IN DATA: Work permit applications to Sweden drop to pre-2016 levels

Last year, Swedish Migration Minister Johan Forssell said his government was promoting nine measures “to position Sweden as a top destination for talent," including fast-tracked work permits, digital passport controls and a stronger “Brand Sweden."

Yet with the other hand, the government has been strictly tightening migration laws for work permit holders, including hiking the work permit salary threshold to first 80 and now 90 percent of Sweden's median salary, and pushing extensive citizenship reforms through without transitional rules. 

How has all of this affected Sweden’s attraction for foreign workers? While it's impossible to say what has caused the shifts, Swedish Migration Agency and Statistics Sweden data compiled and analysed by data journalist Alejandro Lozada Cortés shows that, whatever the root causes, there has been a sizable drop in Swedish work permit applications during the government's tenure.

So how big is the drop?

Last year alone, first-time work permit applications to Sweden dropped by 10 percent. This means that the number of foreign workers aspiring to get a work permit for the first time in Sweden was lower in 2025 than a decade ago. 

For the second year in a row, in 2025 Sweden received fewer first-time work permit applications compared to 2015. The figures for 2025 are 10 percent lower than in 2015.

Has there also been a drop in granted applications?

Yes. 

During the same period of time, rejection rates for first-time work permit applications rose from 26 percent to 42 percent, marking a ten-year high. Both trends – the rapid decline in applications and the steep increase in rejections – began in 2022. 

Data visualizations of first-time work permit applications and rejections by Alejandro Lozada Cortés.

Is there a difference across industries?

Key sectors like healthcare, software, agriculture, and education have all reached ten-year lows.

IT and Software, for example, had relatively stable levels of foreign workers joining each year until 2022. Since then, it has only gone down. The 2025 figures show a 25 percent drop compared to ten years ago – steeper than the 14 percent reduction seen during the pandemic, which is also the last time numbers dropped.

In absolute numbers, it means that the IT and software sector went from around 3,300 new foreign workers in 2015 to 2,500 in 2025. This is a steep reversal in a trend that had the country receiving around 4,600 new tech workers every year for the majority of the last decade, excluding the height of the pandemic.

Data visualizations of granted first-time work permit applications by job type, by Alejandro Lozada Cortés.

The story is almost the same for roles as diverse as education professionals, fishermen, and nurses. Agriculture, forestry, and fishery went from 4,300 new foreign workers ten years ago to 2,400 last year; education, which includes primary teachers as well as university professors, from 263 to 99; and healthcare from 330 to 301. These are all ten-year lows.

Has this had any effect on recruitment?

While it is impossible to say with certainty which factors have affected the ability of Swedish companies to find the talent they need, figures from Statistics Sweden show that, in the 2015-2024 period with available data, recruitment times in sectors that heavily rely on immigrant workers have grown as grants of first-time work permits has dropped.

Data visualizations of recruitment times by industry, by Alejandro Lozada Cortés.

In the energy sector, there's a clear change between 2022 and 2024 in how long recruiters took to find workers in Sweden. Ten years ago, it took recruiters 1.3 months to find a worker; by 2024 (the most recent year for which data is available) that figure had doubled to 2.6 months. Manufacturing tells a similar story, going from 1.2 to 2.3 months – as does the technical and scientific sector, which saw a comparable increase over the same period.

The overall picture

There is a lot of foreign-born labour in Sweden overall. In 2024, around one in every four employed persons was foreign-born.

The rate was one in five for occupations requiring advanced education, and one in two for roles like caregivers, cleaners, and harvesters. Although these figures include EU workers, according to official statistics around 75 percent of the working-age immigrants were born outside the bloc.

Time will tell how the data from recent years, which overall shows a significant drop in immigrant workers joining Sweden's workforce, will affect Sweden's job market – and economy.