency’s premises: the compensation fund reclassifies the relationship and claims employer contributions.
The second is invoicing French clients without VAT while forgetting that the turnover counts towards the 100,000 franc threshold, and that input tax on rent and equipment is lost without voluntary registration.
The third is failing to declare acquisition tax on invoices received from freelancers and platforms established abroad.
The fourth is delivering a campaign whose rights the agency does not hold, for want of written assignment from freelancers and employees.
The fifth is running a bulk mailing for a client without the recipients’ consent: the Unfair Competition Act makes that an offence prosecuted on complaint.
The sixth is letting a third party register the agency’s name, or the name of a campaign created for a client, for want of a contractual clause.
FAQ: setting up a marketing agency in Geneva
Does the Geneva trade police license communication agencies?
No. The Geneva list of commercial activities subject to authorisation mentions neither communication, nor advertising, nor marketing agencies. The agency is created through the commercial register, social insurance affiliation and, where applicable, VAT registration, with no further formality.
Can a freelancer living in France work for my Geneva agency?
Yes, provided they are genuinely self-employed: several principals, their own economic risk, their own organisation. If your agency is their only client and they work under your instructions, the social insurance treats them as an employee and the employer contributions fall on you. Their VAT-free fees are also subject to acquisition tax.
Do I charge VAT to a client established in France?
No. An advertising service is located at the recipient’s registered office (Art. 8 para. 1 VAT Act), so it falls outside Swiss VAT. The amount nevertheless counts towards the 100,000 franc threshold, calculated on Swiss and foreign turnover, and voluntary registration allows recovery of input tax.
Does my agency own the work of its employees?
Only for software, which the statute attributes to the employer (Art. 17 Copyright Act). For a visual, a text or a video, the employee remains the author unless the employment contract provides for assignment. For a freelancer, a written assignment contract is needed, plus a separate clause to pass the rights to the client.
Is an email campaign to prospects lawful in Switzerland?
Not without prior consent. The Unfair Competition Act treats mass advertising sent by telecommunication without consent, without identification of the sender or without an option of refusal as unfair (Art. 3 para. 1 let. o), and wilful breaches are prosecuted on complaint (Art. 23). The exception covers existing customers, for similar services.
Should the agency’s trade mark be filed?
Entering the company name in the commercial register does not protect it against use by a third party for communication services. The trade mark right arises on registration (Art. 5 Trade Mark Act); file before launch, and settle by contract who files the campaign names created for clients.
Sources
- Republic and Canton of Geneva, Commercial activities subject to authorisation (in French)
- Swiss Commission for Fairness (in French and German)
- AHV/IV, Memorandum 2.02, Contributions of self-employed persons, as at 1 January 2026
- Ordinance on Old-Age and Survivors’ Insurance (SR 831.101), Art. 6 and 17 (in French)
- Federal Act on Value Added Tax (VAT Act, SR 641.20), Art. 8, 10, 25 and 45
- Copyright Act (CopA, SR 231.1), Art. 2, 6, 9, 16 and 17
- Trade Mark Protection Act (SR 232.11), Art. 1 and 5
- Unfair Competition Act (SR 241), Art. 3 and 23
- Ordinance on the Indication of Prices (SR 942.211), Art. 13, 14, 16 and 17 (in French)
- Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP, SR 235.1), Art. 5, 6, 19 and 31
- Code of Obligations (SR 220), Art. 321a, 363 and 394
Conclusion
Setting up a marketing agency in Geneva needs no permit, but the trade is held in place by statutes that never name it, and by a border that multiplies the cases: cross-border freelancers judged on economic reality, French clients invoiced without VAT yet counted towards the threshold, foreign services to declare as acquisitions, copyright that reaches the agency only in writing, and campaigns framed by unfair competition and price rules under threat of criminal complaint. A solid agency is a company that owns its creative work, knows where its VAT is due and can prove its freelancers are independent.
RISTER – Fiduciary in Geneva incorporates your agency through our company incorporation service, then handles its accounting, payroll and tax administration, VAT and acquisition tax included. We tell you when a freelancer is an employee, before the compensation fund does. To discuss it, contact us.
