Tax-free Christmas and anniversary gifts for employees

You have three employees, maybe four counting yourself, and you want to give them something in December. The real question is how much the gift can cost before it starts costing tax. For 2026 the answer is 600 kronor per person, and that limit is tighter than it sounds.

600 kronor including VAT, not excluding

Skatteverket, the Swedish Tax Agency, has raised the limit for a tax-free julgåva (Christmas gift) to 600 kronor including VAT for the 2026 income year, up from 550 kronor the year before. What counts is the gift’s market value, meaning what an ordinary customer would pay in a shop. If you got a business discount, your purchase price is not what decides it.

Shipping and handling are not included in the value, according to Skatteverket’s page for employers. So you can send a 595 kronor box to someone’s home and pay 79 kronor in postage without the gift becoming taxable.

Go over and the whole gift is taxable

This is the trap. If you exceed the limit, the entire gift is taxed from the first krona, not just the part above the limit. A 650 kronor gift is a taxable benefit worth 650 kronor, and it has to be reported as salary.

Here is what that looks like. Say you give five people a gift worth 700 kronor each. The full value becomes a taxable benefit, and the company pays arbetsgivaravgifter (employer social contributions) of 31.42 percent for employees born 1959 to 2002. That is 219.94 kronor per person, or 1,099.70 kronor in total, on top of the gifts. Each recipient also pays income tax on 700 kronor. Had you stayed at 600 kronor, you would have paid 3,000 kronor and nothing more.

My advice: pick something clearly below 600 kronor at retail price, and save the receipt or a screenshot of the price.

Cash never works, some gift cards do

Cash and Swish transfers are never tax-free gifts. The same goes for gift cards that can be redeemed for money, since Skatteverket treats them as a means of payment. A gift card that can only be used for goods or experiences can be tax-free, as long as the value stays within the limit.

Don’t let employees choose between a gift and a cash amount or extra salary either. At that point it is no longer a gift but payment for work. If an employee asks you to donate the money to charity instead, that is also taxed as salary.

An anniversary gift needs a 25-year-old company

The word anniversary trips people up. A tax-free jubileumsgåva (anniversary gift) is about the company’s anniversary, not the employee’s. The limit is 1,800 kronor including VAT for 2026, and the gift can be given when the company turns 25, 50, 75 or 100. It cannot be given before the 25th anniversary or more often than every 25 years.

For most small limited companies this simply doesn’t apply yet. If you started your company in 2015 and want to mark ten years with a nice present, expect it to be taxable.

The memorial gift is for people who stayed

When an employee turns 50 or a later round decade, has been employed for at least 20 years, or leaves, you can give a minnesgåva (memorial gift). It is tax-free up to 15,000 kronor including VAT. The person must have been employed for a combined total of at least six years, and the gift can only be given once, apart from the occasion when the employment ends.

This is the only one of the three that can go to a single person. Christmas and anniversary gifts must go to all employees or to a larger group of them.

If you are the employee

If you run the company alone and are its only employee, the larger-group requirement is hard to meet. Skatteverket’s pages on gifts say nothing specific about owner-managed companies, and there is no clear rule saying that a Christmas gift to yourself as the sole employee is tax-free. My view is that it is hard to defend, and not worth the risk for 600 kronor.

If you have staff and give everyone the same gift on the same terms, yourself included, you are on much firmer ground. The difference is that the gift is then a staff gift rather than a way of moving money out of the company to the owner.

VAT and bookkeeping

When the gift is tax-free for the recipient, the company can deduct the input VAT. A 600 kronor gift with 25 percent VAT gives you 120 kronor in VAT deduction and 480 kronor in cost. Book the cost as a staff expense, and note on the voucher who received the gift and what it was.

If the gift turns out to be taxable, its value goes in as a benefit for each employee in the arbetsgivardeklaration (the monthly employer declaration) for the month the gift is given. The VAT treatment then gets more complicated, so check how the deduction is affected before you book it.

Before you order, look up the gift’s retail price including VAT and save it with the invoice. If it is over 600 kronor, change the gift rather than doing the maths on the contributions.