How the salary statistics work

Swedish pay is quoted as a gross monthly amount. A job ad advertising 45 000 — Swedish separates thousands with a space, not a comma — means 45,000 kronor a month before tax, not a yearly figure. Multiply by twelve for an annual equivalent, and note that holiday pay is normally already inside the monthly salary rather than added on top.

The median across all jobs in Sweden is 38,300 SEK a month, or roughly €3,400 / $3,950 at September 2026 exchange rates. Currency conversions on this site are approximate and shown only as a reference point; the underlying statistics are always in kronor.

There is no statutory minimum wage in Sweden. Pay floors come from collective agreements negotiated between unions and employer organisations, sector by sector, and those agreements cover around 90% of employees.

Income tax is mostly municipal and lands around 30–34% for a typical earner, with an additional national surtax on income above roughly 51,000 SEK a month. Employer social contributions of about 31% are paid by the employer on top of the salary and are not part of any figure here.

The statistics are called salary structure statistics, whole economy (lönestrukturstatistik, hela ekonomin) and are produced by Statistics Sweden on behalf of the National Mediation Office. They are based on returns from employers and cover the whole labour market — central government, municipal and private sector.

We use the reference year 2025, published by Statistics Sweden on 16 June 2026. New statistics normally arrive in June each year, and the whole site updates automatically when they do.

The data is fetched through Statistics Sweden's open API and licensed as CC0, which means it is free to use. lonen.se is not affiliated with Statistics Sweden.

Every amount is monthly salary converted to a full-time equivalent. A part-time employee is scaled up to what they would earn full time, so occupations with a lot of part-time work do not look artificially cheap.

The figure includes basic pay plus fixed and variable supplements — for example unsocial-hours pay, on-call compensation and shift allowances. Overtime pay is not included. All amounts are before tax.

The average is the mean of every salary in the occupation. It is pulled upwards by a small number of high salaries and is therefore usually higher than the median. Across all jobs in Sweden the average is 42,900 SEK.

The median is the salary in the middle: half earn less, half earn more. It gives a better picture of what a typical person in the job earns. Across all jobs it is 38,300 SEK.

Percentiles show the spread. If 10% earn less than 30,000 SEK, we say the 10th percentile (P10) is 30,000 SEK. In the same way, P90 is the level only the highest-paid 10% get above. The distance between P10 and P90 says a great deal about how much pay in an occupation can vary.

Occupations follow SSYK 2012, the Swedish standard classification of occupations, which is built on the international ISCO-08 standard. Each occupation has a four-digit code, printed on every page, so a figure here can be matched against international data or traced back to the source table.

English occupation names come from Statistics Sweden's own English edition of the database; for high-traffic occupations we use a shorter, more familiar title. Each page also lists the Swedish job titles that fall under the code — useful when reading Swedish job ads.

Statistics Sweden does not report values where too few people were observed, partly because the figure would be unreliable and partly to protect individuals' salaries. In those cases we show a dash (–).

For the same reason 34 of the SSYK occupations are missing from the site entirely: they have no reported median for 2025. We would rather build fewer pages than pages without content.

The number of people employed in an occupation normally comes from the same survey as the salaries, and so counts exactly the group the salary figures describe. But the private sector part of the wage statistics is a sample survey, and Statistics Sweden suppresses the count when the sample for an occupation is too thin — which applies to 92 of the 395 occupations here.

For those we take the figure from Statistics Sweden's occupational register 2024 instead, a full count of every employee with no suppressed cells. Where an occupation page says Statistics Sweden's occupational register 2024 beneath the number, that is the source you are looking at. The register counts somewhat more people than the survey — it includes every employee, not just the survey's frame — and refers to a year earlier, so the two figures are not directly comparable between occupations.

Starting salary. Statistics Sweden publishes no separate starting-salary statistics. The closest you get is the youngest age group and the 10th percentile, both of which we show on every occupation page.

The gender pay gap. The figure “women's salary as a percentage of men's” is calculated by Statistics Sweden on average monthly salary, not on the median — so it does not correspond exactly to the male and female medians in the same table. It is also unadjusted: it does not account for differences in age, sector, position or working hours, and should not be read as a measure of discrimination in itself.

Counties. Pay by occupation is only reported at the level of the eight NUTS 2 national areas, not by county or municipality.

Your salary. The statistics describe groups, not individuals. What you can ask for depends on experience, employer, location and negotiation.

Statistics Sweden switched to the SSYK 2012 occupational classification in 2014 and changed how staff categories are classified in the private sector at the same time. The pay-growth charts therefore mark where the older series gives way to the newer one. Comparisons across that break should be made with care.