Housing foreign workers in Sweden: the rent, the deduction and the lodger rule

If you provide housing to workers from outside the EU, Migrationsverket reviews it alongside the employment itself. The rent may not be out of proportion to the wage or to the standard of the housing, any deduction from wages requires the worker's written consent, and the worker may not lodge with you in your own home. Housing details form part of the application.

What Migrationsverket actually reviews

Housing is not a service item beside the file, it is evidence inside it. In Migrationsverket's conditions for seasonal workers, the clearest published statement the authority has on employer housing, the employer must state where the worker will live and the housing must meet an acceptable standard. The review looks at three things at once: what the housing is, what it costs, and how the cost is collected.

The word to read carefully is proportion. Migrationsverket weighs the rent against two figures, the wage the worker receives and the standard the housing genuinely holds. Rent that consumes a large share of net pay raises the question even when the amount looks like a market price, and rent at the local market level for a room with eight beds raises it from the other direction. Both tests apply, not one.

Written consent is the second element. If you intend to take the rent directly from pay, an oral agreement or an unsigned annex is not enough. Migrationsverket requires written consent from the worker. In practice that means a signed document naming the housing, the amount and the period, given to the worker in a language the person understands before departure. Without that consent the deduction is not acceptable, however reasonable the amount.

The third rule is the one smaller employers miss most often. The worker may not be a lodger with the employer in the employer's own home. A spare room at the owner's house or at the site manager's flat will not hold up in the file, however well intended the arrangement. The housing must be separate from the employer's own home.

Group applications and the timeline

When you recruit several people to the same site, a group application is the normal route, and it carries one condition worth planning around. Migrationsverket's handling of group applications (2025) assumes the same housing for everyone in the group. Twelve pickers meant to live in three flats in three towns are therefore not one group in the application sense but several files, and you find that out when the case officer asks for supplements.

Working backwards, a normal file runs like this.

The cost has two parts. One is the fee in the file, which is the worker's application fee to Migrationsverket. The other is the housing, which the employer carries until a valid deduction or the worker's own rent payment takes over. Budget the season, not the month. A room at 3,000 kronor a month for twelve people over six months is a commitment of 216,000 kronor, and that commitment stands even if one person leaves the job early.

The mistake that stalls the file

The most common failure is not rent that is too high, it is housing swapped after filing. The employer states an address, receives a request for supplements, quietly moves to another flat that became free, and on arrival the worker moves into an address that does not appear in the file. The application and the site no longer agree, and at an inspection it is the discrepancy that gets recorded, not the intention. If you change the housing, report the new address in the file before the person travels.

The second most common failure is the deduction introduced afterwards. Employment starts, the rent turns out higher than planned, and the amount comes off the next payslip on the strength of a conversation. Without written consent that is a unilateral wage deduction, and it shows on the payslip as plainly to an inspector as it does to the worker.

The wage level is assessed separately, and the ways a permit file breaks down are collected in the most common refusal grounds. The chain of responsibility between employer, client and authority is set out in the employer compliance chain, and the EU floor behind the Swedish seasonal rules is described in the Seasonal Workers Directive on accommodation.

Housing is the part of a Swedish work permit file the employer controls entirely, which is why it repays being written down in detail before filing. The address, the amount, the standard and the consent belong together. If those four agree on paper and on site, the file survives both the assessment and a later inspection. For a walk through of a specific arrangement, see our employers page.