Parent guides
Deducting therapy costs the smart way
Self-paid therapy costs can add up fast. The Swiss tax system lets you deduct part of them — if you know your canton's threshold and keep the right paperwork. Here's how it works, step by step.
If you pay for your child's therapy, dental work or other medical costs out of your own pocket, Switzerland lets you deduct part of those costs from your taxable income. Not the whole amount — each canton first applies a threshold — but for many families the deduction is well worth claiming. This guide walks you through how the calculation works, where the cantons differ, and which documents to keep.
Please treat this article as general orientation. For your specific situation, always check with a tax adviser or directly with your cantonal tax office.
How the deduction works
Every canton applies a so-called retention (Selbstbehalt): a percentage of your income that you must carry yourself before anything becomes deductible. Only the costs above that threshold can be claimed in your tax return.
The calculation in four steps
- Add up all the health costs you paid yourself — therapy, dentist, medication not covered by insurance.
- Take your taxable income for the year.
- Calculate your canton's threshold — for example 5% of income in many cantons, lower in others.
- Deductible amount = total health costs minus the threshold. If your costs stay under the threshold, nothing is deductible.
A worked example
Say your family's total self-paid health costs for the year come to CHF 13,480 — for example four intensive blocks of 12 sessions at CHF 260 each (CHF 12,480) plus CHF 1,000 of dental work — and your taxable income is CHF 85,000.
In the canton of Zurich the threshold is 5%: CHF 85,000 × 5% = CHF 4,250. Your deductible amount is therefore CHF 13,480 − CHF 4,250 = CHF 9,230 — the figure you can claim in your tax return.
Same country, very different thresholds
The same family, the same costs — but a different canton — can mean a very different deduction. In Geneva the threshold is just 0.5%: CHF 85,000 × 0.5% = CHF 425, leaving CHF 13,055 deductible. In Basel-Landschaft there is no threshold at all — the full CHF 13,480 can be claimed. It genuinely pays to look up the rules for your canton of residence on your tax office's official pages, or to ask them directly.
"The folder of receipts you keep today is the deduction you claim next spring."
— The Apexa teamWhat counts — and the paperwork to keep
Only costs that you demonstrably paid yourself and that are medically necessary and medically prescribed count. In practice, that means keeping three things together for each treatment: the prescription or medical certificate, the invoice, and the proof of payment. Costs reimbursed by your insurer can't be claimed again.
A brief word on insurance
Whether and how much your health insurer or the IV contributes to therapy costs varies from case to case, and we aren't insurance specialists — the right answers come from your insurer directly. Two things generally help: asking your insurer early about what they will cover, and attaching a doctor's certificate confirming that the therapy is medically necessary. Whatever they decide, the tax deduction described above applies to the part you end up paying yourself.
How we support you
What we can promise is clean paperwork. Every block at our centre comes with clear, itemised invoices, a transparent fee overview, and written therapy documentation — including assessment reports built on ORCA — Objective Reasoning & Clinical Architecture, our clinical framework — that you can hand to a tax office or insurer without translation into "official language". If you're unsure what you'll need, ask us before your block starts: we prepare the documents, and we navigate the journey together.
