Swedish dual citizenship requirements 2026: Sweden asks for none

Someone in your family has told you that the day you become Swedish you lose the citizenship you were born with. In Swedish law that is false. Whether it is true for you is settled somewhere else entirely: in the law of the country you came from, which Sweden neither influences nor checks.

What Sweden requires for dual citizenship: nothing

Sweden does not ask you to give up anything. There is no renunciation box on the application, no document to hand in afterwards, and no later check of what other passport you hold.

What the Swedish citizenship adds is concrete. Only Swedish citizens have an absolute right to live and work in Sweden and to vote in elections to the riksdag, and only Swedish citizens can be elected to it or become police officers or professional soldiers.

It also gives you a Swedish passport if you want one, although nothing obliges you to hold one. You apply at the police, the fee for an ordinary passport is 500 kr, and a passport is valid five years for anyone over twelve.

Children born in Sweden after 1 April 2015 with a Swedish parent are Swedish from birth. Whether they are also citizens of your old country is, once again, that country’s question and not Sweden’s.

The other country decides whether you lose anything

Foreign nationality laws fall into three broad patterns. Some end your citizenship automatically on the day you naturalise abroad, without telling you. Some let you keep it, but only if permission was applied for before the foreign naturalisation. Some do not care at all.

The middle pattern is the dangerous one, because the order cannot be repaired afterwards. A permission applied for in August is worth nothing if you became Swedish in May.

So write to that country’s embassy in Stockholm while your Swedish case is still open, and ask two questions: does naturalisation in Sweden end my citizenship with you, and is prior permission required. Ask for the answer in writing and keep it with the date on it.

Migrationsverket names the main practical risk in its own words: that your Swedish citizenship is not recognised by the other country where you are also a citizen. Inside that country you may be treated as its citizen and nothing else.

Which passport at which border

The Foreign Ministry (Utrikesdepartementet, UD) is direct about travel. Every Swedish citizen has a right to consular assistance abroad, dual citizens included, but your other country of citizenship can limit what Swedish authorities are allowed to do, and entering on its passport strengthens its argument that Sweden has no standing.

Travelling with two passports can also bring extra checks from border police and customs, and an entry or exit stamp missing from one of them. In some countries a passport can be seized, and you can be fined or stopped from leaving.

Compulsory military service is the other thing to check. If you are a citizen of a country that has it, you can be called up during a visit, and in some countries not having served carries a prison sentence. UD also tells dual citizens to read up on that country’s family law, custody rules and exit bans for children before travelling.

A worked example, with dates

Your Swedish decision is dated 4 May 2026, and you are a citizen from that date. On 20 March 2026, while the case was still open, you emailed your birth country’s embassy in Stockholm with the two questions above.

The reply, dated 2 April 2026, says that permission must be applied for before the foreign naturalisation, and that its citizens have to enter the country on its own passport. You file the permission request on 7 April, a month before the Swedish decision, and you save the reply with its date on it.

Then you plan the travel. The Swedish passport is ordered at the police in May: 500 kr, valid five years. The family visit moves from July to October so the permission has time to be decided, and at that border you enter on the old passport, as its law requires, keeping the Swedish one for the flight back to Sweden.

Before you send the citizenship application

The list below is short on purpose. Two items on it, the written embassy answer and the permission if one is needed, belong before the Swedish decision rather than after it. Everything else is the ordinary Swedish citizenship requirements and process, and after the decision comes your first Swedish passport.

What we do not know yet

Neither Migrationsverket nor UD publishes a country-by-country list of what happens to your old citizenship when you become Swedish. The UD pages cover travel, not other states’ nationality law, and they say so themselves.

Countries also change these rules without announcing them to people who live abroad. The only answer that carries weight is a written one from that country’s own authority, and if its embassy will not put anything in writing, treat the silence as a risk rather than as a yes.

One Swedish rule does take a citizenship away, and it is easy to miss. Under 14 § of the citizenship act, a person born abroad who has never had habitual residence in Sweden, and has not been here under circumstances indicating a connection with the country, loses Swedish citizenship at the age of twenty-two. That matters for children raised outside Sweden, not for you.