COPY LINK

For members

FAMILY

How to use Swedish parental leave to spend four months with your baby back home

Swedes have long combined parental leave and holiday to spend four months or more with their babies on a beach in Thailand. Foreigners can use the same trick to return to their home countries.

Published: 5 September 2024 11:30 CEST

How to use Swedish parental leave to spend four months with your baby back home

It's possible to leave Sweden with your infant for three months or more. Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

From July 1st this year, parents of newborns in Sweden are allowed to take up to 60 so-called “double days”, when both parents receive parental benefit at the same time, meaning they use up 120 days of shared leave.

This means that if each partner also takes a month of parental leave solo at the same time as the other takes their full 25-day holiday entitlement, couples working in Sweden can enjoy a full four months together away from work, allowing them to travel back to their home country to share those precious first months with their friends and family.

Swedes already do this to enjoy a long holiday with their new born infants, with schools established in some of the most popular resorts in Thailand so that parents can bring school-age children with them, leading to envious reports in the Swedish newspapers.

If you still have days left for another, previous child, you can add in these too, stretching your paid time off from work even longer.

We asked Anna Stenhoff, an executive at the Swedish Social Insurance Agncy, how the system works.

READ ALSO:

Sweden’s 480 days of parental leave: What you need to know

What’s the maximum amount of time you can be abroad on parental leave?

There are different rules for the 390 days that you are paid at sickness level (80 percent of salary) and for the 90 days paid at the minimum level of 180 kronor a day. There are also different rules for stays inside and outside the EU.

Under Sweden’s rules, sickness level parental leave is a work-based benefit. This means you remain entitled to it for as long as you are employed in Sweden and have a child resident in Sweden.

In practice, this generally means you and your child can stay outside the EU and collect sickness level parental leave for up to a year, so long as you do not, say, decide to work for a new employer in the country where you are working, or are not made redundant from your job in Sweden.

“So long as you keep your job, you can take that leave abroad,” Stenhoff told The Local. “But for parental benefit specificially the child has to be a resident of Sweden, so that’s why the one year kicks in, because typically after a year, the child would no longer be a resident of Sweden, which is a qualificiation for the benefit.”

The 90-days paid at the minimum level, however, is a residency-based benefit, which under Sweden’s rules can only be collected ouside the EU for up to six months, so long as you are still considered resident in Sweden.

“Normally, if you travel abroad on holiday, that’s not an indication of changing residency, but if you moved abroad, you would lose this benefit from day one,” Stenhoff said.

This means you risk losing the benefit at minimum level if you, for instance, inform the Swedish Tax Agency that you have moved to a country outside the EU, or changed your official address to an Indian address, or changed a child’s school to an Indian school.

The rules on work- and residency-based benefits are more generous for stays in another EU country, with the general rule being that you can be in another EU country for up to a year and still receive your benefits.

“It’s more generous in the EU, but it’s also more complicated,” Stenhoff said, adding that as the rules changed, for instance, depending on your job and whether you have family members in the other EU country.

This means, she says, that it is “always a good idea” to ring the Social Insurance Agency to discuss your situation before you leave.

How will a stay abroad affect work or residency permit extensions?

If you only have temporary residency in Sweden through a work permit, you may need to be more careful before taking parental leave outside the EU.

In theory, you can be out of Sweden for six months or more without causing issues when you later apply for an extension, as both being on parental leave and taking the holiday you are entitled to in your job are seen as “an acceptable reason to interrupt your employment” under work permit rules.

This is not the case, however, if the time you have been away from work greatly exceeds the time you were actually working.

“If you have not worked at all, or have only worked for a very limited period of time, your application for a permanent residence permit may be rejected,” the Migration Agency warns on its website.

It’s a good idea to ring the Migration Agency before departure to check that your planned stay will not affect your chances of receiving a new work or residency permit, permanent residency, or citizenship.

What do you need to do before you go abroad?

Even if you are travelling outside the EU, EEA or UK, when it comes to parental benefit, it is not obligatory to inform the Swedish Social Insurance Agency or request permission to take your leave internationally, Stenhoff said.

She nonetheless believes it is a good idea to ring the agency to check that everything you planned to do is within rules, pointing out that for several other benefits, it is obligatory to inform them if you leave the EU.

You should also keep documents or print-outs from the Swedish Social Insurance Agency and also from your employer of the days you have taken of parental leave and holiday, as you may need to send these to the Migration Agency when you apply to extend your work permit.

The Swedish Board of Health and Welfare recommends that parents planning to travel abroad with a baby also inform the childcare unit or barnavårdscentral (BVC) that they are registered with of their plans at least a few months before they depart, so that they can ensure that your baby has all the vaccinations they need to travel safely abroad.

In Sweden, BVCs normally invite you to around 13 visits during the child’s first year, so if you plan to be away for up to six months of this, they may also wish to carry out some essential checks before you go.

Which bank account can I be paid into?

If you are receiving benefits abroad, it is easier to have them paid into a standard Swedish bank account. It is, however, possible to have them paid into a foreign bank account, so long as it is in the name of the beneficiary and it has passed the money-laundering and other anti-fraud checks run by the agency’s payments division. You can register a new bank account by logging into the Social Insurance Agency here.

What about if I have a child at school or day care?

There is currently no requirement to send your child to daycare in Sweden, but many municipalities automatically take away your place at preschool if your child is away for two months or more without a good reason.

You may well be able to get around this if you are away for three or four months by explaining your plans to the preschool head. If you want to keep your child’s place you will have to continue paying the monthly fee while you are away.

It is compulsory in Sweden for all children between the ages of 6 and 16 to attend school, however. This means that if you are planning on taking your child out of school for two or three months, you need to convince the headteacher that you have “extraordinary reasons and special circumstances” to do so.

Whether they say ‘yes’ depends on how liberal they are, but you are quite likely to have your request denied, particularly in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö, where the municipalities face a recurring problem of chldren being taken out of school without permission.

Acceptable reasons include family celebrations such as weddings and funerals, and important religious festivals. You are unlikely to have a request accepted for a holiday.

For periods longer than a few months, you will need to apply to your municipality for a temporary exemption from compulsory schooling. You can find the application form for Stockholm here, and the city government’s explainer on taking your child overseas here.

The chances are that if you take a child away for longer than a few months, they will be declared no longer covered by compulsory schooling, meaning they will lose their school place and you will have to reapply on your return.

There is no statutory regulation saying what counts as a long or short time overseas, but in Malmö, for example, any journey longer than 10 days needs to be approved by the school head, and anything over six months is very likely to lose you your school place.

Member comments

Become a Member to leave a comment.

Interview: Indians leaving Sweden only 'a temporary fluctuation'

When The Local reported last month that Sweden was in the first six months of 2024 seeing net emigration of Indian citizens for the first time in that period since records began, the media in India sensationalised the story to such an extent that Nrusimha Kiran Pathakota, business strategy manager at Siri AB, had to fend off worried calls from home.

“It picked up quite a bit of steam in India, and then it also got merged with the other news, like the crime rate, and we started getting calls from some of our friends and relatives. Is everything fine in Sweden?” he told The Local. “The news did spread across the spectrum, and it got picked up by a lot of vernacular news channels. I could see at least 10 or 15 channels covering the story.”

But according to Pathakota and the company’s global business director Aditya Mylavarapu, while there have been some major layoffs at big companies that employ Indian software engineers, there’s no sign of an exodus of high-skilled Indians.

“I think these statistics definitely highlight a shift,” Mylavarapu said. “But from where we stand and what we see on the ground, we believe it is a temporary fluctuation rather than a long-term trend.”

READ ALSO:

Indians in Sweden hit back after ‘exodus’ stats go viral

For a start, as The Local also reported, some of the Indian citizens registered as leaving Sweden in the first part of the year may have left earlier and then been included in this year’s statistics due to the Swedish Tax Agency’s checks on the population register.

But even those that have left, Mylavarapu said, were more likely to have done so because they lost residency permits than because of dissatisfaction with the country.

The redundancies announced last year by major employers, he explained, had taken an unusually long time to carry out, meaning many Indians’ permits had expired before they had a chance to get another job.

“I think 2023 saw the longest layoff period – not in terms of the number of layoffs, but in the time it took to start and end it,” he said. “Because of this extended time period, people who got laid off struggled to find another job,” he said.

YOUR SWEDISH CAREER:

What laid-off foreigners get wrong about Sweden’s ‘three-month deadline’

Siri AB and other potential employers, Mylavarapu explained, usually wait until a redundancy process is over before swooping in and trying to hire those who have been laid off.

“We tend to wait and watch until the layoff completes before we start planning the next step,” he explained. “And most other players would have been going with the same approach: let’s wait and watch until this whole thing comes to an end, and then we will start recruiting.”

But in early 2024, this approach backfired, as many work permit holders had not managed to find a job within the three-month window they are given under their work permits.

“Most work permit holders have only three months to find a job before they have to leave, so you could attribute some of these data shifts to that.”

No big changes to make Sweden less attractive

Erik Hult, Siri’s sales manager, said that the tightening of immigration policy under the current government and the higher salary threshold for a work permit, had had only a minimal impact on the attractiveness of Sweden for the Indians professionals the company hires.

“In our case, this has not affected us since we work with high-skilled competence, where the salary levels are higher,” he said.

Efforts to speed up work permit processing times for high-skilled workers were at the same time removing one of the barriers.

“I wouldn’t say that it has made Sweden more attractive, yet. But it makes it more competitive,” he said. “For us as a company it makes a difference in being able to provide talent to our customers at shorter lead time.”

READER INSIGHTS:

What Indians should consider before moving to Sweden

Mylavarapu said that Indians already living and working in Sweden didn’t feel less welcome as a result of the “paradigm shift” in migration policy.

“On the ground and in my social circles, I have not heard anything bad about Sweden that turned 180 degrees in the last few years,” he said. “In the last 13 odd years we’ve hired about 250 people, and only a handful of people – I can count them on one hand – have left to go back to India, and most of them went to take care of aging parents. Other than that, most have made a decision to settle down here.”

The gang crime issues that featured in the many of the reports on Indian TV had not, he added, changed the attitudes of high-skilled Indian workers.

“The reports about the crime rate in Sweden have had an impact on how Indians in India perceive Sweden, not Indians living in Sweden, because it has never affected them directly,” he said.

What did make a difference was the weak krona, however, with “very, very high inflation” obvious when buying groceries.

Innovation and quality of life the big advantage

But there are career opportunities available in Sweden that are hard to find elsewhere, at least outside of Silicon Valley, Pathakota said.

“Innovation in Sweden is very high, and that is probably the reason why most Indians look at Sweden. There are so many companies that are innovating here and that is quite an attraction.”

For Siri AB, the challenge over the past 13 years has been to make highly-skilled Indians see Sweden as a good place to move to.

“For us, for a long time, the competition is not about attracting talent to Siri, but attracting talent to Sweden, and what Sweden has in its favour is the work-life balance and the easy ways of working. I read somewhere that India and Sweden are two countries of different sizes, but almost similar mentality and I can see that.”

Size of economy, spouse jobs and slow medical care

The biggest downside to Sweden as a place for Indians to work, he said, was the small size and concentration of the economy, which means employment tends to be less stable than in the US or Germany, with the few really big employers often hiring or enacting redundancy programmes at the same time.

“The fluctuations are way too steep and way too fast, while for a country like Germany, the ups and downs can be more easily managed. For a typical person, it is easy to find another job,” Pathakota said.

READERS SUGGEST:

What can Sweden do to make life easier for ‘trailing spouses’?

The small size of the economy also poses a problem for Indian couples where there are two highly skilled workers, only one of which has been offered a job in Sweden.

“We’re talking about people who are engineering graduates, managers and medical specialists, or software engineers, and then generally, they tend to marry people who have the same skills, and sometimes it is a challenge to get a job for the spouse at a level equal to their skills.”

What could Sweden do to make itself more attractive?

Back in India, healthcare can be expensive but getting an appointment and scheduling an operation is fast compared to the long waits common in Sweden, something Mylavarapu said many Indians living in Sweden found frustrating.

“We have had a few employees over the past few years who ran into some medical emergencies, and once they are into the hospital, they have nothing but praise. They have not seen a system so accommodating and compassionate,” he said.

“But getting into the door has become more and more difficult to the extent that some people I know went back to India to get medical treatment. That is becoming a sensitive point. If there is something that government can do about that, I think it would be a big win.”

Pathakota, meanwhile, believes that the country should consider bringing in a different taxation system for people on short-term work permits, like the “30 percent ruling” in The Netherlands, or perhaps a tax rebate like the one Germany has been considering.

“The whole tax system in this part of the world – in Sweden and probably in Germany as well – is designed for life,” he said. “You get the real benefits as you age. As you get old, the country will take care of you.”

EXPLAINED:

Which foreigners are eligible for Sweden’s ‘expert tax’ relief?

This can be a problem for Indians who often intend to return to India before retirement, as on top of paying tax for an old age they probably won’t end up spending in the country, they often also send money back to India to support elderly relatives.

Whether or not Sweden’s government takes any new actions to attract high-skilled labour, Siri AB expects Indians to continue to come to the country, with the emigration in the first half of the year a temporary slump in a long-term upward trend.

SHOW COMMENTS

Url copied to clipboard!