KOF Economic Barometer: Economic outlook remains favourable
The KOF Economic Barometer rises in September. After its consecutive increases over the previous months, it continues to stay above its medium-term average. The outlook for the Swiss economy remains favourable.
In September, the KOF Economic Barometer increases by 1.6 points to a level of 109.1 (after a revised 107.5 in the previous month). Among the indicator bundles included in the Economic Barometer, the indicator bundles for manufacturing, services, as well as for construction show particularly positive developments. A slightly weakened outlook, however, is shown by the indicators for foreign demand and financial and insurance services.
Within the producing industry (manufacturing and construction), the majority of the sub-indicators for the different aspects of business activity exhibit positive developments. In particular, the sub-indicators for exports, for stockpiling of intermediate products, and for the general business situation indicate a brightened outlook. The sub-indicators for employment prospects, however, are under pressure.
The positive developments are supported by most of the sub-indicators within manufacturing. While the sub-indicators for machinery and equipment manufacturing are slowing down, the sub-indicators for the chemical and pharmaceutical industry, for paper and printing products, as well as for the textile industry develop particularly favourably.
KOF Economic Barometer and Reference Series: Annual Update
The annual 2026 revision took place in September. These updates always comprise the following steps: a redefinition of the pool of indicators that enter the selection procedure, an update of the reference time series and a renewed execution of the automated variable selection procedure. For further background information, we refer to the document ‘Background Information KOF Economic Barometer September 2026 Revision’.
The updated pool of indicators now consists of 538 economic time series. The updated reference series is the smoothed growth rate of Swiss GDP distributed across the three months of a quarter from 2016 until and including 2025, based on the official quarterly real GDP statistics, adjusted for the effects of major international sporting events, as released by the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) at the beginning of September 2026. SECO in turn takes the release of the previous year’s annual GDP data published by the SFSO into account.
The 2025 vintage of the KOF Economic Barometer (published until August 2026) comprised 342 indicator variables. The current 2026 vintage, which is now replacing the 2025 vintage, consists of 327 indicator variables. Compared to the previous vintage, 33 indicators are new and 48 indicators dropped out of the set of selected indicators. The Barometer is the rescaled weighted average of the selected indicators, where the weights correspond to the loadings of the first principal component.