Change of ownership and periodic inspection: when a property must be inspected again

The customer calls: the property is being sold, the notary is asking for the safety certificate, and the last inspection was seven years ago — but the twenty-year inspection interval does not expire for another thirteen years. Does it have to be inspected anyway?

The answer is not in the inspection interval itself but in a separate rule for a change of owner.

The rule: section 3 of the annex to the NIV

Electrical installations with an inspection interval of ten or twenty years must additionally be inspected at every change of ownership if more than five years have passed since the last inspection (section 3 of the annex to the NIV, the Low-Voltage Installation Ordinance, SR 734.27).

So two conditions must apply at the same time: there is a change of ownership, and the last inspection is more than five years old. If only one of the two applies, the current inspection interval stands — which interval applies in a given case is shown by the inspection interval calculator.

The purpose of the rule belongs to the same territory as Art. 219 para. 3 of the Swiss Code of Obligations (OR, SR 220), under which warranty claims for defects in a building sold with its land become time-barred five years after ownership is acquired: the new owner should take over a property whose electrical safety is known at the time of the change, rather than having to deal with an old defect years later.

What counts as a change of ownership — and what does not

The NIV itself does not define the term. The Federal Inspectorate for Heavy Current Installations ESTI has published its practice for the most common cases:

Transaction	Change of ownership within the meaning of the NIV?
Succession on death (the estate passes to the community of heirs)	No — universal succession
Division of the estate (the property passes from the community of heirs to one heir)	Yes
Advance on inheritance of a property	Yes
Gift of a property	Yes
Merger under the Merger Act	No — universal succession
Sale of jointly owned property to a third party	Yes
Sale of jointly owned property to an existing co-owner	No, except for a community of heirs selling to one heir (then as for a division of the estate: Yes)
Sale of an ordinary co-ownership share	No
Sale of the co-owned property as a whole	Yes
Sale of a condominium unit with exclusive right of use	Yes
Divorce	Depends on the division of marital property — one of the lines above, as the case may be

Succession itself therefore triggers nothing; only when the community of heirs divides the property among themselves or sells it to an outsider is there a change of ownership. And anyone who sells only their co-ownership share in a property does not trigger an inspection either — only the sale of the property as a whole, or of a condominium unit with exclusive right of use, does.

What this means for the electrical contractor

The question rarely comes from the owner himself, but through third parties — a notary, a property management company, a buyer who wants certainty before signing. Three points that can be settled in that conversation, before the time pressure builds:

1. Look up the date of the last inspection, do not estimate it. Only if it is more than five years ago is the change-of-ownership rule relevant at all.
2. Ask what kind of change of ownership it is. A succession on its own is not yet a change of ownership; a division of the estate, a gift or a sale are. With condominium ownership, the sale of a single unit is already enough.
3. Check only where the inspection interval is ten or twenty years. The rule expressly does not apply to installations with a one- or five-year interval.

A contractor who settles these three points can tell the customer before the appointment at the notary whether an inspection is due — rather than finding out when the buyer demands one in the purchase contract. How to commission an inspection body for it, and what the register of licensed firms is, is set out in the article «Commissioning an inspection body»; what happens when the deadline has already passed, in the article «The deadline for the safety certificate has passed».

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Sources: section 3 of the annex to the Ordinance on Low-Voltage Electrical Installations (NIV, SR 734.27), fedlex.admin.ch, version retrieved on 6 September 2026; Michelle Rebsamen and Daniel Otti (ESTI), «Periodische Kontrolle bei Handänderung», Bulletin SEV/VSE 3/2019, esti.admin.ch. This article is not legal advice: whether a change of ownership within the meaning of the NIV exists in a given case, particularly on divorce or with more complex transfers under company law, is a question of the individual case and, in case of doubt, one for the competent inspection body or the ESTI.