We prove a recent conjecture of Borot et al. that a particular universal closed algebraic formula recovers the correlation differentials of topological recursion after the swap of $x$ and $y$ in the input data. We also show that this universal formula can be drastically simplified (as it was already done by Hock). As an application of this general $x-y$ swap result, we prove an explicit closed formula for the topological recursion differentials for the case of any spectral curve with unramified $y$ and arbitrary rational $x$.