There is no single price. VQF publishes a CHF 2,000 admission handling fee and a CHF 1,250 annual minimum; PolyReg publishes CHF 1,600 admission and CHF 1,800 annual at its smallest size band. The external audit and the substance behind it carry no published rate at all.
Every figure below comes from a fee schedule or regulator page that is publicly available, cited with its document number and version date. Where no published figure exists, this article says so and explains what drives the cost instead. All amounts are Swiss francs, exclusive of VAT.
Is "Swiss SRO licence" even the right phrase?
Not quite, and the imprecision costs money later. What is being bought is not a licence issued by the state; it is membership of a self-regulatory organisation. FINMA puts the duty plainly: financial intermediaries acting on a professional basis under Art. 2 para. 3 of the Anti-Money Laundering Act must, under Art. 14 para. 1 AMLA, affiliate to an SRO recognised by FINMA, and FINMA in turn recognises and supervises those SROs. FINMA's published list showed eleven recognised SROs as at 10 August 2026.
That matters for budgeting because SROs are private associations that set their own fees. There is no single national tariff, no statutory fee, and no reason to expect two SROs to charge you the same — or even to measure you the same way. See the Swiss SRO route end to end for what the process itself involves.
What is actually published
VQF, the cross-sector SRO based in Zug, publishes its fee schedule (Gebührenreglement, document 1101.5). The current version is marked "Stand: 1. Januar 2026" — approved by the board on 30 June 2025, in force from 1 January 2026, replacing the 1 January 2025 schedule.
| Fee | CHF (excl. VAT) | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Admission administration fee | 2,000 | Fixed |
| Additional admission fee for managing director / legal & compliance | 300 – 6,000 | By time spent |
| Admission examination, where ordered | 750 – 3,000 (as a rule) | By time spent; not ordered in every case |
| Annual membership contribution | 400 | Fixed, per year |
| Annual minimum fee | 1,250 | Applies if the calculated annual fee is lower |
| Flat audit administration fee | 750 | Per audit cycle, for administering and accepting the audit report |
One line in VQF's admission guidance for legal entities (document 801.3, version 1 July 2026) deserves particular attention: the application can only be processed once the CHF 2,000 handling fee plus VAT has been received, with any further effort-based admission fees invoiced separately afterwards. The money leaves before the answer arrives.
Why are there two different annual fees?
This is the fork that decides most of the bill, and it turns on what your business actually does rather than on how big it is.
Members in classic financial intermediation — VQF's own examples include acting as an organ of a domiciliary company, lending, payment services, trading and asset management — pay a per-file fee on their AML client files. Members whose business model departs from classic financial intermediation, or who keep no AML files at all, pay a turnover-based fee instead. Most crypto and payments businesses land in the second category.
| Basis | Band | CHF per year (excl. VAT) |
|---|---|---|
| AML file fee, tiered per file | Files 1–100 | 30 each |
| AML file fee, tiered per file | Files 101–500 | 20 each |
| AML file fee, tiered per file | Files 501 and above | 10 each |
| AML turnover fee | Turnover 0 – 100,000 | 500 – 1,500 |
| AML turnover fee | Turnover 100,001 – 250,000 | 1,500 – 3,000 |
| AML turnover fee | Turnover 250,001 – 500,000 | 3,000 – 5,000 |
| AML turnover fee | Turnover 500,001 – 1,000,000 | 5,000 – 7,500 |
| AML turnover fee | Turnover 1,000,001 – 2,000,000 | 7,500 – 10,000 |
| Annual minimum fee | Where the calculated fee is lower | 1,250 |
Note that the turnover column is a range, not a price. VQF's schedule states that the SRO fixes the amount within the band having regard to the specific shape of the business model. Above CHF 2 million of turnover, and for group structures, the fee is set by VQF on application after discussion with the member. Above 1,000 AML files the same discretion applies, and any special arrangement lapses if the member falls back below that threshold.
So the honest floor for a newly admitted member with negligible turnover is the CHF 400 contribution plus the CHF 1,250 minimum plus the CHF 750 audit administration fee — before a single hour of audit work is billed.
What does the audit cost?
Nobody publishes that number, and it is usually the largest recurring line.
VQF's schedule is explicit about why: the audit firm is mandated directly by the member, its fees for the SRO audit follow the hourly rates that audit firm has quoted, and it invoices the member directly. VQF prices only its own side — the CHF 750 administration fee, plus CHF 150 per reminder where a member breaches audit administration duties such as failing to notify the audit date in time. It also charges CHF 500 to accredit an audit firm for the first time and CHF 200 for a lead auditor.
PolyReg goes one step further and publishes a rate: CHF 250 per hour for auditors accredited with it, with members audited annually as a rule, and — from the third year of membership — the possibility for active members to defer an audit under certain conditions.
A rate without hours is not a price. What moves the hours is inside your control: how many product lines and geographies the AML file has to cover, whether internal directives were written for this business or copied, whether client files were maintained continuously or reconstructed the week before, and whether the previous audit left open points. Two members on the same published rate routinely pay very different totals. That is the real content of substance and risk.
Would a different SRO be cheaper?
Possibly — but the interesting difference is not the size of the numbers, it is the metric. VQF measures you by AML files or turnover. PolyReg measures you by the number of people in the business performing AML-relevant functions.
| Item | VQF (Zug) | PolyReg (Zurich) |
|---|---|---|
| Admission | 2,000 administration, plus 300–6,000 by time spent | By size band: 1,600 (1–3 people) · 2,600 (4–8) · 5,000 (9–27) · ≥12,000 (28+) |
| Annual fee metric | AML files, or turnover | Headcount in AML-relevant functions |
| Annual fee, smallest case | 400 contribution + 1,250 minimum | 1,800 as a rule (1,400 for inactive and voluntary members) |
| Audit rate | Not published — member mandates the audit firm directly | 250 per hour for accredited auditors |
| FINMA supervisory levy | No separate line in the published schedule | Stated as included in the annual fee |
A four-person crypto business with heavy volume and a twenty-person firm with modest turnover can rank in opposite order under those two rulers. A third SRO, ARIF in Geneva, publishes a separate tariff table (in force from 1 July 2024) with structurally different items again — CHF 1,500 for express handling of an affiliation application, CHF 500 a year to verify an audit firm's accreditation conditions and CHF 350 per responsible auditor. The lesson is not that one is cheap: it is that each SRO cuts the same total in a different place, so the comparison only becomes meaningful once your own file count, turnover and headcount are on the table.
The costs of leaving, and of getting it wrong
Two categories are almost always missing from a budget built at the start.
Exit. VQF's articles of association require three months' written notice to the end of a calendar year. A mid-year exit can be requested in justified exceptional cases, also on three months' notice — but there is no entitlement to one, the full annual contribution and any further fees remain payable for the whole year, and there is no right to a refund of what has already been paid. Membership is an annual commitment in practice, not a monthly one.
Enforcement. The same fee schedule prices failure. Measures proceedings run as a rule between CHF 300 and CHF 5,000; sanction proceedings as a rule between CHF 1,000 and CHF 15,000, with flat decision fees of CHF 1,000–5,000 for simple cases, CHF 5,000–8,000 for those of average complexity and CHF 8,000–15,000 for complex ones. Under its SRO rules VQF may impose a contractual penalty of up to CHF 1,500,000, measured by the severity of the breach, the degree of fault and the member's economic capacity. Challenging a sanction before the association's arbitrator carries a registration fee of CHF 10,000 where a contractual penalty or a reprimand is contested, and CHF 20,000 where exclusion is contested.
Read together, the schedule prices being wrong far above the cost of being right. A compliance budget trimmed at the start is generally borrowed rather than saved.
How to read a quote you are given
A credible number separates three things. Ask that any proposal do the same.
- Published and verifiable — the SRO's own schedule. You can check every line yourself against the documents cited here.
- Rate known, quantity unknown — the external AML audit, and any hourly advisory work. Honest here means a rate and an estimate of hours with the assumptions attached, not a single figure.
- No published figure exists — forming and maintaining the Swiss operating entity, the people who will carry the AML function, banking, and the work of getting internal directives and client files to an auditable standard. These are real and they are not on anyone's tariff.
Four numbers deliberately do not appear in this article, because no source we could fetch supports them: an all-in total, the cost of the Swiss entity and its local personnel, the number of audit hours, and any duration from filing to admission. No SRO publishes admission timelines or approval rates, so any percentage or week count you are shown was invented somewhere.
If you want the comparison against the two other common routes rather than a price on one of them, start with the three-route comparison, and see how we work for the shape of the engagement. No adviser can guarantee an outcome: the SRO decides whether to admit a member and retains full discretion. CryptoLicense is an advisory firm — not a regulator and not a law firm — and this article is not legal advice. Fee schedules are amended; the figures above are those in the current published versions cited.
本文属于系列指南：完整指南见 落地与风险.