Cleaning, construction, restaurants and staffing: where Migrationsverket asks employers for more

Migrationsverket has named a set of sectors in which a work permit application is examined more closely. In those sectors an offer of employment is not enough on its own: the employer must also file evidence that the company can pay the salary it has promised. Which sector a company belongs to is decided by its SNI code, not by how the business is described in the application.

The sectors on the list

Migrationsverket sets out the stricter requirements by SNI code, the industrial classification maintained by Statistics Sweden and recorded when the company registers with Bolagsverket and the Tax Agency. The boundary is mechanical. A firm that cleans on contract but is registered under a different code will still be assessed against the activity the case officer sees in the file, and a code that does not match the real activity is itself something Migrationsverket asks about.

The list is published by Migrationsverket on its page for employers hiring someone from a country outside the EU and the EEA. In September 2026 it covered, in the main:

• Cleaning services (SNI 81290 and 81210).
• Hotels and restaurants (55101 and all of 56).
• Construction (41200, 421, 42990 and all of 43).
• Retail and wholesale trade (471 to 478).
• Agriculture and forestry (0113, 012 and 02102).
• Motor vehicle repair (452).
• Personal and other services (9602, 9604, 9609).
• Staffing and labour hire (782).

The staffing entry is the one that surprises employers most often. A staffing company is assessed both on its own finances and on the conditions holding at the client site for the whole permit period, even though the client is not a party to the case. In practice the firm hiring out skilled trades to construction or industry carries two links of the chain inside one application.

What Migrationsverket wants to see, and what it costs in time

The requirement in the listed sectors is that the employer sets out how the company can guarantee the salary of the person applying, and proves it has the means to pay that salary for at least three months. The evidence is accounts and liquidity, not statements of intent. In practice employers file the annual report or the closing accounts, current bank statements or a balance report, headcount, and the ongoing contracts the salary will be paid out of. A newly formed company with no accounts has to replace that history with something else that can be counted, for example a client contract with a stated value and term. Public sector employers, meaning municipalities, regions and the state, are exempt from the higher requirements and file none of it.

The salary level itself does not vary by sector. Under Chapter 6, Section 2 of the Aliens Act (2005:716), terms must be at least at the level of the Swedish collective agreement or of practice in the occupation, and that holds as firmly in cleaning as in engineering. What sets the scrutinised sectors apart is the burden of proving the salary can actually be paid.

The application fee charged by Migrationsverket is 2,200 Swedish kronor for a worker, according to the fees the agency published in September 2026. That is the only authority fee in the chain. The real cost sits in the insurance policies the employer must hold from the first day of employment, and in the extra processing time a request for supplementary evidence creates.

The failure that costs the most time

The common interruption is not a refusal but a supplementary request. The employer files the offer, Migrationsverket sees that the company sits under an SNI code on the list, and asks for financial evidence nobody prepared. The case stops until the accounts and bank statements arrive, and because the deadline for answering runs alongside the planned start date, it is the start date that moves. Put the evidence in the application from the beginning rather than waiting for the question. The same logic applies to the union opinion, set out in the employer sponsorship compliance chain.

A second failure is a salary set at the collective agreement floor while the financial evidence shows a company already running at a loss. The two documents contradict each other and the case officer sees it. The pattern matches the refusal grounds that recur in why EU work permit applications fail, and the surrounding timings are in work permit timelines country by country.

An employer in one of the listed sectors should therefore plan for two applications inside one: the case about the worker and the case about the company. Both can be prepared before filing, and the financial evidence is assembled once and reused for each recruitment that follows. What belongs in that file is set out for employers.