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Swiss asylum accommodation: federal asylum centres, Vaud and Bern

84 documented sites: 18 federal asylum centres, 37 collective accommodation structures in the canton of Vaud and 29 centres in the canton of Bern. Swiss asylum accommodation has two tiers. The Confederation runs the federal asylum centres, where people stay for the first phase of the procedure. They are then assigned to a canton, and the 26 cantons house them under 26 different arrangements with no national register. The cantonal tier is covered here for two cantons only. The mapped federal centres still in the system carry 4,580 of the 7,020 places SEM states as its politically agreed capacity; that is a ceiling, not a headcount.

Federal asylum centres (SEM) · 18

Centres run by the State Secretariat for Migration that have a published building address. The figure beside each is the politically agreed capacity, a ceiling and not a headcount. SEM does not publish which centres are in operation, so each status comes from dated releases and press reports cited on the page.

Canton of Vaud: EVAM collective accommodation · 37

From the list of accommodation structures for adults and families published by EVAM, the canton’s public reception body. EVAM publishes an address and no capacity. Flats are never mapped.

Canton of Bern: collective accommodation (third-party directory, October 2025) · 22

The canton of Bern publishes no list. These entries come from the October 2025 directory of KKF, a contact point run by the churches. It is not an official source, it gives no capacity, and we have not confirmed each centre since that date.

Canton of Bern: return centres (same third-party directory) · 6

Open centres for people whose asylum application was rejected and who are required to leave Switzerland. They receive emergency aid. These are not detention facilities.

Accommodation for people displaced from Ukraine, not asylum capacity · 1

People displaced from Ukraine hold protection status S, a separate legal route from asylum, so this is listed apart and never counted as asylum accommodation.

What is not here. SEM publishes further sites with a town and no building address: its emergency-planning sites, two airport units and sites reachable only through a post-office box. They stay off the map until an address is published, because a pin at a town centre would be an invented location. Two entries in SEM’s address list are offices, not accommodation. Twenty-four cantons are not covered at all, and flats are never mapped anywhere. The only cost figure that exists is federal: CHF 411.6m in 2025 for the operation of the federal centres (Staatsrechnung 2025, credit A202.0156). No accommodation cost figure exists for the cantonal centres.

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