Swedish Migration Agency rates just two jobs as 'high risk' for work permits

Local Sweden

24-07-2025

The Swedish Migration Agency has rated two job titles – cooks and pantry chefs, and cleaners – as high risk for work permits, saying it doesn't have enough data to include other professions that are also known as being at risk of abuse.
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The agency was requested in February to provide the list of job titles which could be excused a future new salary threshold for work permits, and also asked to propose a list of job titles for which it should not be possible to get work permits, due to the "great risk of exploitation and abuse".
Although the cleaning, hotel and restaurant, construction, temping, retail, agricultural, car repair, and personal assistance sectors are all seen as at high risk of abuse, the agency said in its report that "methodological difficulties" meant it lacked sufficient data to back work permit bans for more job titles.
"It's only for two job descriptions that we that we have the numbers required to draw any conclusions, and that's then cleaners and also cooks and pantry chefs," Hanna Geurtsen, the official leading the agency's mission to make work permit processing more efficient, told The Local.
In its report, the agency said that the inquiry into work permits had already suggested that berry pickers and personal assistants should be ineligible for permits, although it noted that "berry picker" was bundled together with "planter" in SSYK, Sweden's list of 429 job titles.
Geurtsen said that the agency had used six criteria to establish which job titles were at risk of abuse or exploitation.
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"We normally talk about sectors in the employment market where we see see a higher risk of exploitation and it's also usually connected to the individual employer. So if an employer has a number of job titles in their factory or restaurant, which of those job titles is most prone to risk here?" she explained.
"So to establish any connection at all between 'risk of exploitation' and and job titles, we had to dig quite deep into the data that we have then from processing applications for work permits."
She also stressed that there were as yet no guidelines in place on how to balance employers' need for skilled workers and the risk of exploitation, and that the Migration Agency itself lacks a legal mandate to propose that certain job titles be banned from work permits, making the list of two – or four if including berry pickers and personal assistants – job titles purely advisory.
"The work on the assignment has been associated with several challenges linked to concepts that are not accepted in the Swedish labour market," the report reads. "A large part of the work has therefore been to develop and describe the method and analysis."
The agency based its list on the 152 job titles provided to it by the Swedish Public Employment Service on May 30th, which as The Local reported last week included all those paying below the median salary where employers were struggling to recruit nationally.
Of those, the Migration Agency reported that Swedish employers had only recruited internationally over the past few years for about 90 job titles. It opted, however, not to slim the list down to 90 titles on the grounds that employers should not be limited in how they can recruit in future from which job titles they have recruited for in the past.
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"It would be unwise not to exempt a job title from a heightened salary threshold just because in the past, there have not been any applications within that field," Geurtsen said. "We want to encourage employers to explore this way of finding the competence that they need to expand and to grow."