TL;DR: Among others, Helsingborgshem, PiteBo, Karlstads Bostads, and Nordanstigs Bostäder.
If you want to rent an apartment in Sweden, many landlords will have strict requirements around proving that you have a high enough income to be able to pay the rent. They have different methods for actually determining this, but from my research, the most common ones, roughly equally popular, are what I call "Income Multiple" and "Left After Rent". Income Multiple is the most straightforward, as it simply states that your income must be greater than, for example, three times the rent. Although even this is theoretically not always as simple as it sounds, because a distinction can be made between before- and after-tax. In Sweden, salaries are generally discussed in the context of before-tax, since your exact tax-rate depends not just on the amount itself, but also which municipality you live in and even if you're a member of the church. However this doesn't stop many landlords from explicitly declaring that the multiple calculation uses your after-tax salary. The other way of determining income eligibility I call "Left After Rent", which simply means that your monthly income minus the rent must be greater than some specified amount.
Din inkomst efter skatt måste vara minst 10 000 kronor högre än hyran.
– Helsingborgshem AB (2024-09-25)
That is basically the current default and status quo for income requirements of Swedish landlords. Their absolute best-case scenario is a perfectly average, normal, boring, predictable person having a perfectly average, normal, boring, predictable job. This person is what I call a "100%er" because the number of landlords with explicit rental policies that will explicitly accept them approaches 100%. So what if this person loses their job and has to go on unemployment benefits? What percentage of landlords with explicit rental policies, and actual vacancies at the time of writing, will explicitly accept them then? Well my friends, in that case the number already drops to 58.8%. Now of course this doesn't mean that half the number of literal doors are literally closed to them, because the two "explicit-clauses" are really closer to a worst-case estimate than an absolute certainty. So it's more like those doors that were previously open turn into question marks, but if you're the sort of person who enjoys having endless possibilities and options, that could make you a little bit uneasy.
Godtagbara inkomster • A-kassa - minst 180 dagar kvar att få ut a-kassa.
– PiteBo (2024-02-22)
But what if you meet with an even more terrible fate and become (semi-)permanently unable to work, such that you have to rely on sickness compensation? 41.7%. So you go further down the ladder as you fall through the cracks of the system and move further and further away from the norm. And mind you, the Swedish state is actually comparatively speaking very generous by making sure that your monthly income keeps on flowing, without you having to worry about manually paying for expensive insurance beforehand. Month after month, they keep paying out around the 25th or so, because all the bills are typically due at the end of the month. So notice how the expectation that you are going to be living paycheck to paycheck, dependent on either the private or public sector, is already baked into the system.
Skicka in senaste utbetalning om du får: […] Sjukersättning
– Helsingborgshem AB (2024-09-25)
But also notice how this entire ladder traces back to having had a boring job at some previous point in time. Now I don't want to say that a long, full-time, standard Swedish job history is a hard requirement for getting unemployment or sickness compensation, but I will say that it certainly makes things easier, based on my own experience. So what if you don't have that? From my research, the step below that on the ladder is a guarantor. This simply means offloading the requirements onto someone else, like a parent in many cases. Probably not the best solution for the feeling of building independence as a young adult, but often better than nothing at all. The percentage for that is 37.5%.
Det krävs att borgensmannens nettomånadsinkomst ska vara minst fem gånger månadshyran.
– Karlstads Bostads AB (Januari 2026)
The step of the ladder beneath that feels strange to put below the step of unemployment or sickness, but the numbers do back it up in this particular area, which is having savings. And here you have to differentiate again between the continued attachment to income, namely only counting the returns those savings generate, and pure savings and therefore finally dropping the income requirement. The percentages come in at 27.8% and 14.8% respectively. And if you want to have as few arguments as possible, by choosing a landlord that gives you an exact threshold anchored to the yearly rent, that number drops to 9.3%.
Som inkomst räknas: […] inkomst av kapital, eller kapitaltillgångar motsvarande minst 12 månadshyror
– Nordanstigs Bostäder AB (2026-02-11)
According to my understanding, all of the quoted landlords (PiteBo, Helsingborgshem, Karlstads Bostads, and Nordanstigs Bostäder) accept all of the categories I mentioned in this report. But if you want the complete list of landlords for all of the mentioned categories and more, then consider supporting my work for 100 kr to get a month of full access to Bostadskvant, which will also help you filter vacant apartments against many other kinds of requirements you may have, like low queue competition, adjacency to stores and public transport, or features included in the rent.