Grocery shopping in Valais: when the shops close, and where they stay open

In Valais the closing time is set by the canton, not by the chain. The cantonal shop opening law of 22 March 2002 (LOM) and its regulation of 23 October 2002 apply uniformly across the canton, as the Service de l’industrie, du commerce et du travail states on vs.ch (retrieved September 2026). An ordinary shop therefore closes at 18:30 Monday to Friday, at 17:00 on Saturday and on the eve of a public holiday, and stays shut on Sunday. Exactly one evening a week runs until 21:00, and the commune decides which one. This guide sets out where the exceptions are, what changes in the mountain resorts, and why the promotion calendar, by contrast, does not stop at the cantonal border.

Last updated: September 2026. Sources: the Valais shop opening law of 22 March 2002 (LOM) and its regulation of 23 October 2002, presented by the Service de l’industrie, du commerce et du travail on vs.ch; circular no 1 of the same service on applying the LOM (Sion, October 2002); RTS on the revision and the popular vote; the result of the cantonal vote of 3 March 2024 per the official communication carried by the Bulletin officiel Valais Wallis; corporate.migros.ch for Migros Valais; aligro.ch for the Sion branch; foodaktuell.ch, aldi-suisse.ch and lidl.ch for the promotion days. This guide deliberately quotes no prices: they change every Thursday.

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What time do shops close in Valais?

For every shop without a specific derogation, circular no 1 of the cantonal service sums up the LOM like this: Monday to Friday until 18:30, Saturday and the eve of a public holiday until 17:00, Sunday closed, plus one extended weekly evening until 21:00. The most useful detail is what the law does not fix. The LOM sets closing times as binding rules but prescribes no opening time at all, so each shop decides for itself when it raises the shutter. The midday break is no longer regulated either, which is why some shops in Valais stay open over lunch and others do not.

The extended weekly evening is the point where two Valais communes can differ. The canton does not pick the day, the municipal council does, and the commune has to notify the cantonal service every year by 30 November for the coming twelve months. Live in Sion and work in Martigny, and your late evening may well fall on two different weekdays. Since 2002 the LOM has no longer been a framework law: a commune cannot set hours that contradict it, it can only fill in the slots the law leaves open.

Sunday in Valais: closed, with five ways out

The rule is closure on Sundays and public holidays. The LOM then allows five situations in which something stays open, and all five are narrowly drawn.

First, the municipal council may grant a single derogation per year, from 13:00 to 18:00, and it has to be tied to a particular event: a village festival, a Christmas market, a cultural or sporting event. Second, bakeries, pastry shops, confectioners, dairies, florists, kiosks, tobacconists and newsagents may open until 18:30 on Sundays and public holidays, provided they are not part of a shopping centre. Third, family businesses and food shops with a sales area of up to 100 m² may stay open until 20:00 Monday to Saturday and until 12:00 on Sundays and public holidays. Fourth, a particular group of shops gets a 22:00 limit all week, Sundays included: service-station food shops up to 100 m², shops in campsites and in cultural, sports and leisure complexes up to 100 m², art galleries, and places tasting and promoting Valais produce. Fifth, railway-station shops of the Aperto type fall outside the LOM entirely, because they are covered by article 39 of the federal railways act.

Table source: circular no 1 of the Service de l’industrie, du commerce et du travail on the LOM of 22 March 2002 and its regulation of 23 October 2002, published on vs.ch. The 100 m² threshold is not administrative trivia: it is the dividing line, and the same shop switches regime depending on its sales area.

Tourist places: the rule that changes everything in the resorts

Shops located in a tourist place may open all week and on Sundays and public holidays until 21:00. The LOM defines such places as localities offering cures, sports, excursions or restful stays, for which tourism plays a preponderant role while being subject to strong seasonal variation, plus localities at a direct border crossing with France or Italy. That is the legal reason you can do a food shop on a Sunday evening in a Valais resort while everything down in the valley is shut.

Two subtleties matter a great deal and are routinely missed. First, the list of these places is fixed by the cantonal government in the annex to the regulation, and that annex may be reviewed every two years. It is an official list, not a judgement call about how touristy a village feels. Second, in a tourist place the municipal council may set only more restrictive hours, and only after consulting the local traders’ associations. Then there is the season: the commune reports the length of its tourist seasons to the canton by 30 November. The same resort can therefore run under the 21:00 regime in February and under ordinary hours in May.

Which Valais localities actually appear in that annex is something we could not verify against an official source in this research, so this guide names no commune. The reliable move is to ask the local municipal administration where you are going. The border-crossing clause is also worth knowing if you cross: the rules on the other side are entirely different, and a separate guide covers shopping in Italy from Switzerland.

Sion, Martigny, Brig: one law, two languages

Valais is bilingual, and you notice it in the aisles. Lower Valais, with Sion, Martigny, Sierre and Monthey, works in French; Upper Valais, with Brig and Visp, in German. The closing-hours law does not change from one valley to the next: hours are harmonised across the whole canton.

On the retail side, Valais has a quirk that goes beyond language: Migros is organised there as its own cooperative, Migros Valais, which describes itself with 1'221 staff as one of the canton’s leading private employers (corporate.migros.ch, September 2026). What that means for the weekly flyer and the assortment is set out in the guide to the ten Migros cooperatives and is not repeated here. Aligro lists a branch in Sion on aligro.ch (September 2026), and Aligro requires no membership card. For the other chains this guide gives no branch count in Valais: we found no verifiable public source, and an approximate figure would be worth nothing.

The promotion calendar does not stop at the cantonal border

On closing hours Valais is a special case. On promotions it is not. Migros, Coop and Denner start their weekly Aktionen on Thursday, Coop since the week of 21 January 2025 (media release carried by foodaktuell.ch), Migros and Denner since 5 February 2026. Aldi Suisse and Lidl Schweiz run two waves a week, Monday and Thursday (aldi-suisse.ch, lidl.ch). In Valais that produces a particular combination: the shelf moves on Thursday morning, but Thursday evening ends at 18:30 in an ordinary commune, unless that happens to be the extended evening.

This is exactly where a search beats a paper flyer: prices change every Thursday, and Rappn shows the ones that apply today, the seven chains side by side and filtered to your canton.

December: three late evenings until 22:00

For the Christmas period, which the law fixes as 1 to 23 December, the municipal council may grant all shops three late evenings with opening until 22:00. The trade-off is spelled out in the circular: once those Christmas late evenings are set, the ordinary extended weekly evening is abolished for that period. So it is three extra evenings, not three plus the usual one. The choice of the three days belongs to the commune, which reports it to the canton by 30 November.

What the vote of 3 March 2024 changed

Nothing, and that is precisely the point. The cantonal parliament had adopted the LOM revision on 11 May 2023: it would have pushed ordinary weekday closing from 18:30 to 19:00 and let communes define their own tourist zones, with opening seven days a week until 21:00 (RTS, 2024). A referendum followed, and the electorate rejected the text on 3 March 2024: according to the official communication carried by the Bulletin officiel Valais Wallis, 64.95 per cent of Valais voters came out against it. The 2002 clock therefore stands, with 18:30 on weekdays and 17:00 on Saturdays.

How to plan your week in Valais

It depends on your commune, and that is not a dodge, it is the structure of the law. The hour is cantonal, but the extended evening, the annual Sunday derogation, the three December evenings and the length of the tourist seasons are all set by your commune. Three things are worth looking up once and then remembering: which weekday is the late evening where you live, whether the place you are heading to is listed in the annex as a tourist place, and where the nearest shop under 100 m² is, the one open on Sunday morning until 12:00.

The price question cannot be settled in a guide, because it comes back every Thursday. Filter to canton Valais in Rappn and look at what is on offer today across the seven chains before deciding whether the drive down to the valley is worth it. To compare with the rest of French-speaking Switzerland there are dedicated guides to Lausanne, Geneva and Fribourg.