The SNB has now held its policy rate at zero for four consecutive assessments. Switzerland isn't just at the bottom of the global rate table anymore — it's alone there. Here's the full picture: how the country got to zero, how that compares with every other major central bank right now, and what it actually means for a CHF-denominated portfolio heading into the September decision.
Key takeaways
Where things stand
The Swiss National Bank left its policy rate unchanged at 0% at its 18 June 2026 assessment, the fourth consecutive hold since rates first touched zero in June 2025. It wasn't a surprising decision — markets had priced it in — but the details are worth sitting with. The SNB's conditional forecast, published alongside the decision, sees inflation averaging roughly 0.6% in both 2026 and 2027, edging up to 0.7% by 2028, while GDP growth is expected to hold around 1.0% this year and 1.5% next. That's a forecast built entirely on the assumption that the policy rate stays at zero throughout the horizon — in other words, the SNB itself isn't pencilling in a move any time soon. The next assessment falls on 24 September, and barring a shock, a fifth consecutive hold looks like the most probable outcome.
How Switzerland got to zero
It's easy to treat "zero" as a static fact, but the path there says a lot about where things might go next. Like most major economies, Switzerland raised rates hard through 2022–23 to fight the same post-pandemic inflation wave that hit everyone else, taking the policy rate to a peak of 1.75%. What set Switzerland apart was the exit: in March 2024 the SNB became the first major central bank to cut, a surprise 25-basis-point move that kicked off a sequence of six consecutive reductions — a run that included a 50-basis-point cut in December 2024, the steepest single move since January 2015 — before the rate touched 0% in June 2025. It's been parked there ever since.
| Period | Move | Policy rate |
|---|---|---|
| Through 2023 | 2022–23 hiking cycle | 1.75% (peak) |
| March 2024 | –25bp (first major central bank to cut) | 1.50% |
| Mid–late 2024 | Further quarterly cuts | 1.00% |
| December 2024 | –50bp (steepest since Jan 2015) | 0.50% |
| Early–mid 2025 | Further cuts | 0.00% (from June 2025) |
| Sep 2025 – Jun 2026 | Held for four straight assessments | 0.00% |
| 24 September 2026 | Next decision | — |
The pattern underneath the numbers: Switzerland cut earlier, faster and further than almost anyone else, because its inflation problem was smaller to begin with and its currency does a lot of the disinflationary work on its own. That's the same dynamic now keeping it at the bottom of the table while other central banks are stuck fighting a fresh inflation problem of their own.
The global outlier
That's really the story of 2026: Switzerland used to have company at the bottom of the rate table. It doesn't anymore.
| Central bank | Policy rate (approx., Aug 2026) | 2026 direction |
|---|---|---|
| SNB (Switzerland) | 0.00% | Held since Jun 2025 |
| Fed (United States) | ~3.50–3.75% | Cut in Dec 2025; on hold since |
| ECB (Eurozone, deposit rate) | 2.25% | Hiked +25bp in June 2026 |
| Bank of England | 3.75% | Held in June 2026 (7–2 vote) |
| Bank of Japan | 1.00% | Hiked +25bp in June 2026 |
Through 2024 and most of 2025, the Fed, ECB, BoE and SNB were all cutting roughly in sync, and the story was simply "rates coming down everywhere." 2026 broke that synchrony. A resurgence in energy and inflation pressure tied to the conflict in the Middle East pushed eurozone inflation back toward 3%, forcing the ECB into a rare mid-cycle hike in June — its first tightening move since the previous cycle ended. The Bank of England, still contending with UK inflation above target, has held rates well above 3.5%. Even the Bank of Japan, which spent sixteen years at or below zero before finally exiting negative rates in March 2024, has kept hiking, reaching its highest level since 1995. Switzerland's own inflation problem never reappeared in the same way, so the SNB simply stayed put — and in doing so went from "low along with everyone else" to "the outlier" without changing its own policy at all.
The franc, without the drama
A zero policy rate usually comes with a subplot about the franc, and this year is no exception — just a quieter one than usual. EUR/CHF has spent the summer hovering around 0.93, a long way from the 0.90 level the SNB treats as a meaningful line for intervention. In its June statement, the SNB reaffirmed that it stands ready to buy euros if the franc appreciates "rapidly and excessively," but that condition simply hasn't been met — if anything, the franc has drifted a touch weaker against the euro in recent weeks rather than stronger. What has widened instead is the inflation gap: Swiss inflation was running at roughly 0.4% in early August against roughly 2.9–3.0% in the eurozone, a divergence that, other things equal, tends to support the euro side of the pair rather than the franc. For Swiss investors with any foreign-currency exposure, that gap is a more relevant number to watch right now than the policy rate itself.
A yield curve worth watching
Here's the part of the story that gets less attention than the policy rate but arguably matters more for anyone holding CHF bonds: while the SNB has kept short rates frozen at zero, longer-dated Swiss yields have not stood still. The 10-year Swiss government bond yield fell to a fresh multi-year low below 0.15% in October 2025, and has since drifted up to around 0.41% as of early August 2026 — nowhere near dramatic in absolute terms, but a genuine multiple of where it stood ten months ago. That's part of a broader global pattern: US 10-year Treasury yields have been trading above 4%, and German Bund yields near 2.9%, as investors demand more term premium across the board. Switzerland's long yield remains, by a wide margin, the lowest among major markets — but "lowest" and "unchanged" are not the same thing, and the curve is telling a slightly different story than the policy rate alone.
What zero really costs you
The policy rate doesn't just sit in the background — it sets the ceiling for what cash and near-cash instruments in francs can pay. Savings accounts and short-dated CHF paper are, for practical purposes, paying close to nothing, which means that even Switzerland's unusually low inflation is enough to slowly erode purchasing power for money left sitting in francs. It's a slow leak rather than a dramatic one — at 0.4–0.6% inflation it would take years to show up starkly on a bank statement — but it's the reason a "wait and see" allocation to cash carries a real, if modest, cost in this environment, and has for some time now.
Where Swiss investors have been looking instead
None of this is a call to abandon francs or cash altogether — a rate environment like this one is precisely why diversification matters rather than concentration in any single answer. But it does explain three trends we've seen play out over the summer among Portfolio Atlas readers: continued interest in dividend-paying equities as a substitute for the income CHF deposits no longer provide; a willingness to accept currency risk in exchange for more visible real yields in foreign-currency bonds or equities, particularly in USD and EUR, where the rate differential we outlined above is now large enough to matter; and sustained demand for real assets — Swiss residential property among them (see our companion piece this week) — as a hedge against a rate environment showing little sign of normalising the way it has elsewhere.
Scenarios into September
Three broad paths from here. The base case, and by far the most likely given the SNB's own forecast assumptions, is a fifth consecutive hold on 24 September — inflation and growth are both tracking close enough to target that there's no obvious case for action either way. A dovish surprise would require an inflation undershoot meaningful enough to revive talk of negative rates — something the SNB has explicitly called a "high bar" rather than a normal-sized cut, given the well-documented side effects negative rates had on Swiss pension funds and bank margins last time around. A hawkish or defensive surprise would come from the franc side: a sharp, disorderly appreciation that pulls EUR/CHF back toward 0.90 and triggers the direct market intervention the SNB has kept on the table all year. None of the three looks imminent based on where the data sits today, which is exactly why "unchanged" has been the correct call in March, June, and — most likely — September too.
Bottom line
Switzerland's zero rate isn't news by itself anymore; what's changed is the company it keeps. A year ago, "low rates" was a shared global story. Today, Switzerland is the only major economy still at the floor, with a currency that isn't under acute pressure, a bond market that's quietly repricing anyway, and a policy path that looks set to stay unchanged into autumn. For portfolio construction, the practical takeaway hasn't shifted much from earlier in the year — cash in francs is a slow-burning cost, not a safe harbour, and that's the backdrop against which the rest of this week's coverage on equities and property should be read.
