When a periodiseringsfond pays off, and when it just costs

You look at the numbers for the first eight months of the year and see that the company is doing better than you expected back in spring. Someone mentions a periodiseringsfond, a tax allocation reserve, and it sounds like free money: defer the tax, keep the cash, decide later. That is partly true, but the reserve has a price and a deadline, and you can work out both before you get stuck in the bokslut, the year-end close.

You are borrowing from the state at the government borrowing rate

A limited company may set aside at most 25 percent of its taxable profit, and the allocation has to be booked in the accounts. It must be reversed back into taxable income no later than the sixth year after the year of the allocation, and the oldest reserve always goes first (Skatteverket). Set money aside in the 2026 accounts and it has to be back in the result by 2032 at the latest (Skatteverket).

The price is called schablonintäkt, a deemed income you add to your taxable profit every year. It equals the statslåneränta, the government borrowing rate, at the end of November the previous year, multiplied by the reserves you held at the start of the year, and that rate may not be counted as lower than 0.5 percent (chapter 30 of the Income Tax Act). On 30 November 2025 the rate was 2.55 percent, and corporate tax is 20.6 percent (Skatteverket).

Put those two numbers together and you see what the reserve really is. You borrow the deferred tax from the state and pay the government borrowing rate on the loan, no more and no less.

A worked example on a profit of 400 000 kronor

Say your company lands on 400 000 kronor of taxable profit for the 2026 financial year. The maximum allocation is 100 000 kronor, and your tax that year drops by 20 600 kronor.

From 2027 you add a deemed income of 2 550 kronor, which is 2.55 percent of the reserve, costing 525 kronor in tax. Keep the reserve all the way to 2032 and you have paid around 3 100 kronor to push 20 600 kronor ahead of you for six years. The deemed income is recalculated with a new borrowing rate every year, so 525 kronor is the first year’s figure, not the answer for all six.

The reserve is only worth something if a later year is worse

The benefit shows up when the reversal meets a weak year. If 2029 turns out to be heavy on investments, or you lose the client that accounts for half your revenue, the reversal is offset against that year’s loss and you never pay full tax on the amount. This is smoothing over time, not a deduction.

If the company earns roughly the same good result every year, you end up in a loop where you set aside about as much as you reverse and pay a bit over 500 kronor per 100 000 kronor of reserve to stand still. So do this: set money aside if you have a concrete reason to think one of the next six years will be weaker, or if cash is tight right now. Do not do it just because the rules let you.

The reserve is also forced back early whatever you think, among other things if the company stops trading, goes bankrupt, enters liquidation or is dissolved through a merger (Skatteverket). If you are thinking of selling or winding up within a few years, that is a strong argument against adding more now.

A reserve from 2020 has to go back this year

Allocations from financial years that began in 2019 or 2020 are uplifted to 104 percent when reversed, because corporate tax was higher then. Reserves from before 2019 are uplifted to 106 percent, and the uplift is entered as a tax adjustment at box 4.6 d in Inkomstdeklaration 2, the corporate tax return (Skatteverket). A reserve of 100 000 kronor set aside in 2020 is therefore taxed as 104 000 kronor, and it has to be reversed in the 2026 accounts at the latest.

What you set aside, you cannot pay out

The reserve sits on the balance sheet as obeskattade reserver, untaxed reserves, so it counts as neither a liability nor as fritt eget kapital, the unrestricted equity you can distribute. The ceiling for a dividend is that unrestricted equity in the balance sheet adopted by the shareholders’ meeting (Bolagsverket, chapter 17 of the Companies Act).

So an allocation of 100 000 kronor in the 2026 accounts cuts what you can distribute at the spring 2027 meeting by 100 000 kronor, even though only 20 600 of that is tax. If you are planning salary and dividends this October, that is the real trade-off: money out of the company next year, or tax deferred for six.

Pull a preliminary result as of 31 October and calculate 25 percent on the taxable result after salary and after deducting losses carried forward. If you still have losses from earlier years, there is often nothing to gain from an allocation at all. You decide at the year-end close, but you want the numbers now.

One genuine caveat: you are tying yourself to six years of a corporate tax rate that nobody knows for 2032. If it goes up, you pay more on the reversal than you saved on the allocation, and that risk cannot be calculated away.