Posting workers to Sweden: the Arbetsmiljoverket notification and the contact person

If your company sends workers to Sweden to perform work for a limited period, the Posting of Workers Act (1999:678) applies. Notification must be made to the posting register kept by the Swedish Work Environment Authority no later than when the work in Sweden begins, and you must appoint a contact person in Sweden. The Swedish client carries a verification duty of its own.

The notification, the register and what it must carry

The posting register is kept by Arbetsmiljoverket, the Swedish Work Environment Authority, and it is where a posting assignment becomes visible to Swedish authorities, to the client and to the trade unions that police the collective agreement area. The notification is made by the posting employer, meaning the company in the home country, not by the Swedish client and not by the worker.

Timing is the simple part of the rule and still the part most often missed. Notification must be in place no later than when the work in Sweden begins. That means the first working day on site, not the first invoice, not the day the contract was signed and not the week after the fitters landed. If the details change during the assignment, for example when more people join or the workplace moves, the change must be notified to the register.

In practice the notification identifies four things: who the employer is, who the workers are, where and when the work is carried out, and who the contact person in Sweden is. An assignment with three fitters on two sites is therefore not covered by naming the company alone; the notification has to carry the workplaces.

The Act rests on EU law. The Posting of Workers Directive 96/71/EC laid the foundation, and the amending Directive (EU) 2018/957 tightened equal treatment on pay and conditions and introduced the rules on long term posting. The Swedish Act implements both, which is why the requirements feel familiar from Austria, France and the Netherlands even though the register and the form are Swedish.

The contact person you cannot skip

The contact person is not a field in the form, it is the physical recipient of the authority's letters. The employer must appoint a contact person in Sweden who can receive service of documents and who can produce the papers showing that the posting follows Swedish rules. The person must be reachable for as long as the assignment runs.

Two practical choices decide whether the appointment holds. The first is where the person sits. A contact person based in the home country who appears in the register behind a Swedish mobile number does not meet the purpose of the rule, because service of documents has to be possible in Sweden. The second is what the person can reach. The papers that may be requested are the employment contract, the time records, the payslips and the worker's social security certificate. A site manager without access to payroll cannot produce it, and the requirement is then unmet even though the person is physically on the site.

The client's duty and the timeline

The Swedish client, meaning the company receiving the work, carries a duty of its own. The client must verify that notification to the posting register has been made, and where it has not, the client must report the matter to Arbetsmiljoverket. The rule moves part of the monitoring from the authority into the contract chain, and it is why Swedish main contractors ask for the register receipt before anyone is let onto the site.

Long term posting is the second thing that changes the picture. Under Directive (EU) 2018/957, after twelve months, extendable to eighteen on notification, a broader set of Swedish terms and conditions of employment applies to the posted worker. An assignment planned for nine months that slips to fourteen therefore changes rule set midway, and keeping track of that date is the employer's job.

The cost has two sides. The register notification is not charged as a fee to the employer, so the direct cost sits in the administration. The real cost is the penalty payment when the notification is missing or wrong, and the stoppage on site when the client cannot see a register receipt and therefore does not admit the crew. A fitting crew idle for a week at a Swedish industrial site costs more than the entire paperwork.

Posting is not the same thing as employing in Sweden, and the distinction matters most when the worker comes from outside the EU. That arrangement carries the home country employment and the Swedish reception at once, and the logistics behind it are set out in the relocation chain for a non EU hire. The cross border variant between member states is covered in posting non EU workers between EU countries, and the division of responsibility along a contracting chain is in the employer compliance chain.

The notification takes an hour, the contact person takes a decision, and the verification duty takes a routine at the client. Those three hold a posting assignment together in front of Arbetsmiljoverket, and all three belong before the first working day rather than after the first inspection. For a walk through of a specific assignment, see our employers page.