Time Limits on Unpaid Invoices: Three Years, Then Gone

Time limits on unpaid invoices in Sweden are set by preskriptionslagen (1981:130), and the number that matters is three. A claim by a business against a private consumer, for goods or services bought for private use, dies after three years. Everything else — business to business, one private person against another, most other debts — runs for ten years. The clock starts when the claim arises, not on the due date you printed. It restarts from zero every time you make a valid preskriptionsavbrott: the customer acknowledges the debt, or you send a written demand that reaches the customer, or you take the claim to Kronofogden or a court. When the period runs out the money is gone for good. You cannot sue for it, and the accrued interest dies with the principal.

The two clocks people confuse

Almost every argument about an old job is two separate clocks being mixed up:

• Your clock. How long you have to collect money the customer owes you. Three years against a consumer, ten years otherwise.
• Their clock. How long the customer has to complain about a defect (fel) in the work you did. For work on land or on a building, that runs ten years against a consumer.

They are not symmetrical, and the asymmetry is brutal. Seven years after a bathroom rewire, your right to be paid for it is long dead and the customer's right to make you come back and fix it is still very much alive. Nothing in Swedish law links the two. A customer who never paid can still hold you to the defect period.

Time limits on unpaid invoices: three years or ten?

The three-year rule is a consumer protection rule, so it is read from the consumer's side. It applies where you are the trader and the buyer is a private person buying for private purposes. If the customer is a landlord booking the flat through their property company, that is not private use, and you get ten years. If you are chasing a subcontractor who owes you, that is business to business: ten years.

Reading this outside Sweden

The concept is universal, the numbers are not. In England and Wales the Limitation Act 1980 gives six years on a simple contract debt and twelve on a contract executed as a deed. New Zealand's Limitation Act 2010 gives six years, and most Australian states also use six. The bigger difference is the restart rule: in the UK a written acknowledgment or a part payment restarts the clock, but posting a reminder on its own does not. Reminder-as-interruption is a Nordic feature. Take the workflow below, keep the acknowledgment discipline, and check your own jurisdiction for the period.

When the clock actually starts

Not on the due date. The period runs from when the claim came into existence, which in practice means when you completed the work or delivered the goods and the right to payment arose. Extending your terms from 30 days to 90 does not buy you three extra months of limitation.

This is why unbilled work is dangerous. Finish a job in March 2023 and never invoice it, and the consumer claim expires in March 2026 regardless. Sitting on the paperwork pauses nothing. Firms digging through old job lists in a tighter market to find missed billing routinely discover the claim died while the job card sat in a folder.

What counts as a preskriptionsavbrott

Section 5 of preskriptionslagen lists three ways to interrupt the period. Achieve one and a fresh full period starts running from the day of the interruption, under section 6. A three-year consumer debt interrupted in month 34 is good for another three years.

1. The customer acknowledges the debt. Paying part of it, paying interest on it, agreeing a payment plan, or writing anything that concedes the debt exists. A part payment is the strongest interruption there is, because it is the customer's own act and it lands in your bank statement with a date on it.
2. You send a written reminder or demand and the customer receives it. This is the everyday route, and the one that fails in court.
3. You bring the claim. An application for betalningsföreläggande at Kronofogden, a summons at the district court, arbitration, or a bankruptcy petition.

A phone call is not on that list. "I rang him about it in 2024" interrupts nothing. Nor does an internal note, a diary entry, or a debt sitting on your ledger looking obviously owed.

Why a reminder only helps if you can prove it arrived

The statute requires that the reminder reached the debtor. Sending is not enough, and the burden of proving arrival sits on you, the creditor. The customer does not have to prove they never got it. They only have to say so.

Swedish courts have not made this impossible. The Supreme Court has accepted that a creditor who sent several letters over time, to an address verified as the debtor's registered address, can be found to have interrupted the period with no signed receipt at all — the improbability of every letter going astray does the work. But that is a fact-specific finding, not a rule you can bank on. One email, to an address you never confirmed, is thin.

What actually stands up:

• Several reminders, not one. The case law rewards a pattern. Three dated reminders beat one.
• A verified address. Check the registered address in the population register at Skatteverket before you send, and note the date you checked. A letter to an address the customer left in 2021 proves nothing.
• Delivery evidence. A reply of any kind (even "stop emailing me" is a reply, and probably an acknowledgment too), a login to your customer portal, a signed mottagningsbevis.
• A timestamped system record showing what was sent, to which address, when, and by whom — generated at the time, not reconstructed later from memory.

The version that fails: a chat thread on a phone that has since been replaced, a message to a social account the customer no longer uses, a text you are sure you sent, or "we always send reminders" with nothing behind it. If your proof of avbrott lives in a personal inbox or a lost chat thread, you do not have proof.

The workflow that keeps the claim alive

You do not need a lawyer for this. You need a habit.

1. Invoice on completion, not when things calm down. The clock has already started.
2. Run an open-items report monthly. Sort by the date the work was done, oldest first. Anything past 24 months against a consumer goes on a watch list.
3. Interrupt every open consumer claim at least once every 12 months. Three years gives you room for two clean interruptions before you are near the edge. Do not aim for month 35.
4. Send the demand in writing, to a checked address, and log it in the system. One dated entry per reminder, attached to the invoice.
5. Prefer an acknowledgment over a reminder. If you can get the customer to pay a few hundred kronor on account or sign a payment plan, you have an interruption they cannot argue with.
6. If it is serious money, file at Kronofogden. A betalningsföreläggande interrupts the period and creates a public, dated record. It costs a modest application fee plus a claimable representation cost — check the current amounts at kronofogden.se. That is cheap against writing the invoice off.

This is one place a job system earns its keep. Every reminder written from the job card, timestamped, attached to the invoice, still visible on the customer's page years later. In OdinTask the reminder history sits on the invoice itself, so when a customer says "I never heard from you" in 2029, the dated trail is in the same place as the job.

The other clock: the customer's right to complain about a fel

Under konsumenttjänstlagen a consumer must complain about a defect within a reasonable time of discovering it, and a complaint made within two months of discovery is always reasonable. Then there is an outer limit. For work on land, on buildings, or on other fixed structures, that outer limit is ten years from completion. For other services it is three.

Practically, almost everything a tradesperson does to a house sits in the ten-year bracket. Read it as: you carry the defect exposure for a decade and the collection right for three. The two do not cancel out, and the customer's complaint period is not shortened by their own non-payment.

Between businesses it differs again. Under köplagen the default complaint cut-off is two years unless a guarantee says otherwise, and if you signed the standard construction terms (AB 04, ABT 06) you are into a five-year responsibility period, with longer exposure for gross negligence. Check which terms you actually signed.

What happens when the period runs out

The claim is extinguished, and so are the accessory claims. The interest you had been quietly accruing goes with the principal. You cannot enforce it, you cannot set it off, and it is worth nothing to a collection agency.

Two nuances. In an ordinary civil dispute the court does not raise limitation on its own initiative — the debtor has to invoke it, and any debtor with representation will. And a time-barred debt can be revived in effect if the debtor voluntarily acknowledges it afterwards, so a customer who pays part of an old debt without arguing has handed you something. Do not build a strategy on it.

Preskription is not a technicality you can talk your way around. It is a hard stop, and the only defence is a boring, dated, written record showing you kept the claim alive on purpose.

If your open invoices and your reminder history live in different places, or in a chat thread, that is the thing to fix this week. Start a free trial of OdinTask and keep the trail where the job is.