IQ tests in Switzerland: costs, providers and what a result actually says

Search for an IQ test in Switzerland and within a few clicks you land on four very different things: an assessment by a qualified professional, the admission test of Mensa Schweiz, the aptitude tests that surround the search for an apprenticeship, and short online tests like ours. They cost between nothing and several hundred francs, they take between twenty minutes and several hours, and they do not answer the same question.

This article sorts the four routes, gives the verified prices with their source, and says what a result carries. It also explains why we give no average figure for Switzerland, even though the question comes up often.

If you are new to the Swiss system, start here

Almost everything on this page depends on one fact that surprises people who moved here: education in Switzerland is a cantonal matter. There are 26 cantons, and each one runs its own schools, sets its own transfer rules and funds its own services. There is no national school system, no national curriculum for entry to upper secondary school and no national exam date. What applies to your child depends on where you live, and a neighbour in the next canton may be describing something genuinely different rather than misremembering.

The second thing worth knowing is that after lower secondary school (Sekundarstufe I, which ends around age 15) there are two main routes, and they are not ranked the way a British, American or Indian reader would expect.

• The Gymnasium is the academic upper secondary school, roughly an academic sixth form or a college-prep high school, but selective and starting earlier. It leads to the Matura, the school-leaving certificate that gives direct access to Swiss universities. There is no separate university entrance exam in Switzerland; the Matura is the entrance ticket. Entry to the Gymnasium usually runs through the Gymiprüfung, an entrance exam sat at the end of primary school or of lower secondary school, with the rules and dates set by the canton.
• The Lehre, the apprenticeship, is a three or four year programme (EFZ) or a two year one (EBA) that combines paid work in a training company with school. About two thirds of Swiss school leavers take it. It is not a fallback for weaker pupils. It leads into protected professions, it can be combined with the Berufsmaturität, a vocational baccalaureate that opens the universities of applied sciences, and via the Passerelle, a supplementary exam, it reaches the regular universities as well. Between the two sits the Fachmittelschule (FMS), a specialised school leading into health, education, social work and the arts.

The numbers show how little of the country goes the purely academic way. The overall maturity rate in 2023 was 43 per cent, of which 23 per cent was the academic Matura and 15.5 per cent the Berufsmaturität. More than one Matura in three in Switzerland is not an academic one.

This matters for the subject of this article because the tests most Swiss teenagers actually sit are not intelligence tests. They are the Multicheck and the Basic Check, commercial aptitude tests taken at a test centre when applying for an apprenticeship, and the Stellwerk, an adaptive assessment run by the school in class 8 and class 9. If your child comes home talking about a test, it is far more likely to be one of those three than anything to do with an IQ.

Four offers, one word

The most common reason for disappointment is a mix-up. Someone wants to know whether an assessment is worth pursuing and takes an apprenticeship aptitude test instead. Or someone needs evidence for Mensa and sits an unsupervised online test that does not count there. The overview below separates the four routes before prices come into it.

Only the first route leads to a professional judgement. The other three produce measures built for their own purpose, and outside that purpose they say very little.

What each route costs

The prices below come from the providers’ own pages and were retrieved on 13 September 2026. Where a figure is missing, it is missing on purpose: we find no sound Swiss source for the fees charged by private practices, and we would rather write nothing than copy a range that happens to be circulating.

The spread from nothing to over a hundred francs is not explained by quality but by effort. An automatically scored online test costs us almost nothing once it is built; an appointment at a test centre costs room, supervision and evaluation.

Mensa Schweiz: the route with the clearest threshold

Mensa Schweiz is the Swiss branch of the international high-IQ society. It admits people in the top two per cent, and from a result of 130 the invitation follows. There is a choice of a non-verbal test from age 15 for CHF 80, reduced to CHF 40 for students and pupils, and a multidimensional test with a German language section from age 14 for CHF 100, reduced to CHF 50. The non-verbal test may be repeated once after a year; the multidimensional one not at all.

Anyone who already holds a result from a recognised procedure submits it as prior evidence: CHF 60, reduced CHF 30, free for under 18s. In every case the result arrives by post, within about three weeks. Test appointments are currently held only in Zug, and several of them are fully booked.

One point concerns us directly. Mensa Schweiz does not accept unsupervised tests or online tests. That expressly includes ours. If membership is the goal, you can get a picture with us beforehand, but you will still need the supervised route afterwards.

Aptitude tests are not intelligence tests, though parts overlap

The Multicheck, the Basic Check and the Stellwerk turn up in every search for a test in Switzerland, and for most teenagers here they are the only experience of a formal test in their whole school career. They measure school material and job related demands, not intelligence. Parts of them are nevertheless cognitive: logic, spatial imagination, memory and joined-up thinking appear explicitly in the contents of several Multicheck versions.

That is why the results can resemble each other without being interchangeable. An aptitude test asks whether this profile matches the demands of this occupational field. An intelligence test asks how well rules are recognised and applied in unfamiliar material. The second question is narrower, the first is more practical. Neither replaces the other, and a Multicheck result cannot be converted into an IQ score.

The Multicheck in detail

The Multicheck, run by gateway.one, is taken around 30‘000 times a year in eight versions: Attest for two year EBA occupations, retail and service, health and social care, ICT, media and design, pharma and chemistry, TEK for technical fields, and business and administration. The Attest test costs CHF 60 and takes about 1.5 hours, retail and service CHF 85 at around 2.5 hours, and all the others CHF 100 at up to 3.5 hours.

The test period runs from the end of May to the end of May. Two attempts per occupational field are possible, and a second attempt is noted on the certificate. The certificate is in your user account within two working days, though in May and June it takes longer. Cancellation is free up to 72 hours beforehand, after which half the fee is charged, and at short notice the full amount. Many training companies cover the cost with a voucher, so it is worth asking the company before you register.

What changes for the 2026/2027 period

This is where many guides still carry the old position. The provider’s page states, on 13 September 2026, in so many words: the Multicheck Gewerbe is being discontinued for the 2026/2027 test period and replaced by the Basic Check. The technical Multicheck, by contrast, is being developed further and not replaced. That distinction is often reported wrongly, and it decides whether you register for the right procedure.

There is a further detail that almost no ranking guide mentions: basic-check.ch is today a 301 redirect to gateway.one. It is the same provider as the Multicheck, not a competitor. The Basic Check costs CHF 100, takes 2.5 to 3.5 hours depending on the modules chosen, and is built to be occupation neutral: a base module with German, mathematics and cognitive abilities, plus optional modules for English, French, practical technical understanding, practical problem solving and digital skills. The school content follows the curriculum at the end of class 8.

Stellwerk measures difficulty, not the number of right answers

The Stellwerk, published by the Lehrmittelverlag St. Gallen, the teaching materials publisher of the canton of St. Gallen, runs in ten German-speaking cantons according to the provider’s own list, checked on 13 September 2026, and costs CHF 10.00 per pupil, with the supplementary Stellwerk plus tests at CHF 7.00. The gap to the Multicheck surprises many people, but it follows from the channel: the Stellwerk runs through the school, not through a test centre.

More important than the price is the measurement principle, because it is systematically misread. The system is multidimensional and adaptive: it adjusts within each competence area and reports values on a scale from 200 to 800 points. What is measured is the difficulty of the tasks mastered, not the number of correct answers. Someone who solves twenty hard tasks ends up higher than someone who solves thirty easy ones. The basis is Lehrplan 21, the common curriculum of the German-speaking cantons, and since the 2023/24 school year it also covers science and technology. Whether the test is compulsory or simply in use is decided by each canton separately. Zurich, St. Gallen, Lucerne, Schwyz and Zug state on their education portals that it is binding. Thurgau abolished its obligation from 2025 and has since disappeared from the provider’s list as well.

Who may test in Switzerland

Intelligence tests may only be administered in Switzerland by people with a recognised psychology degree. The professional title itself is protected under the Psychology Professions Act, and using it without authorisation is a criminal offence. That is not a formality in passing. It is the reason an assessment costs more than an online test: it includes a preliminary conversation, a standardised procedure under supervision, an evaluation and a conversation about the result.

For pupils, the Schulpsychologischer Dienst, the cantonal school psychology service, does this, and it does it free of charge. Most families who have moved here have never heard of it, and it is the single most useful piece of practical information in this article. The usual way in runs through the class teacher or the school management, who make the referral; in some cantons parents can approach the service directly. A phone call to the service in your canton settles which of the two applies, and that call costs nothing.

For adults the route runs through a private practice, as a rule one holding the FSP specialist title. The FSP is the Federation of Swiss Psychologists, the professional body whose specialist title marks a recognised practitioner, and it is the shorthand you will see after a name on a practice door or a report.

We ourselves fall into none of these categories. Kognita is an editorial team with a test procedure we built ourselves. We carry out no assessments and issue nothing that could be submitted anywhere.

Why we give no average IQ for Switzerland

The question comes up often, and almost every page answers it with a figure somewhere near the middle of the scale. We do not, and the reason is methodological.

First, 100 is not a measurement. When a procedure is normed, that value is set as the mean of the reference sample, together with a spread of 15 points. An average of roughly 100 does not come out of the process; it is put into it. How that works in detail is in our article on the IQ scale and its classification.

Second, the country lists that circulate rest on collected individual studies: different instruments, different survey years, different kinds of sample, some of them very small, and for countries without data values filled in by calculation. Because norms shift across decades, a value from the 1980s is not comparable with one from the 2010s, even where the same instrument was used.

A sound national figure would need a single instrument, a single norming year and a representative sample. That does not exist. Anyone who quotes the figure anyway is telling you something about their sources, not about Switzerland.

What a result says, and what it does not

A test result is an estimate, not a reading off a gauge. Every estimate carries a measurement error, and that error is part of the result. For our short test the standard error is 6.4 points, measured across 4‘000 simulated runs. The 95 per cent interval is therefore about 25 points wide. Someone who scores 112 lies, with 95 per cent confidence, roughly between 100 and 124. A single point value without that range pretends to a precision that does not exist.

The second useful figure is the percentile rank. It says how many out of a hundred people in the reference group reach the same result or a lower one, and it can be read without knowing anything about the scale. For a comparison between two different instruments it is the only sensible quantity.

And the third point: a short test measures reasoning, the recognition and application of rules in unfamiliar material. It does not measure subject knowledge, stamina, care or motivation. Those things decide at least as much about success at school and at work. The procedure, the simulation results and the limits are documented in full on our method page.

The Kognita test

Our test has 30 tasks in 25 minutes, across five areas: figural matrices, number series, verbal analogies, spatial imagination and deductive reasoning. Scoring runs through an item response theory model with a guessing correction, which means that the difficulty of each individual task enters the estimate and that random clicking is not reported as an average. Every result comes with a 95 per cent confidence range.

The test is free and needs no registration. The written report costs CHF 19.00 in the basic version and CHF 29.00 in the complete version with a profile of the sub-areas and a walk-through of the tasks.

What it is not matters just as much: it is not an expert opinion, not a professional assessment, not valid evidence for Mensa Schweiz, and not something that can be submitted anywhere. It is also built for adults and not suitable for children, because a child’s result depends heavily on age. For parents we have set that out in a separate article on an IQ test for a child.

Which route fits which question

The last line is the important one. As soon as a result is meant to have a consequence, a placement, a certificate or a decision, there is no way past a qualified professional. Everything else is orientation, and orientation is worth something as long as it is labelled as such.