Advertisement

Sweden: 25 statutory leave days and no statutory overtime premium at all

Sweden pairs two facts that sound contradictory. The Semesterlagen guarantees 25 days of annual leave, five weeks, among the most generous statutory entitlements anywhere. Whether all of them are paid is a separate question in your first year: paid days are earned over a qualifying year running from April to March, so a new starter has the time off without necessarily having earned the pay for every day of it. And the Arbetstidslagen, which fixes ordinary working time at 40 hours a week, attaches no premium whatsoever to the hours beyond it. There is no Swedish equivalent of time and a half in law.

That is less alarming than it reads, because Swedish law deliberately leaves pay to the kollektivavtal. Around nine in ten Swedish employees are covered by a collective agreement, and those agreements set the overtime supplements, typically stepped by time of day and day of week rather than by a single multiplier. "No statutory premium" here almost never means "no premium"; it means the number is in your union agreement rather than in the statute, and this calculator cannot know which agreement covers you.

Public holidays sit in the same place. They are not separately guaranteed as paid time off by statute, but most fall on days the collective agreement covers, so the eleven counted here are an indicative figure rather than a legal entitlement.

The upshot is that a Swedish salary spreads over about 2,080 paid hours but only around 1,792 worked ones once five weeks of leave and the holidays come out, lifting the rate per hour actually worked by roughly a sixth over the headline figure.

For how the calculation works, the formula behind it and what it leaves out, see the full guide.

Data sources

  • Swedish working time and holiday entitlement

    Effective 1978-01-01 onward · retrieved 2026-08-30

    Public holidays are not separately guaranteed as paid, but most fall on days covered by collective agreements.

    How we checked these figures

    Semesterlagen: 25 days of paid annual leave. Arbetstidslagen: 40 ordinary hours a week.

    Current

This calculator in other countries

Each country has its own rates, thresholds and rules, and its own page with the official sources they came from.

CentExact Editorial · Research & verification

Every CentExact calculator is built from the published finance formula, tested against spreadsheet, lender and tax-authority figures, and reviewed when the underlying rates or rules change.

How we build and test our calculators

Figures are estimates derived from published rates and rules, current at the review date shown at the top of this page and taken from the sources listed below. Rates, fees and thresholds change; always confirm current values with the official source before relying on a result.