NEUCHATEL - A quarter of Switzerland's residential buildings were fitted with a heat pump by 31 December 2025, the Federal Statistical Office reported on Tuesday. The share has risen sixfold since 2000 and now covers about three quarters of homes built in the past decade.
The country had 1.8 million residential buildings and 4.88 million dwellings. More than a million of those buildings were detached houses, and 55 percent of them housed only one or two people. Half of all residential buildings still used fossil fuels: heating oil 33 percent and gas 17 percent. Oil remains the largest single source, though its share has fallen for forty years.
Town and country heat differently
Gas is a city fuel. It warmed 29 percent of dwellings in urban municipalities and only 4 percent in rural ones. Nearly a third of detached houses now have a heat pump. Looked at by household rather than building, 58 percent of households still used oil or gas in 2025, and 22 percent used a heat pump.
The numbers will feed the climate debate that opened with the Federal Council's 2035 targets. Cantons that want federal retrofit money will be judged against a stock that is changing quickly at the new-build end and slowly in older blocks. Zurich's density rules, covered in our cantonal housing report, will only cut emissions if those extra flats are not locked into oil boilers.