Field Notes

concept

Preliminärskatt

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Preliminärskatt is tax a Swedish business pays monthly against the result it expects for the year, before that result is known. An employee’s tax is withheld by an employer; a business holding F-skatt does the equivalent for itself, paying an amount Skatteverket sets from a forecast the business supplies.

The payment is the same amount each month, due on the twelfth, transferred by bankgiro without an invoice being sent.1 Late payment accrues interest, and unpaid amounts can be passed to Kronofogden, the Swedish enforcement authority.

For a sole trader or a partner in a general partnership the monthly amount covers both income tax and Egenavgifter, so a single payment discharges two obligations that a limited company would meet separately.

The forecast is a live obligation

The forecast is not filed once and forgotten. A business may revise its preliminary income declaration whenever it notices the surplus moving, and must file a new one when the gap grows large enough: the trigger is a difference of roughly 30 percent between projected final tax and current preliminary tax, with a floor of one price base amount — 59,200 SEK for 2026.12

A declaration for a tax year can be filed up to six months after that year ends.1

Where it sits

Preliminärskatt is the payment layer over whatever the business earns, so it applies whether the surplus is taxed through a company’s corporate income tax or personally in the hands of a sole trader. It is separate from VAT, which is collected from customers rather than levied on profit, and separate from Arbetsgivaravgifter, which arise only from paying people. Swedish business tax map keeps the four layers apart, and Swedish VAT for ecommerce covers the transaction layer.

  1. Skatteverket, preliminärskatt för företag och föreningar, captured 2026-07-29 in Skatteverket business tax pages 2026. ↩↩↩

  2. Skatteverket, belopp och procent 2026, which gives the price base amount as 59,200 SEK for the 2026 income year. ↩

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