Available organs are allocated in accordance with relevant legal provisions developed by medical professionals working in the area of transplantation in cooperation with the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH).

The basic legal principles for organ allocation are defined as follows:
• The Transplantation Act stipulates the basic conditions for organ transplants. This includes a prohibition on fees paid to donors and on commerce in organs, requirements that must be fulfilled prior to removing organs, and relevant criteria for declaration of death and for allocation of organs.
• The Organ Allocation Ordinance contains provisions governing the acceptance of patients into the waiting list as well as the general and organ-specific resolutions on allocation criteria and priorities.
• Finally, the Organ Allocation Ordinance FDHA (Federal Department of Home Affairs) describes in detail the allocation criteria for the individual organs.

The priority of patients on the waiting list is determined primarily based on the following criteria:

Organs are allocated using an Internet-based computer program known as SOAS (Swiss Organ Allocation System). SOAS contains data for all recipients on the Swiss waiting list as well as data for all donors. Based on the available data, the system computes the priorities of the registered recipients in order to enable allocation of donor organs in compliance with the applicable laws.