Swedish citizenship: what changed on 6 June 2026

A lot of pages in English and in French still describe this as a bill. They are out of date. The Riksdag voted the tightened requirements on 29 April 2026, the texts went into the Swedish statute book in May, and Migrationsverket announced on 5 June 2026 that the new rules would apply from the following day.

The government's own bill is prop. 2025/26:175, Skärpta krav för svenskt medborgarskap. Riksdagen registers it on 12 March 2026 and regeringen.se dates its page 13 March 2026. One day apart, no practical consequence, but worth knowing if you see two dates quoted.

The separate piece that creates the test itself is förordning (2026:451) om medborgarskapsprov, adopted on 30 April 2026 and in force since 6 June 2026. That regulation is where the subject areas of the civics test come from, and we went through all eleven of them separately.

The headline change is hemvist, the period of habitual residence. The general rule moved from five years to eight. What the press mostly skipped is that the shorter periods by category survived, and they matter to a large share of applicants.

Migrationsverket lists them: two years for citizens of another Nordic country, two years for someone who previously held Swedish citizenship, five years for a stateless person, seven years for a refugee, seven years for the spouse, registered partner or cohabitant of a Swedish citizen, and seven years for an applicant under 21.

The word hemvist is not a synonym for having lived here. It is a legal term about where your habitual residence has been, and time spent on certain permits does not count the way people assume. If a year or two is the difference for you, that is a question for Migrationsverket and not for any website.

There is now a försörjningskrav, a requirement to support yourself. Migrationsverket puts the 2026 figure at 250 200 kronor a year before tax, which is about 20 850 kronor a month before tax. It applies to adults up to the retirement reference age.

That figure is tied to a year. It will be restated for 2027 and anyone quoting it without a year attached is quoting a number that will quietly go wrong. Read it on Migrationsverket's own page rather than from a summary, ours included.

Alongside it, the requirements about levnadssätt, your conduct and way of life, were reinforced. That part is assessed case by case and there is no threshold to publish.

Two knowledge requirements were created, and they are not on the same schedule. The civics requirement, grundläggande kunskaper om det svenska samhället, is live. The civics test held its first sitting on 15 August 2026 at Stockholmsmässan in Älvsjö, with around a thousand people sitting about sixty multiple-choice questions.

The Swedish language requirement is law too, but the test that will prove it does not exist yet. Until it does, you prove your Swedish with a grade or a recognised exam, and we wrote out every accepted route.

Both requirements apply to people aged 16 to 66. Below 16 and from 67 they do not apply at all. The age counted is your age when your file is examined, not when you filed it, which in a queue this long is not a detail. If the two tests blur together in your head, they are genuinely two different exams.

This is the part that protects you, and almost no competing page writes it down. As of 12 September 2026, UHR has not published the pass mark. The August sitting was an utprövningsprov, a calibration sitting, and UHR says the threshold will be set afterwards from the results, which are due in October 2026.

UHR has also not published the length of a sitting, the number of questions for the next sittings, their dates, their cities, or the fee for any sitting held before 2027. Its own page says, in so many words, that this information is coming. A figure of ninety minutes circulates on commercial preparation sites and no official source consulted here confirms it.

The fee itself is set at 2 000 kronor per sitting by förordning (2026:451), with those provisions applying from 2027 and an exemption for stateless people holding refugee status or a travel document issued by a Swedish authority. The August 2026 sitting was free. Anything you read about a price for an autumn 2026 sitting is a guess.

There is one open tension we will not paper over. UHR calls the August sitting a calibration sitting, SVT reported on 15 August 2026 that it was a trial, and The Local wrote on 23 July 2026 that people who passed would still count as meeting the civics requirement. Both can be true at once. No primary source we have read says so plainly, so if that is your situation, ask Migrationsverket.

If your file is already in, read the piece on whether the new rules apply to an application you filed years ago. The answer is uncomfortable and it is deliberate policy, not an oversight.

If you have not filed, the useful work is the language, because both requirements run through Swedish. The civics test is written in Swedish at the level the law calls funktionell nivå, and the only study material is a Swedish book. Nothing about that changes when UHR publishes a pass mark.

We are not affiliated with UHR, Skolverket or Migrationsverket, we cannot tell you whether you qualify, and nobody can promise you a pass. What we can do is keep the dates on this page tied to a source, and send you to the agency for your own case.