Company car or mileage allowance in your Swedish AB?

You are in the middle of October planning, salary and dividends need to be settled before year end, and the car question shows up again. Should the company buy or lease a car that you take out as a taxable benefit, or should you keep driving your own and let the company pay you per kilometre.

It comes down to one number, and it is not how much you drive for work. It is how much you drive privately.

The benefit value does not care how far you drive

Bilförmån, the taxable company car benefit, arises as soon as you use the car privately on more than ten occasions or for more than 100 mil (a Swedish mil is 10 kilometres, so 1,000 km) during the year, according to Skatteverket. Once you cross that line you are taxed on the full standard value, whether you then drive 300 mil privately or 3,000.

The standard value has four parts:

• 0.29 prisbasbelopp, the price base amount that many Swedish tax figures are pegged to
• the new car price times the sum of 70 percent of the statslåneränta, the government borrowing rate, and 0.01
• 13 percent of the new car price
• the fordonsskatt, the annual vehicle tax for that car

For 2026 the price base amount is SEK 59,200 and the government borrowing rate on 30 November 2025 was 2.55 percent. That makes the interest related factor 2.785 percent of the new car price.

What it looks like on a car worth SEK 350,000

The price base amount part is SEK 17,168. The interest related part is 350,000 times 0.02785, so SEK 9,748. The price related part is SEK 45,500. Add the vehicle tax, say SEK 3,200, but look up the exact figure for your own model.

That totals about SEK 75,600 a year, just over SEK 6,300 a month added on top of your salary. If your marginal tax rate is 33 percent, the car costs you roughly SEK 24,900 in tax. The company also pays arbetsgivaravgifter, employer social contributions, at 31.42 percent on the benefit value, around SEK 23,800, and in return deducts the running costs of the car.

Drive 400 mil privately in a year and you are paying about SEK 62 per private mil in tax alone. And we have not touched fuel yet.

Fuel is taxed separately, with a markup

If the company pays for the fuel you burn privately, it is valued at market value times 1.2. The base for employer contributions, on the other hand, is the market value without that markup, which trips up a lot of people running their own payroll.

Do this instead: pay for fuel yourself and let the company reimburse your business driving. Then SEK 12 per mil is tax free, or SEK 9.50 per mil for a fully electric company car.

25 kronor per mil is the boring winner

If you drive your own car for work, the company can pay you SEK 25 per mil tax free as milersättning, a mileage allowance. Three hundred mil of business driving gives you SEK 7,500 tax free and a full deduction in the company, with no employer contributions and no capital tied up in a vehicle.

My recommendation: if you drive less than roughly a thousand mil privately per year, keep your private car and take the mileage allowance. A company car starts to pay off only when your private driving is heavy enough that you would have owned an expensive car anyway, or when you reach 3,000 mil of business driving and can reduce the benefit value to 75 percent.

Electric changes the maths, an old car does not

For green cars the new car price is reduced by a fixed amount before the calculation: SEK 350,000 for electric and hydrogen, SEK 140,000 for plug-in hybrids and SEK 100,000 for gas cars, capped at 50 percent of the car’s new price. So an electric car at SEK 500,000 gets a reduction of SEK 250,000, not 350,000, because the cap bites.

Buying something cheap and used rarely helps either. For car models that are six years or older there is a rule that the new car price is deemed to be at least four price base amounts, which comes to SEK 236,800 for 2026. Check that against your model before you talk yourself into a ten year old estate.

VAT makes leasing less bad than buying

If the company buys a passenger car, you cannot reclaim the VAT at all, apart from car dealing, rental, taxi and a few other cases. Lease instead and you can deduct 50 percent of the VAT on the lease charge, plus all VAT on running costs such as fuel, service and inspection if the car is used in your VAT liable business.

Whichever route you pick, the körjournal, the mileage log, is what decides whether the arrangement holds up if Skatteverket asks. Date, odometer reading, purpose and who you met, every single trip.

Your next step before deciding anything for 2027: pull up your 2026 calendar and add up how many mil you have actually driven privately this year. And before you swap cash salary for a company car in your October planning, check how it hits your dividend allowance, because the wage base in the 3:12 rules is built on cash pay, not on benefits.