Work & your rights

When you accept a job in Sweden, what you're actually entitled to isn't just whatever your employer happens to tell you — a lot of it comes either from the law itself or from an agreement your employer's whole industry already negotiated with a union, which applies to you automatically even if you never join that union yourself.

• Your employer must give you written information about your employment terms within 7 days of starting: salary, working hours, workplace, job title, notice period.
• Kollektivavtal (collective agreements) cover roughly 90% of the Swedish workforce and typically set pay scales, pension contributions, and extra holiday beyond the legal minimum — ask on day one whether your employer has one and which union/sector it's tied to.
• Both permanent (tillsvidareanställning) and fixed-term (visstidsanställning) contracts exist; a probation period (provanställning) can run up to 6 months.

Sweden puts a legal ceiling on how many hours you can normally be made to work, and separate, tighter rules on "extra" hours beyond that (overtime) — how much of it is allowed and how it should be handled.

• Legal maximum under Arbetstidslagen (the Working Hours Act): 40 hours/week ordinary time (many kollektivavtal set 37.5–38.75h instead).
• Overtime is capped at 48 hours over 4 weeks (or 50/month), with a yearly ceiling of 200 hours ordinary overtime plus up to 150 hours "extra" overtime in special circumstances — pay/compensation rates come from your kollektivavtal, not a fixed legal %.
• You're entitled to daily/weekly rest periods (11 consecutive hours/day, 36 hours/week) and breaks on longer shifts.

This one genuinely surprises a lot of newcomers: Sweden has no government-set minimum wage at all. There's no single number you can look up as "the minimum wage," unlike in many other countries — pay floors come from somewhere else entirely.

• Sweden has no statutory minimum wage. Pay floors come instead from kollektivavtal (the same industry-negotiated agreements from above) — roughly 22,000–28,000 kr/month for full-time entry-level work (hotel/restaurant/retail ~25–26k, warehousing/logistics ~28–29k, entry IT ~28–32k).
• Average full-time salary nationally is about 37,000–41,000 kr/month gross; typical net take-home after tax is roughly 25,000–27,000 kr/month.
• Salary is paid monthly by bank transfer with a payslip (lönespecifikation) — keep them. Pension contributions via a kollektivavtal (tjänstepension) are standard even without a legal minimum requirement.

How paid vacation actually works in Sweden trips up a lot of newcomers who assume it works like it does back home — it's worth understanding the mechanism, not just the headline "25 days" number.

• Statutory minimum: 25 paid vacation days/year (Semesterlagen). The "semester year" runs 1 April – 31 March, and you have a right to 4 consecutive weeks off between June and August.
• Unlike some neighbouring countries, most monthly-salaried employees keep getting their normal salary during vacation PLUS a small per-day supplement (sammalöneregeln, roughly 0.43% of monthly pay per vacation day) — it is NOT unpaid time followed by a lump sum next year.
• Hourly/variable-pay workers instead get the percentage rule: holiday pay = at least 12% of what you earned in the prior 12-month earning period, paid out when you take leave.
• You can save up to 5 unused vacation days per year, for up to 5 years.

If you get sick and can't work, Sweden has a specific system for who pays you and how much, and it changes in stages depending on how long you're out — it's not just one flat rule the whole time.

• Day 1 of a sick period carries a karensavdrag (qualifying deduction) of about 20% of an average week's sick pay — a cost-sharing mechanism, not a full unpaid day.
• Your employer pays sjuklön for days 1–14 at roughly 80% of salary; a doctor's certificate is required from day 8.
• From day 15, Försäkringskassan (the Social Insurance Agency) takes over with sickness benefit (sjukpenning), also around 80% up to a ceiling.
• Caring for a sick child under 12 (occasionally up to 16) is a completely separate benefit: paid leave via Försäkringskassan (VAB — vård av barn), roughly 120 days/year per child at ~80% of income.

Two related but technically separate memberships matter a lot for your financial safety in Sweden, especially if you ever lose your job — most Swedes join both together, but they aren't automatically the same thing.

• Union membership is common and normal — LO (blue-collar), TCO and Saco (white-collar/academic) are the big federations; fees are typically 1–2% of salary.
• a-kassa (unemployment insurance fund) is technically separate from union membership but almost always joined alongside it. To qualify for income-based benefits you generally need 12 months of a-kassa membership plus having earned at least 120,000 kr over the past 12 months (at least 11,000 kr in 4 of those months).
• Join a union AND an a-kassa in your first weeks — the qualifying period means late joiners are exposed if they lose their job early.