Switzerland’s invisible skyline: why Zug towers over the rest
Zug is a small town on a lake with an unusually tall skyline, if you give every registered company a storey. Seven of the ten tallest invisible towers we could map stand in Zug canton, which promotes low corporate taxes to attract businesses. The highest is in neighbouring Cham, where one building has 444 active registrations.
We mapped 657,870 active registered entities to 327,735 Swiss buildings. At the busiest addresses, hundreds of businesses share a front door. What are they all doing there?
The business of selling an address
A company can pay for a registered address in Cham and have its mail sent elsewhere. At Sinserstrasse 67, easyDOMIZIL offers addresses with or without "c/o Ludwig Limbeck AG". The "c/o" names the recipient handling the company’s mail. Those clients can have letters scanned or forwarded; the package without the addition includes access to workspace.
A pharmaceutical consultant is registered at number 65 and a lift installer at number 67. The two entrances belong to the same building, the largest concentration in our data. Their registered purposes describe work that can take place well beyond Cham.
Across Zug, providers make it easy to arrange an address and administration in a canton that sells itself on tax. The register names KENDRIS Schweiz AG at Gotthardstrasse 26 as the c/o recipient for 160 entities. Sarya AG at Chamerstrasse 174 appears in the same role at another of the largest buildings.
On Baarerstrasse, eMBe Finanz offers domiciliation at number 8. That street alone has three buildings in the top ten. Zug’s appeal comes with a local industry ready to help companies establish a registered presence.
The ten tallest towers
| Building | Place | Entities |
|---|---|---|
| Sinserstrasse 65 / 67 | Cham (ZG) | 444 |
| Chamerstrasse 174 / 176 | Zug (ZG) | 424 |
| Cours des Bastions 13 | Genève (GE) | 421 |
| Baarerstrasse 8 / 10 | Zug (ZG) | 353 |
| Gotthardstrasse 26 | Zug (ZG) | 340 |
| Chamerstrasse 172 | Zug (ZG) | 327 |
| Baarerstrasse 43 | Zug (ZG) | 312 |
| Sihleggstrasse 23 | Wollerau (SZ) | 300 |
| Baarerstrasse 75 | Zug (ZG) | 285 |
| Alpenstrasse 1 | Luzern (LU) | 277 |
What a registered address tells us
For 68% of buildings on the map, there is just one registered entity. Only 117 buildings have at least 100, together accounting for about 3% of the mapped total. The spectacular concentrations are a small part of the picture.
In Zug, those concentrations fit a canton that promotes low taxes and has businesses ready to supply an address. The register does not tell us why each company chose it. Sharing an address is a normal administrative arrangement and, on its own, says nothing about wrongdoing. Counting registrations as workplaces can put economic activity in the wrong location.
Data and method
We matched active Swiss commercial-register records from Prospex’s snapshot of 5 September 2026 to swisstopo’s building-address directory, covering 89.6% of active records. Counts include registered sole proprietorships and branches; deleted records, entities in liquidation and unknown statuses were excluded, as were records without a valid UID or an unambiguous building match. The snapshot totals, exclusions and source checksum are available as JSON. To investigate another address, use Prospex’s Company API or our guide to shared registered addresses in Switzerland.