Losing your job on a work permit: the three-month rule

The word in the meeting was övertalighet and your permit card runs to 2028. The card is not the deadline. Migrationsverket's own page says you may stay in Sweden to look for a new job for three months after your last day of employment, provided the work permit is still valid during that period, and that sentence contains two dates you need to check tonight.

The count starts on your last day, not on the notice

Notice (uppsägning) and the end of the employment are two different dates, and only the second one starts the count.

Through the notice period (uppsägningstid) you are still employed and still paid, and the permit is doing what it always did. How long that period is comes from the collective agreement, or from LAS where there is none. Ask the union rather than only HR: one month against three is the difference between looking calmly and looking in a hurry.

Get the last day of employment in writing. Every date below is counted from that one.

Rasha writes software in Västerås. She is given notice on 31 July 2026 with a three-month notice period, so the employment ends on 31 October 2026 and her three months run to 31 January 2027. Her permit runs into 2028, so the three months are the binding date. She registers with Arbetsförmedlingen on 1 November, signs with a new employer in December, and the application is complete and paid on 14 January 2027, seventeen days before the deadline.

The three months are not an extension of the permit

This is the part people misread. The three months are permission to stay and look, and they run inside the permit you already hold. If the permit expires on 15 December and your job ended on 31 October, you have six weeks, not ninety days.

Migrationsverket puts it plainly: if you do not find a new job within three months, or if the work permit expires before then, and you have no other ground to stay, you must leave the country. The agency can revoke a permit when the conditions behind it are no longer met, and no longer working is one of those conditions.

Whether your permit is limited to a named employer or only to an occupation is written in the decision you were sent and printed on the residence permit card. In the ordinary case the first two years are tied to both, and after that to the occupation. Read your own decision instead of trusting a summary, this one included.

What the next contract has to clear

A new employer always means a new application, assessed like a first one against the rules on the day it is decided. Your previous salary is not a reference point.

Four things decide it. The post advertised in Sweden and the EU for at least ten days, with the contract signed after that advertising period ended. Pay and conditions at collective-agreement level. Health, life, occupational injury and pension insurance in place by the time you start. And a salary of at least 34 470 kr a month, the 90 per cent line for applications received from 16 June 2026.

A lower level of 75 per cent, 28 725 kr, exists, but it is not a general discount. It applies to a list of exempt occupations and groups. Check Migrationsverket's salary-requirement page against your own job title before you accept an offer that sits between the two figures.

The move that buys you months: apply, then start

There is one rule here worth more than everything else in this article. If the new application reaches Migrationsverket before your current permit expires, you may start working for the new employer while the case is processed. You do not wait for the decision.

So the sequence is: contract signed, employer starts the offer in the e-service, you complete the application and pay 2 200 kr, and only then do you count on the new job. An adult family member pays 1 500 kr and a child 750 kr, and the fee is not refunded if the answer is no.

Do not hold out for a better offer before filing. A signed contract that clears the floor and a filed application on day sixty are worth more than a promising conversation on day eighty-five.

Week one, SGI and the money

Register as a jobseeker with Arbetsförmedlingen on your first unemployed day. Both Arbetsförmedlingen and Försäkringskassan say the same thing about why: registering on that first day is what protects your sickness benefit qualifying income (sjukpenninggrundande inkomst, SGI). Försäkringskassan adds a nuance worth knowing, that a gap between two permanent employments does not by itself cost you your SGI; the strict day-one rule bites hardest between short fixed-term jobs.

Unemployment insurance is a separate membership from a separate organisation, and no official page states whether a work permit holder may draw it. Ask your own a-kassa in writing and keep the answer. What is documented is the other direction: unemployment benefit does not count as income when Migrationsverket assesses maintenance for a family member's permit.

What we do not know yet

Two things sit outside what any official page will tell you. Whether an individual a-kassa will pay a work permit holder, which the funds decide themselves and which is worth a written question rather than a forum answer. And how strictly the June 2026 rules are being applied to small employers, since the reform widened the grounds for refusing an application because of the company rather than the applicant.

There is also a version of this that is easier than it looks. If your employment is ending but the same company wants to keep you in another role, or a competitor in the same occupation makes an offer, you are in the ordinary change-of-employer case: apply before the permit expires, start when the application is in, and the three months never become the story.