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When will you get your tax refund in Sweden?

The tax rebate will bring a welcome relief to many people's Swedish bank accounts this year. Here are the key dates when you can expect to receive it.

Published: 3 April 2023 14:55 CEST

When will you get your tax refund in Sweden?

Are you getting kronor back on your taxes this year? Photo: Fredrik Sandberg/TT

If you filed your tax declaration online by the end of March, and you didn’t need to make any changes to it, you should get any rebate you’re owned on April 5th or 6th.

If you know that you are owed money back but don’t get it, it could be because you haven’t submitted your bank account details to the Tax Agency (Skatteverket).

You can submit your bank account details via this link.

The final deadline for filing your tax declaration is May 2nd, and you can submit it either online, through text message, by calling or by posting the paper version to Skatteverket. You will then receive your refund by June 9th.

If you haven’t yet received the paper version of your tax declaration form, fear not. It’s scheduled to arrive by April 15th, so there’s plenty of time left.

And finally, if you are not one of the lucky ones and you instead have residual tax to pay, you have to pay it by September 12th at the latest, unless it’s less than 100 kronor in which case you can put it off until the tax declaration season of 2024.

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Nordic countries urged to set common working from home rules

The proposal is part of a series of recommendations to simplify tax agreements to facilitate free movement of people and make the region “the most integrated” in the world by 2030, as agreed by Nordic Prime Ministers.

The Freedom of Movement Council argues that the pandemic revealed the flaws in the current system, as a large proportion of cross-border workers had to operate from home, facing taxation in two countries, different tax levels and mounting bureaucracy.

“Now that more companies are open to their employees working from home, the current Nordic tax agreement just isn’t keeping up. I hope this analysis will pave the way for dialogue and that the end result will be simplification and less bureaucracy,” said Karen Ellemann, secretary-general of the Nordic Council of Ministers.

Internationally less known than EU free movement rules, the region has a special agreement on free movement of people that dates back to the 1950s.

Under the Nordic Passport Union, citizens can move within the region without travel documents or residence permits and enjoy more rights than those granted to EU citizens within the European Union. Non-EU residents, however, only partially benefit as they do not have the automatic right to work in another Nordic state.

The Nordic free movement area covers Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, the Faroe Islands and Åland. Greenland is not part of the Passport Union but is in practice subject to some of its provisions.

The Nordic governments set up the Freedom of Movement Council as an independent body to identify obstacles to this principle and propose how to remove them.

In an interview with The Local, chair Siv Friðleifsdóttir said the Council has identified over 100 barriers to free movement and prioritised 30. The tax system is one of them.

“The Nordic countries currently have several agreements that regulate cross-border and remote working. Common to all of them is that they’re based on the countries’ need to protect their tax base,” the Council notes.

INTERVIEW:

The myths and realities of Nordic freedom of movement

The report, prepared by consultancies KPMG and Resonans Nordic, points at four problems in particular: rules for domestic work, registration obligations in more than one country for employers, as well as taxation of wages and pensions when working in another Nordic state.

The Council therefore proposes to set common conditions on “permanent establishment” when working in the country of residence, including from home. It also suggests to tax salaries in the country of employment and consider work from home in the country of residence equal to work in the country where the employer is located.

In addition, advance tax should be reported and collected in the employer’s country to avoid having different rules for the same salary.

Pension contributions should be mutually recognised as deductible in another Nordic states and returns taxed only under the legislation of the country where the pension plan is established, the Council argues.

In the Øresund region, between Denmark and Sweden, a fully integrated labour market could generate combined annual socio-economic gains of 2.9 billion Danish kroner, the report estimates.

“Our countries have a lot to gain from having a flexible common labour market. It can solve the problem of skills shortages in one country and the problem of unemployment in another. In other words, a functioning labour market is a strong catalyst for our countries’ economies,” says Siv Friðleifsdóttir, chair of the Freedom of Movement Council.

The full report is currently only available in Danish but translations are expected in the coming weeks.

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