NZZ Paywall: How to Read Neue Zürcher Zeitung Articles for Free

The Neue Zürcher Zeitung, almost always just NZZ, is the Zurich daily that has been publishing since 1780 and is the flagship of the NZZ media group. It is the paper of Switzerland's liberal-conservative establishment: sober on economics, sceptical of the state, with a foreign desk and a Feuilleton that are read well beyond Switzerland, and in recent years it has built a sizeable readership in Germany as a counterweight to the German press. Its commentary, its science and culture features and its long reported pieces are the ones most often marked NZZ+, so a reader arriving from a search result or a shared link frequently meets the subscription prompt. This guide explains how the paywall works and how to read a full article.

How the NZZ paywall works

NZZ runs a freemium paywall with a meter on top. Breaking news and short agency items are generally open. Articles labelled NZZ+, which include most opinion pieces, interviews, investigations and Feuilleton essays, are reserved for subscribers, and as far as we can tell non-subscribers can also open only a limited number of articles before a registration or subscription box appears. The count is kept in a browser cookie.

The gate is enforced in the browser. The article text is delivered in the page so that search engines can index it, and a script then checks whether you are a subscriber or over your limit and replaces the body with the subscription box. A reader that fetches the page without running that script receives the complete article. Our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls sets out why that distinction matters, and NZZ sits on the softer side of it.

Our tests on 22 October 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• A 1,582-word NZZ science feature asking how sustainable new textile fibres such as lyocell, milk fibre and pineapple leather really are loaded in full, all 45 paragraphs.
• A 1,688-word NZZ opinion column arguing that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's claim that "woke is over" is wishful thinking loaded in full, all 48 paragraphs.
• A 1,269-word NZZ Feuilleton essay by the writer Jürg Halter on public pressure, self-censorship and the oppressive feeling of unfreedom loaded in full, all 28 paragraphs.

Read an NZZ article in full

• Copy the article link. NZZ links look like nzz.ch/meinung/ or nzz.ch/feuilleton/ followed by a slug and an id such as -ld.10025716.
• Paste it into the box on the home page and press Read Article.
• The story appears in a clean reader view with the headline, byline and full text.

The reader shows the article in German, exactly as NZZ published it. If you want it in English, your browser's built-in translation works on the reader page in the normal way.

Other approaches

• Newsletters. NZZ sends free email briefings, including a morning newsletter and section bulletins, that summarise the main stories and link to them.
• Library access. NZZ is carried on PressReader, which many public libraries in Switzerland, Germany, the UK and North America offer free to cardholders, and Swiss libraries commonly provide access to the paper's archive.
• Private windows. The meter lives in a cookie, so a private window resets it, though NZZ+ pieces stay closed.
• Related free sources. Swiss federal documents, Federal Council statements and Swiss National Bank releases are published free, and much of NZZ's domestic and economic reporting can be checked against them.

How it compares with other German-language papers

NZZ is one of the few major German-language dailies that passes. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung sends only a short preview to the reader and is not listed. Die Zeit, Die Welt and Süddeutsche Zeitung blocked the reader in our October 2026 tests, and Handelsblatt did the same, so there are no guides for them. Der Standard in Vienna loaded in full in one test, but most of its site is free to read anyway. Two other European titles do work: the Berlin weekly der Freitag and the Dutch quality daily NRC. The full list of sites that work is kept current, and our guide to sites that cannot be bypassed explains what to do about the rest.

Subscribe if you read it regularly

NZZ keeps correspondents across Europe, the United States and Asia and runs one of the strongest science and culture desks in the German-speaking world. If you read its commentary and Feuilleton every week, a digital subscription, which is usually discounted for the first months, is the right way to keep that reporting going.