What has the government proposed?
At a press conference on Monday, Migration Minister Johan Forssell announced that the government would raise the minimum salary to be eligible for a work permit to 90 percent of the Swedish median wage.
The government will also grant itself powers to determine exemptions (undantag) to the minimum salary which will be presented in a government order or förordning, which will be developed along with the planned bill and come into force simultaneously with the new legislation.
How much does that increase the salary threshold?
The current salary threshold for a work permit is set at 80 percent of the Swedish median wage, or 29,680 kronor a month. This is based on the 2024 median wage of 37,100 kronor.
Based on this same median wage, the new minimum salary will be 33,390 kronor a month if it comes into force, as the government has proposed, on June 1st 2026.
As Statistics Sweden updates its wage statistics in mid-June, however, the minimum salary is likely to be raised further within a couple of weeks of the law's introduction.
What jobs will be exempted from the salary threshold?
It's hard to know. Whereas the inquiry recommended tasking the Swedish Migration Agency with developing a list of professions where there is a labour shortage in coordination with the Swedish Public Employment Service, the government said it had decided to instead grant itself the powers to decide which jobs, professions or sectors should be exempted.
Forssell would only say that the exemption list would be "more restrictive" than the 152 job titles drawn up by the employment service in July, but would not give any details on what grounds the government would use to determine the list.
Will it be 100 job titles or five? Will it be individual job titles or whole sectors? We don't know.
Will the new higher salary threshold apply at the time of application or decision?
One of the controversial aspects of the recommendations of the inquiry which reported in February 2023 was that it wanted the threshold to apply at the time the Migration Agency makes a decision on the application, rather than at the time the application is submitted.
The government did not say at the press conference whether it had opted to follow or ignore this advice.
What's the background to the raised salary threshold?
The Moderate Party, Christian Democrats, and Sweden Democrats all campaigned in the 2022 election on raising the salary threshold for a work permit from the 13,000 kronor in place at the time.
In the Tidö agreement, the coalition agreement the Moderates, Christian Democrats and Liberal Party signed with the Sweden Democrats in 2022, they agreed to raise the work permit.
"The starting point," they agreed, "should be that a work permit should only be issued if the work for which the labour migration is happening in the normal case has a salary level equivalent to the median salary".
It took them, however, until November 2023 until they raised the minimum salary for a work permit to 80 percent of the median salary, using a law passed by the former Social Democrat government.
A government inquiry then recommended in February 2024 that a new system be brought in which would raise the threshold to the full median wage, with exceptions recommended by the Migration Agency and decided on by the government.
How has the business sector reacted?
The Confederation of Swedish Enterprise, Sweden's main business lobby group, has been extremely critical of the 80 percent salary threshold, of the proposed 100 percent threshold, and of the 90 percent announced by Forssell.
"It is good that the government has listened and is lowering the salary requirement from what was previously announced," Karin Johansson, deputy chief executive of the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise, told The Local in a written statement about Monday's announcement.
"The fact remains that it will make it more difficult for many companies to find the necessary expertise, to continue to run their businesses, or expand as they would like. This is negative for Swedish growth."
In addition, she said that the way the government intended to dictate exceptions to the rule without any clear system for which jobs should be eligible risked being "decided on a very arbitrary basis."
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