Salary or dividend from your Swedish company under the new 3:12 rules

You are looking at the profit and loss report for January to August and the company is doing better than you expected. There is maybe SEK 100,000 that the business does not need, and the question is whether it should leave as salary in November and December or as utdelning (a dividend). You decide this now, because after 31 December the money cannot be moved between years.

The December payroll affects your 2027 dividend, not this year’s

Your gränsbelopp for 2026, the dividend allowance taxed at only 20 percent, was already set by what you did last year. The grundbelopp (base allowance), which has replaced the old simplified rule, is four inkomstbasbelopp (income base amounts), SEK 322,400 for 2026, and the wage based part builds on cash salaries paid out during the year before the income year.

So the salary you run this autumn lands in the löneunderlag (the company’s total cash wage base) for the 2027 allowance. There the base allowance is four times the 2026 income base amount of SEK 83,400, that is SEK 333,600. The wage deduction is eight income base amounts, SEK 667,200, and the formula is your share of the wage base minus eight income base amounts, times 0.5.

If you are the only employee, the wage based part is usually zero

With SEK 600,000 in your own salary during 2026 you stay below the wage deduction of SEK 667,200, and the wage based part comes out at zero. You still get the full base allowance, so you lose nothing by dropping the chase for the wage part.

Only once the company’s total cash salaries pass SEK 667,200 does each extra krona of salary add 50 öre to your allowance. The old requirement to pay yourself a minimum salary is gone, but the wage based part can never exceed 50 times your own cash compensation, so zero salary still gives zero.

One hundred thousand kronor, two ways out

Say you have taken SEK 550,000 in salary during 2026 and have SEK 100,000 left in the company. Paid out as salary, arbetsgivaravgifter (employer social contributions) at 31.42 percent take SEK 23,907, leaving a gross salary of SEK 76,093. On that you pay municipal tax, on average 32.38 percent, and you stay under the brytpunkt (threshold for state income tax) of SEK 660,400, so no state tax is added. You end up with roughly SEK 52,000 in hand, a bit more once the earned income tax credit is counted.

Leave the money in the company instead and you pay corporate tax of 20.6 percent, SEK 20,600. Of the SEK 79,400 paid as a dividend within your allowance, 20 percent goes in tax, SEK 15,880, and you keep SEK 63,520. The dividend route gives you about SEK 11,500 more per hundred thousand.

What still argues for salary

Salary builds pension rights and sickness benefit, a dividend builds neither. The ceiling for pensionable income is SEK 673,038 for 2026, and above that salary adds no further state pension.

Three amounts sit close together this year, and they are the ones you aim at:

• SEK 660,400, where 20 percent state income tax starts
• SEK 667,200, the wage deduction your wage base is measured against for 2027
• SEK 673,038, the ceiling for pensionable income

If you are somewhere in that range, a salary just under the state tax threshold is a reasonable benchmark, with the rest as dividend. If you want the full pension credit, the last SEK 12,638 costs an extra 20 percent in state tax, and weighing pension against tax there is your call.

The interest on saved allowance is gone

Unused allowance used to be uprated each year by the government borrowing rate plus three percentage points. From the tax return you file in 2027, saved dividend allowance is no longer uprated with interest. It still carries forward and does not disappear, but it no longer grows, so waiting earns you nothing. If the company has the cash and enough non restricted equity, take the dividend.

Do this before the December payroll

Add up the cash salaries the company has actually paid out through September, add what you plan for the rest of the year, and compare with SEK 667,200. If you are below it and have no other employees, keep your salary just under the state tax threshold and take the rest as a dividend within the base allowance.

One caveat that really bites: the payment date decides. If the December salary leaves the company account on 5 January 2027, it lands in the wage base for the 2028 allowance instead. If you own shares in more than one close company you also get four income base amounts in total, split across the holdings, so add them up before you decide on a dividend. And you must have owned the shares at the start of the income year to calculate an allowance for that year at all.