estv-mcp

MCP server for the official Swiss federal tax administration calculator at swisstaxcalculator.estv.admin.ch.

It wraps the undocumented JSON API behind that SPA (no key, no auth) and exposes income, wealth, lump-sum, inheritance and corporate tax figures for every Swiss municipality and tax years 2010-2026.

Tools

Household income and wealth:

Comparing places:

Planning:

Other taxes:

Related MCP server: swiss-democracy-mcp

Install

uv sync

Register with Claude Code

From inside the repository:

claude mcp add estv-tax -- uv run --directory "$PWD" estv-mcp

Add -s user to make it available in every project rather than just this one.

Or in any MCP client config, with /path/to/estv-mcp replaced by wherever you cloned it:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "estv-tax": {
      "command": "uv",
      "args": ["run", "--directory", "/path/to/estv-mcp", "estv-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Development

uv sync                            # install, including dev group
uv run pytest -q                   # tool-level tests plus golden values
uv run python scripts/stdio_smoke.py  # real MCP stdio handshake
uv run ruff check . && uv run ruff format --check .

Tests hit the live ESTV API, so they need network access but no credentials. CI runs lint, the suite on Python 3.11/3.12/3.13, and the stdio smoke check on every push and pull request, plus weekly on a schedule.

Golden values

tests/golden.json pins recorded figures for a closed tax year, where the scales should never move again. tests/test_golden.py re-checks them against the live API with caching disabled, so the weekly run reports upstream drift as a concrete diff rather than just confirming the endpoint still answers.

When a golden test fails, read the diff first. It usually means ESTV changed something, not that this repo is broken. Once the change is understood:

uv run python scripts/update_golden.py   # prints every value that moved

Caching

Responses are cached under ~/.cache/estv-mcp for a week, which matters because the planning tools fan out into dozens of sub-queries. ESTV_MCP_NO_CACHE=1 disables it, ESTV_MCP_CACHE_DIR and ESTV_MCP_CACHE_TTL override the location and lifetime.

Notes

• Amounts are CHF per year. income_type='employed' means gross salary; the model derives AHV/IV/EO, ALV, NBU and BVG contributions itself.

• Deduction overrides go through deductions={id: value} on calculate_tax, using the ids from list_deductions (PRAEMIEN3A pillar 3a, SCHULDZINSEN mortgage interest, KKPRAEMIEN health insurance premiums, MIETAUSGABEN rent, KINDBETREUUNGSKOSTEN childcare, and so on).

• compare_locations(scope='switzerland') covers ~2100 municipalities; only the extremes plus summary statistics come back so results stay readable.

• Church tax is only charged for confession values other than none.

• plan_capital_withdrawals models the rule that payouts received in the same calendar year are aggregated before the rate applies, so splitting within a year correctly shows no saving. It does not model the federal aggregation of a spouse's payouts, and years beyond ESTV's published range are priced with the latest available scales. Both are stated in the result's caveats.

• explain_tax_brackets always takes the amount from ESTV. The ladder is rebuilt from the published scale and reproduces ESTV exactly for the ZUERICH and BUND table layouts; splitting cantons apply extra rounding (flagged via ladder_note), and BL, FR, VD and VS publish formulas rather than tables, where the ladder is omitted rather than guessed at.

• Figures are the official ESTV model, not a binding assessment.

API notes

Base URL: https://swisstaxcalculator.estv.admin.ch/delegate/ost-integration/v1/lg-proxy/operation/c3b67379_ESTV. Every operation is a POST with a JSON body answering {"response": ...}. Bad input returns an HTML 500 page rather than a structured error, which api.EstvClient translates into an EstvError.

Enum values (from the SPA bundle):

• Relationship: single 1, married 2, concubinage 3, registered partnership 4

• Confession: reformed 1, roman catholic 2, christ catholic 3, none 4, other 5

• Income type: employed 1, self-employed 2, pensioner 3, other 4

• Language: de 1, fr 2, it 3, en 4

• TaxGroupID: cantons alphabetically 1-26 (AG=1 … ZH=26), capitals 88, all of Switzerland 99

Two gotchas worth recording:

• API_exportManyTaxScales reuses the same field names for two different layouts. In ZUERICH tables Amount is the width of a band; in BUND tables it is the lower threshold and Taxes carries the tax already due at it. Reading a BUND table with the ZUERICH rule gives a plausible but wrong number, so TableType has to be honoured.

• The geo search returns at most 200 results, silently clipping a large radius. find_cheapest_nearby detects the cap and says so.