Offices.se helps international companies find and budget office space when setting up or expanding in Sweden. Use the estimator below to get a quick sense of what an office for your team would cost, then read on for how office space is priced here.
Office cost estimator
Estimate the monthly rent for office space for your team in Sweden. Pick a city to prefill a typical asking rent, then adjust any field to match your situation. The calculation runs in your browser and is not saved.
City rents are rough, adjustable planning figures, not quotes. A common planning figure is 10 to 20 m² per person depending on layout. The estimate shows base rent only; operating costs come on top, and coworking or serviced offices are usually priced per seat.
How office space is priced in Sweden
Commercial rent in Sweden is normally quoted as an annual amount per square metre. To estimate a total you multiply that figure by the floor area, which in turn depends on how many people you need to seat. A common planning figure is between 10 and 20 square metres per person, depending on whether you use open-plan or cellular offices.
Rents vary widely by city and location. Central Stockholm is the most expensive market, followed by Gothenburg and Malmö, while suburban and regional locations cost considerably less. The figures in the estimator are rough, adjustable starting points rather than quotes.
Base rent is rarely the whole cost. Operating costs such as heating, electricity, property tax and service charges usually come on top, and many leases run for three to five years. Flexible options like coworking and serviced offices are normally priced per seat instead, which can suit smaller or newly established teams.
What you sign: lease, coworking membership or virtual address
A company arriving in Sweden normally chooses between four things: a traditional lease of premises, a coworking seat, a serviced office and a virtual address. They differ in price, and they differ more in how long they tie you down and how you get out. For a traditional lease, nine months governs the arrangement twice over, in two ways that have nothing to do with each other.
The rules sit in chapter 12 of the Swedish Land Code, jordabalken. Nine months appears first as a notice period. A lease of premises that runs until further notice ends at the month end falling nearest after nine months from the day notice was given, unless you have agreed on something longer, and a fixed term longer than nine months has to be terminated nine months in advance. For a home the equivalent period is three months. That rule does not apply to premises.
Nine months appears again in what happens when the landlord wants you out. A commercial tenant in Sweden has indirect security of tenure, which does not give you a right to stay. It gives you a right to compensation when the landlord terminates the lease and refuses to extend it, unless one of the exceptions in the act applies, among them that the landlord has legitimate reason to end the relationship, or that the terms demanded for an extension are reasonable and consistent with good practice. Where the right applies, the landlord pays at least a full year’s rent under the terminated lease, and more if the loss was greater. But the protection only bites once the tenancy has run for more than nine months in a row. A short pilot lease that ends before that point leaves nothing behind.
Two things qualify the protection. It can be contracted away, because the parties may agree in a separately drawn up document on terms that conflict with the compensation rules, and an agreement made before the tenancy has lasted longer than nine months holds only if the regional rent tribunal approves it. The exceptions are narrow, covering agreements of at most five years where the landlord will run its own business in the premises, or where the premises are sublet and the head lease is ending. A clause waiving your security of tenure is therefore neither automatically void nor automatically valid. There is also a deadline. If the landlord terminates and you will not move without compensation, you have two months from the notice to refer the dispute to the rent tribunal, and after that the right to compensation is gone. Sweden’s courts publish an overview of how tenancies of homes and premises are handled, in Swedish, if you want to see the process before you need it.
Coworking seats and serviced offices are sold on the opposite promise: short notice, a price per seat rather than per square metre, and services folded into one invoice. That can suit a team that does not yet know how many desks it will need in a year. Whether such an arrangement is a lease in law is a separate question, and the content of the contract decides it, not the name on the product. A defined space of your own, let to you against payment, can amount to a lease of premises even when the seller calls it a membership, while a flexible desk you share with others normally does not. Read what you are being given and how you leave before you assume which rules cover you.
A virtual address is the smallest of the four commitments and the narrowest in what it delivers: an address and mail handling, not a workplace.
Setting up in Sweden
Choosing a location is one of several early decisions when entering the Swedish market, alongside hiring leadership and registration, and some companies bridge the gap with an interim manager while a permanent search runs. The right city and office type depend on where your talent, customers and partners are. Treat the estimate above as a planning aid, and always base a budget on actual quotes from landlords or office providers.