LISTED: The jobs that could be exempt from Swedish work permit salary limit
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The Migration Agency was in February asked to propose a list of job titles which could be exempted from a future salary threshold for work permits, which the government has said it plans to set at Sweden's median salary. This is currently 37,100 kronor, but the Migration Agency has based its analysis on a salary of 35,600 kronor, which was the median salary in 2023.
The Migration Agency included all 152 job titles put forward in an analysis by the Swedish Public Employment Service, which The Local reported on here, marking which of these represent a "heightened risk of workplace exploitation or abuse", which require workers to be Swedish citizens, which have been subject to labour migration in the past, and which the government inquiry into the new salary requirement proposed should be ineligible for work permits.
As we reported last week, only four jobs - cooks and pantry chefs, cleaners, personal assistants and berry pickers - were excluded from the exemption list because of the last two reasons. Only three job titles on the list - officers, special officers and soldiers - required Swedish citizenship.
This brings the number of jobs the Migration Agency is proposing as possible contenders for exception from a future salary threshold for work permits down to 145.
It is important to remember that for more than a year the government has delayed moving forward on its proposal for a new salary threshold for work permits set at the median salary.
That means that this list is purely advisory and there is no way under current legislation that these exceptions could be applied.
Rather than repeat the public employment service's list (for which you can find our English translation here), we have decided to strip out the jobs for which people were in fact hired internationally in 2023 and 2024, starting with those which have seen the highest amount of migration.
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Engineers "a big group"
Hanna Geurtsen, the Migration Agency official who oversaw the analysis, told the Local that it had shown that many high-skilled jobs for which Swedish employers recruit internationally offered lowest salaries below the Swedish median.
"Engineers is a big group. You might think that cleaners and pizza chefs make up the largest portion of labour migration. But that is just not true," she said in an interview about the list. "A large proportion of labour migration is for job titles that earn higher salaries, well above median, but there are skilled jobs in the middle section, salary-wise, where you will have to weigh wisely here so that you don't put up obstacles to labour migration that that you don't intend to."
Engineering, technician and IT roles made up eleven of the 20 job titles on the Migration Agency's list of jobs proposed for exemption which have seen the highest recent levels of labour migration.
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In its report, the Migration Agency opted not to limit the list of proposed job titles to those for which employers have recently recruited overseas, with Geurtsen arguing that 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,' as this did not necessarily mean that employers would not want to hire internationally for these roles in the future.
The agency did, however, mark which job titles have experienced recent labour migration, so we have stripped down their list to show the 95 job titles which qualify where there is labour migration.
Of these, there were three job titles where the shortage was only regional: Geologists and geophysicists and specialists in environmental protection and environmental technology, which were both required in Upper Norrland, and taxi drivers, for which there was only a shortage in Stockholm and upper Norrland.
Membership Plus subscribers can hear an in-depth interview with Hanna Geurtsen from the Migration Agency on the list of work permit exemptions in the Sweden in Focus Extra podcast, out on July 30th.
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