Sweden proposes tax rules that treat required homeworking differently from chosen homeworking
Sweden’s Finance Ministry sent draft rules to the Council on Legislation on 3 September that would change how the tjänsteställe — the tax “place of employment” — is determined. Under the proposal, the place where more than 50% of working time is to be performed becomes the tjänsteställe. Where no location meets that test, it falls to the employer’s premises if the employee attends on around 80% of working days, and failing that, to the employee’s home.
The decisive element sits in how remote work is counted. Remote work an employee is to perform under an agreement with the employer counts towards the assessment. Remote work an employee may choose to do normally does not. In practice, a standard hybrid arrangement of two or three days at home would leave the office as the tax workplace, because those days are elective rather than required.
Why this matters
Your tjänsteställe determines whether journeys to the office are commuting or business travel, and therefore whether they are deductible and whether an employer can reimburse them tax-free. For a remote worker in Sweden, the practical question becomes what your employment agreement actually says. An arrangement recorded as required home-based work pulls the tax base towards your home; the same pattern of days described as a personal preference does not. Anyone negotiating a Swedish remote or hybrid contract from January 2027 onwards would want the wording to reflect the outcome they need, because under this proposal the wording is what decides it.
This is a rare example of a European tax code drawing an explicit line between mandated and voluntary homeworking. Most systems treat a day at home as a day at home, regardless of who decided it, which is why the same hybrid pattern can produce different answers in different countries. The Swedish approach fixes the question at the start of the engagement, based on the employer’s intention, rather than reconstructing it afterwards from where somebody happened to sit.
What to watch
The rules are proposed to take effect on 1 January 2027, but they are not law. They still require Council on Legislation review, a proposition to the Riksdag and inclusion in the autumn budget — and the government has said explicitly that inclusion is not guaranteed. Treat the January date as an intention rather than a deadline until the proposition is tabled.