Late annual report: the penalty comes in three steps

The 2025 accounts are still sitting in the pile, it is mid September, and the årsredovisning, the annual report, still has not reached Bolagsverket. That gives you about two weeks before this gets more expensive.

If your company uses the calendar year as its räkenskapsår, the financial year, the report was due by 31 July 2026. You are far from alone in missing it. In late May, Bolagsverket sent reminders to 258,000 limited companies that had not yet filed.

The penalty is not a daily charge, it hits three times

It makes no difference whether you are five days late or fifty. Bolagsverket charges a förseningsavgift, a late filing penalty, of 7,500 kronor to a private aktiebolag once seven months have passed, another 7,500 kronor at nine months, and 15,000 kronor at eleven months. For public companies the amounts are 15,000, 15,000 and 30,000 kronor.

If you have seen the figure 5,000 kronor somewhere, it is out of date. The higher amounts apply to financial years starting on or after 1 January 2025, which is exactly the set of accounts in front of you.

For a financial year ending 31 December 2025, the calendar looks like this:

• 31 July 2026: first penalty, 7,500 kronor
• 30 September 2026: second penalty, 7,500 kronor
• 30 November 2026: third penalty, 15,000 kronor, and the company risks forced liquidation

Work out what three days cost you

Say you plan to be finished “sometime in early October”. File on 29 September and the company has paid 7,500 kronor in total. File on 2 October and it has paid 15,000 kronor. Three days apart, 7,500 kronor.

If it drags on into December, the bill is 7,500 plus 7,500 plus 15,000, so 30,000 kronor. None of it is deductible. Skatteverket classes late filing penalties as fines and public law sanction charges, which you may not deduct, so the penalty is paid with money the company has already been taxed on. That makes it more expensive than an ordinary cost of the same size.

Eleven months is where it stops being about money

If the annual report has not arrived within eleven months of the financial year end, Bolagsverket shall decide that the company is to be liquidated, under chapter 25, section 11 of the Companies Act, the aktiebolagslag. That is the main rule in the statute itself, not a turn of phrase in a reminder letter.

A liquidation case in progress is also a matter of public record, visible to your bank, your landlord or the customer who looks your company up before signing. You cannot put a krona figure on that, but it is real.

The date you should actually be working to falls earlier

Seven months is the outer limit for the penalty, not the date the law points to first. The bolagsstämma, the shareholders’ meeting, must be held within six months of the financial year end under chapter 7, section 10 of the Companies Act. Once that meeting has adopted the income statement and balance sheet, certified copies must reach Bolagsverket within one month, under chapter 8, section 3 of the Annual Accounts Act, the årsredovisningslag.

So if you held the meeting in May, your real deadline was in June. Note also that the documents must have arrived, not merely been sent. The post is your problem, not Bolagsverket’s, which is one good reason to file digitally this late in the year.

Waivers exist, but the bar is higher than you think

The penalty can be waived, eftergift, if the delay looks excusable because of something outside your control, or if charging it would be plainly unreasonable. Bolagsverket states that as a rule you need certificates showing that nobody in the company was able to prepare and file the report, for example a doctor’s certificate for a board member who fell ill during exactly that period.

Bookkeeping that fell behind, a busy season, or someone who promised to handle it will not do. If you would rather appeal, you have two months from the date of the decision, and the Administrative Court in Härnösand decides the matter. My honest advice is to spend those two months getting finished instead, because your odds are poor.

What to do this week

Call the meeting, adopt the income statement and balance sheet, sign, and file digitally before 29 September. It is the same work you have to do anyway, just moved two weeks forward in the calendar, and it is worth 7,500 kronor.

If your company has a financial year that does not follow the calendar, the same ladder applies, counted from your own year end. Pull up that date and put the seven, nine and eleven month marks in your calendar before you close this page.