Read news from:
Austria
SHARE
COPY LINK
For members

LIVING IN SWEDEN

How to bring your pet to Sweden 

With ample green spaces and welcoming cafes, Sweden is one of the most dog-friendly countries in the world. If you want to move with your furry family members, here’s what you need to do to get them to Sweden. 

Published: 5 May 2021 16:12 CEST
Dogs in a car
Photo: Ron Bull/AP Photo/Toronto Star/Scanpix

Some pets can’t enter

Puppies and kittens must be at least 12 weeks old before they can travel to Sweden. You’re not allowed to separate a puppy from their mother before 8 weeks of age.

Get them microchipped 

To bring a pet to Sweden, it must have an ISO-microchip or an identification tattoo before travel. It’s compulsory for your dog to be ID-tagged and for you to register your ownership in a central register when they arrive. You have to microchip a pet before they can receive any of the necessary vaccines. 

Get them vaccinated 

Sweden is considered a rabies-free country, and it wants to stay that way. Any dog or cat that you bring to the country must have had a rabies vaccine more than one month and less than one year before travel. An animal must be over 12 weeks old to get the rabies vaccine and you have to wait 21 days after the primary vaccination before you’re allowed to travel. 

Non-vaccinated puppies, kittens and ferrets are not permitted to enter Sweden from any country, except Norway. 

Additional proof of an antibodies test might also be required if you’re travelling from outside the EU. In some rare cases, you might have to quarantine your pet if you’re coming from a country with a high rabies risk.

This doesn’t apply to animals that don’t transmit rabies, like reptiles or birds. 

The Swedish Kennel club says that all puppies should be vaccinated against parvovirus, canine distemper and infectious canine hepatitis, in a so-called triple vaccine, but this isn’t a prerequisite for entering the country.

European animal passport
A dog’s EU pet passport, ready for travel. Photo: Chiara Milford

Get them documents

Pets need to carry a valid EU pet passport (which is exactly as cute as it sounds) with proof of their rabies vaccinations. You can get this from any vet in a European country. The passport doesn’t run out, but vaccine shots have expiry dates.  

If you’re coming from outside the EU – which includes the UK – you’ll need a certificate stamped by an official veterinarian. A UK pet passport won’t be accepted anymore. 

A state-certified vet needs to sign and stamp documents regarding ID marking/microchipping, rabies vaccination, and a pet owner’s declaration (a form which states the animal is yours and you don’t plan on selling them when you get to Sweden). You can only get this three months after the collection of the blood sample for a rabies antibody check. They’re very strict about this. 

This certificate is only valid for ten days after issuing and allows four months of travel within the EU, so you might need to move fast. 

These documents will be checked at an official Entry Point when you arrive. You need to notify Customs of your pet’s arrival at least 48 hours in advance, as well as the border inspection veterinarian. You can do this online, if you’re coming from another EU country or by using the red “items to declare” lane at Customs. This is to prevent illegal animal trafficking. 

If you’ve bought an expensive pet (one that cost over 3,000 SEK if you’re coming via car or train, or over 4,300 SEK by plane or ferry) outside the EU, you’ll have to pay import duty on them. More information can be found via the Swedish Customs website. 

For further information, the Swedish Board of Agriculture has a useful guide for travelling to Sweden with a pet cat, dog or ferret.

Dogs in Gothenburg
Luckily you won’t have to queue to register your dog. Photo: Thomas Johansson/TT

Get them registered

Once you arrive in Sweden, you need to register your dog’s ownership with the Swedish Board of Agriculture. You can do this online here for just 40 kronor. You don’t need to do this if they’re not a dog. 

Your dog will be linked to your personnummer, so you’ll need a human Swedish ID too. It’s advisable to move yourself before you bring a pet, because it can take a few months to get a Swedish personnummer set up. 

It helps if you register your pet with a site like DjurID.se, especially in the terrible event that you lose them. 

European animal passport
A visit to the vet. Photo: Stina Stjernkvist/TT

Get them insured

Most pet-owners in Sweden have insurance to cover costly vet bills, which can be high. Swedish pets are some of the most-insured animals in the world. Insurance isn’t a legal requirement here but it comes highly recommended by many pet-ownership organisations.

There are several different options for pet insurance providers. You can find the best option for you by using independent comparison sites, like the Swedish Consumers’ Insurance Bureau (in Swedish).  

As a pet owner in Sweden, you are liable for what your pet does and you are always liable for damages caused by your pet, regardless of how they happened.

The author with Valter the dog. Photo: Chiara Milford

A pet is for life 

Sweden takes animal welfare very seriously. The 2018 Animal Welfare Act prohibits abandoning a domestic animal. If you do, you could be subject to a fine or imprisonment for up to two years. 

Sweden also prohibits docking tails, cropping ears, de-vocalisation, declawing and defanging. 

You’re not allowed to keep a dog in a crate overnight or while you’re away, and you can’t tie up a cat, except to take them on a walk with you. Cats and dogs can’t stay in a stationary car for longer than three hours and must have access to water.

A dog also has to go outside at least once every six hours, which means dog-owners may want to consider dog-friendly offices, or doggy daycare, called hunddagis in Swedish.

Basically, take good care of your furry friends and you’ll be fine. 

Member comments

  1. Have the regulations changed very recently? Because I brought my dog from Mexico 5 months ago and we didn’t have to notify customs beforehand nor pay an import tax (no one even asked how much we paid for him). We followed the instructions in the government’s webpage to a T and everything went very smoothly.
    Also not all countries outside the EU need the antibodies tests, it depends on whether the country of origin is listed or unlisted (meaning a list of countries with a good program for rabies control). At least it was so in December 2020.

  3. Coming from Southern Germany, Sweden looks like a very difficult place for dogs, at least on the West coast, where leash laws are everywhere and beaches are no-go. Where do we find a place in Sweden to play fetch a ball and let a dog run or swim ?

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.
For members

LIVING IN SWEDEN

What you need to know about owning a second home in Sweden

In most countries owning a second home is a luxury reserved for the wealthy, but in Sweden it's very common to have a summer home or 'fritidshus'. Here's what you need to know.

Published: 8 February 2024 15:25 CET
What you need to know about owning a second home in Sweden

What is a fritidshus? 

In Sweden, second homes are generally either classified as a fritidshus, literally a “free time house”, or a permanenthus or permanentboende.

A fritidshus is defined as “a house which is not set up for all-year-around living”. Rather confusingly, this does not mean that you can’t live all-year-round in a fritidshus, or, indeed, that you can’t use a permanenthus as your summer house. 

The difference comes down to how the two types of property are treated in Sweden’s building code, with fritidshus allowed, among other things, to have lower ceilings, smaller bathrooms, more basic kitchens, worse accessibility for disabled people, a lower standard of insulation. 

If you decide to live permanently in a fritidshus, you do not need to get approval to do so, but the building committee at your local council can, if they learn of what you are doing, demand that the building be changed to meet the requirements of a permanenthus (although this rarely happens).

There is also a subgroup of fritidshus, kolonilott, which are houses with a small amount of land which should be used for growing food (although lots of people just use them as attractive gardens). This is different from an odlingslott, which is just an allotment, essentially a kolonilott without the house.

These are usually in designated kolonilott areas close to or in cities, and are not intended for year-round living. In most kolonilott areas, water supply and drainage is cut off outside of the growing season, and you’re not allowed to register them as your permanent address, for example.

Relaxing outside a summer house. Photo: Doris Beling/Imagebank Sweden

How much does a second home cost? 

The average price of a fritidshus fell by about 6 percent in 2023, following a 1 percent fall in 2022, and now lies at about 2.2 million kronor.

But a search on the Hemnet website for fritidshus under 1 million kronor shows that many sell for a lot less, particularly outside the most popular areas. 

As a rule of thumb, anything within an hour’s drive of Stockholm, Gothenburg or Malmö is likely to be more expensive, as is anywhere on the coast (particularly on Gotland), next to a lake, or near one of Sweden’s more popular skiing areas. 

A report from Länsförsäkringar Fastighetsförmedling, out in mid-2023, found that summer houses were cheapest in Kronoberg country (the southern bit of Småland), followed by Örebro, Värmland, Norrbotten and Västernorrland, and most expensive in Gotland, Stockholm County and Halland. 

What’s the point of having one? 

Despite its vast expanses of unspoiled nature, Sweden is very urbanised, with nearly 90 percent of people living in built-up areas and 63 percent in the biggest few cities. It’s much more common to live in an apartment in a city than in the sort of suburban sprawl of houses with their own gardens so common in countries like the UK and US.

This means that most urban Swedes leave any gardening to their summer houses or allotments.

Given the cold, dark winters, that probably makes sense. 

Fritidshus and other second homes are also at the centre of the long Swedish summer break, when people often take three, or even four, weeks off back-to-back. If you don’t have your own fritidshus, you can spend much of the summer visiting people who do. 

What’s the downside? 

Aside from the cost, it’s a lot of work. Owning a fritidshus means weekends spent at out-of-town building supply shops, and brings a whole new list of chores like cleaning the gutters, mowing, trimming hedges, raking leaves and chopping wood.

If you like foreign travel, and have a lot of other passions and hobbies, you may find owning a summer house squeezes them out. 

A summer house in the Stockholm archipelago. Photo: Sara de Basly/Imagebank Sweden

How common is it to have a fritidshus? 

There are about 607,000 fritidshus in Sweden, and according to Statistics Sweden, about one in three children (35 percent) have access to one.

It most common to have access to a fritidshus in the north of Sweden, with more than half of children having access to one in 51 municipalities north of Dalarna, and it is least common in Skåne, where in some municipalities only 10 percent of children have access to a fritidshus. 

Is it best to have a second home in a fritidsområde or on its own? 

Many municipalities in Sweden have set aside areas, often near a lake or by the sea, specifically for the building of fritidshus, selling off plots, or tomter, on which people can either build a holiday cottage themselves or get a builder to do it.

According to Statitsics Sweden, about a quarter of fritidshus are in such an area, with Stockholm County boasting the most fritidsområde, or holiday home areas, followed by Västra Götaland (near Gothenburg) and Skåne (near Malmö and Helsingborg). 

If you are building your own summer house, the advantage of doing so in a fritidsområde is that electricity, water and sewage has normally already been run along the edge of the plot, making these services cheap and easy to connect. 

If you want to get a summer house near the coast or a lake, it is also cheaper if you buy one in a fritidsområde. 

On the downside, they can feel a little like living in a housing estate, you have to be careful not to make too much noise, and can end up getting complaints from the local neighbourhood committee if you don’t maintain your property in the way they expect. 

As many fritidsområde were set up the 1960s and 1970s, with a lot of the houses then built by enthusiastic amateurs, they can also be in desrepair and have structural problems. 

The plots that have yet to be built on, meanwhile, are often the worst, for instance with ground that is damp or prone to flooding. 

Renting out your second home

One of the advantages of your second home being classed as a fritidshus is that – so long as you’re only renting it out short-term — you are not covered by Sweden’s strict rental law or hyreslagen.

This means whatever rent you agree with the tenant is valid, there is no requirement to ask for a “reasonable” rent, and tenants cannot contest the rent with the regional rent tribunal.  

Airbnb makes renting out your fritidshus extremely easy and on the other side makes it a lot cheaper and easier to rent a summer house for three weeks in the summer than to own one all year around.  

If you earn more than 40,000 kronor in a year from renting out your fritidshus, though, you are required to declare it to the Swedish Tax Agency. 

You can then subtract a 40,000 kronor ‘standard deduction’ from your rental revenue and a further 20 percent deduction for rental income, before it gets taxed. See the guide from the Swedish Tax Agency here. 

This means if you receive 60,000 kronor in rent, you subtract first 40,000 kronor, then 20 percent of the 60,000 kronor, which comes to 12,000 kronor.

This leaves you with 8,000 kronor to be taxed as capital income at 30 percent, leaving just 2,400 kronor in tax due. 

SHOW COMMENTS