Mileage and Subsistence Allowances: The Tax-Free Rules

Mileage and subsistence allowances are the two amounts an employer can pay a worker tax-free for driving and eating while away on a work trip. In Sweden the mileage allowance (milersattning) is a fixed sum per mil (10 km) — one rate if the worker drives their own car, a lower fuel-only rate if they drive a company car, and a lower rate again if that company car is electric. The subsistence allowance (traktamente) only exists if the trip involves an overnight stay more than 50 km from both the home and the workplace of record. Both hang on one thing most firms get wrong: which address counts as the worker's tjansteställe (place of employment). Get that wrong and every payment you have made is either taxable salary or a deduction you have thrown away.

The two allowances are not the same thing

They get lumped together on the same payslip line and they should not be.

• Mileage allowance (milersattning) — compensation for using a vehicle on a work trip. Paid per mil. No overnight stay required. A 40 km round trip to a site qualifies.
• Subsistence (traktamente) — compensation for the extra cost of food and living away from home. Requires an overnight stay and a destination more than 50 km away. A long day trip earns mileage but earns no traktamente, however hungry you got.

Both are tax-free only up to a standard amount (schablonbelopp) set by Skatteverket. Pay more than the schablon and the excess is ordinary salary: income tax for the worker, employer contributions for you. Pay less and the worker can claim the difference as a deduction on their own return, subject to the usual thresholds.

Mileage rates: own car vs company car, petrol vs electric

The logic is simple once you see it. If the worker owns the car, the allowance covers fuel plus wear, tyres, depreciation and insurance — so it is higher. If the company owns the car (a formansbil that the worker is already taxed on as a benefit), the only cost the worker personally carries is the energy they put in. So the allowance covers fuel only — and electricity is cheaper per mil than diesel, hence the separate, lower electric rate.

Those are the rates that have applied in the most recent years, and the electric figure in particular has been adjusted more than once as charging prices moved. Do not hardcode them into your payroll and forget about them. Confirm the figure for the current income year at skatteverket.se each January, before the first payroll run.

Three traps that cost real money:

• A plug-in hybrid company car is not "electric" for this. It takes the petrol/diesel rate, not the electric one, because it can burn liquid fuel. Only a pure battery car gets the electric rate.
• If you pay for the worker's fuel and they also drive privately, that is a separate fuel benefit (drivmedelsforman) valued well above the pump price — historically 120% of market value. A company fuel card handed out casually is one of the most expensive things a small firm does by accident.
• You may pay more than the schablon — 30 kr per mil if you like. It is legal. The excess is just salary, and you owe employer contributions on it. Say so out loud to the worker so it does not look like a payroll error later.

For readers outside Sweden: the UK equivalent is HMRC's Approved Mileage Allowance Payments, quoted per mile, with a higher rate for the first tranche of annual miles and a lower one after. The structure matches — a published rate, tax-free up to it, salary above it — but the numbers and the company-car treatment differ entirely. Use your own tax authority's table.

Tjansteresa vs commuting: your tjansteställe decides everything

This is where trades firms lose. A tjansteresa (work trip) is travel to a place that is not your place of employment. A commute is travel to it. Commuting is never a tax-free allowance — it is at best a personal deduction on the worker's own return.

So the whole question is: where is this person's tjansteställe?

The main rule

Your tjansteställe is where you carry out the main part of your work. For an office worker that is the office. For a plumber who starts every morning at the workshop, loads the van and drives out, it is arguably the workshop — and that first drive is a commute.

The building-site exception

Skatteverket applies a specific rule for construction and installation work, and work of a similar kind, carried out at constantly changing places: the worker's home is treated as the tjansteställe. That is the rule most electricians, plumbers, roofers and carpenters actually live under. The consequence is large — if home is your tjansteställe, then driving from home to the site is a tjansteresa, and mileage from the driveway is payable tax-free.

It does not apply automatically to everyone in a van. If the worker turns up at the same depot every morning to be dispatched, that depot starts to look like the tjansteställe regardless of what the sites do afterwards.

When a long-running site becomes the tjansteställe

The exception assumes the sites keep changing. When one bygge runs long enough that the worker is effectively based there, Skatteverket's position is that the site itself can become the tjansteställe — a posting expected to last more than two years at one place is the case to watch. From that point the daily drive is a commute, not a work trip, and the tax-free mileage stops.

Practical version: the day you sign a site contract that runs past two years, ask your accountant to look at it before payroll does. Do not discover it in a revision three years later with 24 months of allowances to unwind.

Traktamente: the two tests, the amounts, and the reductions

Traktamente is tax-free only if both are true:

1. The trip involves an overnight stay outside the normal place of work.
2. The destination is more than 50 km from both the tjansteställe and the worker's home.

Then the amounts. The domestic maximum for a full day (maximibeloppet) has recently been 290 kr, with a half day at half of that and a night allowance (nattraktamente) at half of that again where you have not paid for the lodging and the worker cannot document the cost. Confirm the current year's figure at Skatteverket — this number moves.

• Full day — departure before 12:00, or return after 19:00.
• Half day — departure after 12:00, or return before 19:00. Half the amount.
• Nattraktamente — half the full-day amount, if you did not pay for the bed and there is no receipt. If there is a receipt, reimburse the actual cost instead; that is tax-free in full and usually better for everyone.
• Abroad — a separate normalbelopp per country, published by Skatteverket. Norway and Denmark are not the same figure as Poland. Look it up per trip.

Free meals reduce it — and this is the line people forget

If someone else feeds the worker, the traktamente drops. The reductions are expressed as a share of the full-day amount, and those percentages are stable even when the kronor change:

Breakfast included in the hotel rate counts as a free meal. It is the single most common miss in a payroll audit, because nobody reads the booking confirmation. If the site canteen feeds the crew, that is a free lunch and the reduction applies.

The three-month and two-year steps

Traktamente is not a permanent income stream. Once the worker has been at the same place for more than three months, the tax-free amount steps down to 70% of the maximum. After two years it steps down again, to 50% — and by then you should also be asking whether the tjansteställe itself has moved. Diary these two dates at the start of any long posting.

What a körjournal needs to contain to survive a revision

A körjournal (mileage log) is not legally mandatory. It is simply the only thing that wins the argument. Without one, Skatteverket is entitled to assume a company vehicle was available for private use, and to tax the benefit accordingly — and it is the firm that carries the burden of showing otherwise.

A log that holds up records, per trip:

• Date of the trip.
• Odometer reading at start and at finish. Not just "42 km". The readings must run continuously — an unexplained gap between one trip's end reading and the next trip's start reading is the first thing an auditor circles.
• Distance driven, in km.
• Start address and destination address. "Site" is not an address. "Storgatan 14, Vasteras" is.
• Purpose of the trip — the job, the errand, the customer visit.
• Who or which company was visited, where relevant.
• Private or business, clearly flagged. Private trips must be in the log too — a log with no private trips at all reads as a log that was written afterwards.
• Vehicle registration, and the driver, if more than one person uses the van.

Also record the odometer reading at the start and end of the year. That is the total the whole log has to reconcile to.

Two rules of thumb. A log written at the end of the month is worth less than a log written in the van; reconstructed logs get picked apart on details nobody can remember. And keep it as long as the rest of your accounting records — seven years is the safe assumption in Sweden.

This is one of the places a job system earns its keep. In OdinTask the trip is already implied by the job: the site address is on the work order, the geofenced time clock records the arrival, and the technician confirms the distance from the field app rather than reconstructing a month of driving from memory on the last Friday of the month.

Why 2026 is the year to re-check your numbers

Two things have moved. The per-mil amounts have been adjusted, so a rate you set up in payroll a few years ago is now simply the wrong number — you are either shorting your staff or handing them untaxed salary. And van fleets have gone electric fast, which means a growing share of firms are paying a company-car fuel rate that assumes a diesel engine the vehicle does not have. If you have swapped a Transit for an e-Transit and not touched the payroll setting, you are over-paying tax-free allowance on every trip, and the whole excess is reclassifiable as salary.

Do this once, in an hour:

1. Open the current year's amounts on Skatteverket and write them down.
2. List every vehicle: own car, company petrol/diesel, company pure-electric, plug-in hybrid (which takes the petrol rate).
3. Check the rate configured against each worker in payroll.
4. Decide, per worker, where the tjansteställe actually is — and write down the reason.
5. Diary the three-month and two-year dates for any long-running site.

Then look at the mileage log itself. If your crew is still filling in a paper book in the glovebox, the numbers are being invented on the last day of the month, and everyone knows it.

Want the trip, the time, the job and the site address captured once and used everywhere instead of retyped into a spreadsheet? Start a free trial of OdinTask and run one month of jobs through it. See the pricing page for plans, or read more on the blog.