Job opportunities when you’re young: what a first job really gives you

1. In short: a first job gives you money and contacts, and the contacts weigh the most.

About one in four Swedes aged 15–19 had a job in 2025, according to Statistics Sweden (SCB). Among 20–24-year-olds it was six in ten [1]. Most teenagers who work do it in summer, and most often in a shop or a restaurant [2]. Which jobs you can get is set by law: how old you are, whether you have finished year 9 and whether a parent has said yes.

The money follows one simple rule. If you earn less than SEK 25,042 in 2026 you pay no tax, but you earn no pension either, according to the Swedish Tax Agency and the Pensions Agency [3, 4]. Once you pass that line, 17.21% of your pay becomes pension right, from the first krona [4]. Pension right is the amount credited to your public pension for that year.

What does it give you for the future? Less than many think, and in a different way. When Swedish municipalities allocated summer jobs by lottery, the job did not lead to higher pay a few years later [5, 6]. What shows most clearly is the contacts. According to the Swedish research institute IFAU, vocational students who had a summer or side job at a workplace are 35–40 percentage points more likely than their classmates to get a job there after school [7, 8]. Figure 1 gathers four numbers to start with.

The rest goes deeper. Section 2 shows how many young people work and how that has changed since the 1970s. Section 3 goes through what the law allows at each age. Section 4 covers what research says an early job gives you. In section 5 you can work out what a side job gives in kronor and pension, and section 6 compares the jobs open to young people.

2. One teenager in four works, and the share never recovered from the crisis of the 1990s.

According to Statistics Sweden (SCB), 25.3% of all 15–19-year-olds in Sweden had a job in 2025, about 157,800 people. Among 20–24-year-olds the share was 62.3% the same year [1]. The figures come from SCB’s labour force surveys (AKU), which measure how many people have a job.

From 1976 to 1990, about half of all 16–19-year-olds and eight in ten 20–24-year-olds worked, according to SCB’s older statistics. In the crisis of the early 1990s the share of teenagers with a job fell to just over 20%, and it has never come back [2]. Figure 2 shows the long series on the left and today’s on the right. A likely explanation for the fall is school. Upper secondary school became three years long and nearly everyone started it, and today 92.5% of all 15–19-year-olds are in education [9].

The right one shows today’s series from 2001. Since then the share of teenagers with a job has stayed between about 19 and 27%, mostly in step with the economy. It fell in the financial crisis and in the pandemic year 2020, when 20.6% had a job, and is now back at about the 2019 level [1]. The two series can’t be compared directly. The older one starts at 16 and uses older definitions, so they are drawn on separate axes. The year 2001 is in both: 30.8% in the old series and 27.3% in the new one [1, 2].

Summer is the way in

Most of it happens in summer. In July 2025, 39.3% of 15–19-year-olds had a job, against 22–24% in March and May [2]. SCB’s register data tell the same story: 53% of all upper secondary students had pay in July or August 2024, 57% of girls and 49% of boys. Half of them earned more than SEK 10,000 over the summer and half less [11]. Among 12–15-year-olds there are fewer. About 14% said in 2023 that they had had a summer job [2].

Unemployment looks worse than it is

You may have heard that Sweden has one of the EU’s highest youth unemployment rates. In one sense that is true: of the 15–24-year-olds who worked or looked for work, 24.3% were unemployed in 2025, the third-highest share in the EU [12]. But the figure needs explaining. Since 2007, a full-time student counts as unemployed if they want a side job, have looked in the past four weeks and could start within two weeks. Of the 169,500 unemployed 15–24-year-olds in 2025, 102,400, or 60%, were full-time students. Most of them wanted to work fewer than 20 hours a week [13].

Other measures give a different picture. Only 5.0% of Swedish 15–24-year-olds are neither working nor studying, the third-lowest share in the EU [14]. The difference lies rather in how many manage to combine school and work. Figure 3 compares with the neighbouring countries. About one in five Swedish 15–19-year-olds both studies and works, against four in ten in Denmark and Norway [9]. There, nearly half of all 15–19-year-olds also have a job [15]. So many want to work alongside school, but fewer get a job than in Denmark and Norway.

The jobs are where teenagers live and shop. Among employed 16–19-year-olds in November 2021, 22% worked in retail and 21% in hotels and restaurants [2]. That was a winter month during the pandemic, so restaurants are probably understated.

3. The law follows school: once year 9 is done, most jobs open up.

What you may work at when you are young, and how much, depends both on how old you are and on whether you have finished year 9. That is what the Swedish Work Environment Authority’s regulations AFS 2023:2, chapter 8, say, in force since 1 January 2025 [16]. Many guides still refer to the old rules, AFS 2012:3, which no longer apply. Figure 4 shows the steps.

An “older child” in the Work Environment Authority’s rules is anyone aged 13 or older who hasn’t finished year 9. As an older child you may work at most 2 hours on a school day, 7 hours on a day off and 12 hours a week in school weeks. In holidays of at least a week you may work at most 7 hours a day and 35 a week [16, 17]. The work must be light and harmless. You may not sell age-restricted goods or do heavy or mentally taxing work, such as working alone or handling money. You may not work between 20.00 and 06.00, and you must have at least four weeks in a row off work each year, outside school time [16, 17].

A “young person” in the same rules is anyone who has finished year 9 and turns 16 during the year, until 18. As a young person you may work up to 8 hours a day and 40 a week, but the job must not get in the way of school. You may not work between 22.00 and 06.00 or between 23.00 and 07.00 [16]. That means a 16-year-old still in year 9 in spring has the same limits as a 13-year-old. From the summer after year 9, the young-person rules apply to anyone turning 16 that year, even before their birthday.

Some rules apply to everyone under 18. Nobody may work between midnight and 05.00. After at most 4.5 hours you must get a break of at least 30 minutes. If you have several jobs, the hours are added together. You must always have a suitable supervisor aged at least 18, and a collective agreement cannot change any of this [16]. Under 13, work is in principle forbidden. The exceptions are very light tasks in the family business and performances, for example in culture, sport or advertising, that the Work Environment Authority has given a permit for [16].

The contract and the money

The Children and Parents Code (föräldrabalken) governs the contract and the money. You may take a job yourself, but only if your guardian says yes, and that holds until you turn 18. You can quit the job yourself, and you or your parent can end it at once if it harms your health, your development or your schooling. From 16 you need no new yes for a similar job [18]. The money you earn yourself after turning 16 is yours to decide over. Before that, your guardian manages it [18].

Two more things are useful for parents to know. Social services may not count a child’s own pay when the family’s income support is calculated, as long as it stays below one price base amount, SEK 59,200 in 2026. That also covers upper secondary students under 21 living at home [19]. And employers set their own age limits. McDonald’s hires from 16 and requires 18 for night shifts [20], and the food delivery app Wolt requires you to be 18 [21].

Paid videos: the same laws, plus the advertising rules

There is no special Swedish law for young people who make paid videos, and a motion in the Riksdag in 2022 called the area unregulated [22]. The same rules apply as for other jobs: before 18 your guardian must agree to the contract, and from 16 the money is yours [18]. TikTok’s own ways to earn, such as Creator Rewards, LIVE gifts and TikTok Shop, require you to be 18 [23]. A brand may still pay you directly for a video if you are younger. TikTok’s rules for paid content set no age limit for the creator, but the switch that labels the video as advertising must be on [24].

The advertising rules apply at every age. A paid video must be recognisable as advertising at once, and hidden advertising is forbidden. The company carries the main responsibility, but you as the creator can share it [25]. A video must never urge children to buy something or to ask their parents to buy it [24, 26]. As a minor you may not advertise alcohol, gambling or nicotine, and alcohol advertising may not show anyone under 25 [27, 28]. Everything you get for your videos is taxable, including products you keep, valued at market price [29].

Income is also very unevenly spread. In Sweden, accounts with fewer than 10,000 followers got 8% of the sponsorship money in 2022, according to IRM figures cited by the Swedish Agency for the Media [30]. Think of it as extra income, not a salary. Whether someone paid per video counts as an employee has not been tested, so it is unclear whether the working-time rules apply. Follow them anyway.

4. What an early job demonstrably gives is contacts, not higher pay later.

A summer job has not led to higher pay a few years later when Swedish municipalities allocated the places by lottery. That is what the Swedish research institute IFAU found in its evaluations of Stockholm 2012–2018 (report 2024) and Falun 1997–2003 (report 2013) [5, 6]. Lotteries are the clearest evidence, because teenagers who work often differ from those who don’t from the start, for example in how much they want to work or who their parents are. So comparing the two groups is not enough. When a municipality has more applicants than summer jobs and draws lots for the places, those who got a job can be compared with those who didn’t, who are otherwise alike. Figure 5 gathers the lottery programmes.

The results are sobering. In Stockholm, about 50,000 young people aged 16–19 applied for the city’s summer jobs between 2012 and 2018, and some of the places were drawn by lot. A job gave SEK 4,000–8,000 more that year. But at ages 20–23 those who got a job earned about SEK 10,000, or 8.5%, less per year, and by 24 the gap was gone. The job made no difference to crime, health or how many went on to study either. The researchers’ explanation is that those who didn’t get a municipal job more often found a private-sector job themselves. The result covers applicants without priority, a group with relatively good prospects [5].

In Falun the places were drawn by lot in 1997–2003. Those who got a job earned SEK 6,700 more in the year they left upper secondary school, but over ten years the researchers found no general positive effect [6]. Falun also shows why simple comparisons mislead. The quarter with the most work experience as teenagers earned just over SEK 50,000 more per year when they left school than the quarter with the least. The lottery, which measures what the job itself does, gave SEK 6,700 in the first year and no certain difference after that [6]. The rest of the gap is about who applies for jobs, not what the job does.

In the US, lottery summer jobs for young people in very deprived areas of New York, Chicago and Boston cut violent crime and incarceration, but did not raise later pay [31, 32, 33]. Those results don’t carry over to Swedish teenagers in general. The programmes served young people in very hard circumstances, and Stockholm showed no effect on crime [5].

The contacts are what last

The strongest Swedish evidence that an early job helps is about people. Vocational students are 35 percentage points more likely than their own classmates to get a lasting job at a workplace where they had a summer or side job. Colleagues who worked there at another time don’t help, so it is the personal contact that counts [7]. Across several year groups the gap is about 40 percentage points, and it is largest in a downturn, when firms prefer to hire someone they already know [8]. When the workplace closed just before the student graduated, the student’s job chances and pay were lower for up to ten years [34]. The studies cover vocational students, but the pattern is clear: someone who has worked somewhere has people who can vouch for them.

Other studies point the same way, but more weakly

Studies that follow young people for a long time often see better adult outcomes for teenagers who tried working, according to the OECD [35]. But they can’t separate the job from the kind of teenager who takes it. In US data, more working hours in the last year of school go with higher pay later [36]. When researchers account for who works, the effects shrink sharply and are no longer statistically certain [37]. Responsibility, social skills and coping with setbacks are often mentioned. Researchers think skills like these explain part of the effects, but there are no clean measurements of them [38].

The right number of hours

How much you work matters. In a US study, more than 20 hours a week in term time went with weaker engagement in school and more alcohol, drugs and crime. 20 hours or less had hardly any effect [39]. A review of 69 studies finds a negative but small effect on education on average, and a larger one when the hours get long [40]. The 20-hour line is a rule of thumb from US research, not an exact limit. Our cautious reading is that upper secondary students should work at most 10–15 hours a week in term time. For those who haven’t finished year 9, the law sets the cap at 12 hours a week [16].

The risks are real too

People aged 20–24 report the most work accidents with sick leave: 14.5 per 1,000 employed men and 10.1 per 1,000 women in 2023, and a poor introduction is one of the causes. More than one in three employed women aged 20–24 had been sexually harassed at work in the past year, against 4% of women aged 50–64 [41]. Ask for an introduction and a supervisor, and find out where you can turn.

5. Below SEK 25,042 a year you pay no tax, but you earn no pension either.

In 2026 you can earn SEK 25,042 in a year without paying tax, according to the Swedish Tax Agency (Skatteverket) [3]. The same line applies to your pension: below it you earn no pension at all, according to the Swedish Pensions Agency [4].

Sweden has no minimum wage law. The collective agreements set the floor, and for young people the pay depends on age. Under the retail agreement between Svensk Handel and the union Handels, the minimum in retail from April 2026 is SEK 104.36 an hour at 16 and 106.83 at 17. When you turn 18 it jumps to SEK 160.40, about 50% more. At 15 the pay must be at least 80% of the 16-year-old rate [42]. In hotels and restaurants the 2026 minimum, according to the union HRF, is SEK 104.06 under 17, 113.65 at 17 and 118.50 at 18 [43]. A municipal summer job (feriejobb) is a summer job that the municipality arranges for young people. These jobs pay less, about SEK 69–107 an hour depending on the municipality and your age [44, 45].

Figure 6 lets you work it out yourself. Choose your age, sector and how much you work. The wage is filled in from the agreement, but you can type in your own. The hours cap follows the law for your age and whether it is school weeks or holidays. Everything is counted per year, because the tax and pension line applies to the whole year’s income from all jobs [46]. At the calculator’s starting point, a 16-year-old who has finished year 9 and works 20 hours a week for 8 summer weeks in a shop, at the agreement minimum plus 12% holiday pay, earns SEK 18,701 before tax in a year. That is below the line, so you pay no tax and earn no pension.

To avoid tax being withheld when you expect to earn less than SEK 25,042 in the year, give your employer Skatteverket’s form SKV 434. Then you get your full pay with no tax withheld. If you will earn more, you can apply for an adjustment for students, so that the withholding fits the tax you actually owe [46]. The calculator shows the tax for the whole year. If your employer withheld too much, you get it back after your tax return.

The pension starts at the first krona over the line

A summer job earns you a pension only if your pay for the whole year, from all jobs, comes to at least SEK 25,042 (2026). Below the line you earn no pension at all, but above it the whole wage counts, from the first krona, according to Pensionsmyndigheten [4]. You pay a 7% general pension contribution and the employer 10.21%, so 17.21% of the wage becomes pension right. One year right at the line gives SEK 4,310 of pension right. By Pensionsmyndigheten’s calculation for a 17-year-old, that is about SEK 730 more pension a year, for life, if you retire at 70 [4]. In 2024, 370,000 people under 20 had some pay, but only 157,378 passed the line [4]. Occupational pension from the job usually comes later: from 22 in the agreement for private-sector blue-collar workers and from 25 for private-sector white-collar workers [49].

Two more rules worth knowing

The reduced employer contribution for young people only covers those born 2003–2007, that is 19–23 in 2026. For 15–18-year-olds the employer pays the full rate, 31.42%, so the cut does not make teenagers cheaper to hire [50]. And small jobs for private people, such as cleaning or painting in someone’s home, have their own rules per payer and year. Below SEK 1,000 the payer does nothing and you declare it yourself. From SEK 10,000 the payer must withhold tax and pay employer contributions [51].

6. What separates the jobs most is who can get them.

Which jobs you can get when you are young depends on your age and on whether you have finished year 9. Before 13 there is practically nothing outside the family. From 13 until year 9 is done, you can take light jobs such as babysitting, berry picking and small jobs for neighbours. From the summer after year 9, when you are 15 or 16, most jobs in shops, restaurants and care open up. From 18 come delivery apps, night shifts and the big pay rise in retail [16, 20, 21, 42]. Figure 7 compares ten ways in, roughly in order of the lowest age, with pay, hours, how you get the job, and pros and cons.

Contacts decide, and municipal summer jobs are the way without

Who gets the private jobs depends a lot on contacts. SCB sees that the share of upper secondary students with a summer job is highest when both mother and father work, and that native-born students on academic programmes have summer jobs much more often than foreign-born ones. Place matters too: nearly nine in ten students in Överkalix had summer pay in 2023, against about four in ten in Burlöv [61]. Parents’ workplaces are an important route to the first job, especially for young people with low grades and in years of high unemployment [62]. There is no Swedish figure for the share who got their job through family.

Municipal summer jobs need no contacts or CV, unlike many private summer jobs, but they pay less and not everyone who applies gets a place. According to the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (SKR), about two in three who applied for a municipal summer job got one in 2023 [53]. In Stockholm the places are drawn by lot when applicants outnumber jobs, and your first choice is not guaranteed [63]. The state’s extra money for summer jobs only goes to municipalities with high unemployment and must reach young people who struggle to find work themselves [64]. On the open market, about 111,000 summer jobs were advertised with Arbetsförmedlingen in spring 2026. About 80% required no degree, and a will to learn can weigh more than a long CV [55].

What most often goes wrong

The most common problems are hours being withdrawn and fixed-term jobs being ended early. That is what LO found when the union reached over 65,000 summer workers at more than 6,000 workplaces in 2025, half of them in retail [54]. The hours in your contract are the hours you are entitled to. LO’s helpline for summer workers, 020-56 00 56, is free and needs no union membership [65].

7. About the evidence: strong statistics, thinner knowledge of what the job gives.

Collabify compiled this article in October 2026 from published sources. Every source is tagged by what it is. “Independent” marks laws, authorities, municipalities, official statistics and research. “Estimate” marks unions, employers, organisations, companies and legal Q&A services. “TikTok” marks TikTok’s own rules. The agreement wages come from the agreement text or the union’s website and are tagged as estimates, because agreements are not law.

What is computed or assumed

The calculator in Figure 6 is a worked example. The tax is simplified: it runs between Pensionsmyndigheten’s three examples for a 17-year-old with 32.41% municipal tax, and stops at SEK 100,000 [4]. The hours and weeks, how much you save, the agreement wage from 20 and the return of 3.25% a year above inflation are assumptions you can change. The return is Pensionsmyndigheten’s assumption for the premium pension, not a forecast [4]. The older series in Figure 2 is calculated from SCB’s tables and shown for its shape only.

What was left out

Claims that could not be traced to a source are left out, such as how many young people want a summer job, or that half of upper secondary students had a summer job in 2025. The claim that Sweden has the EU’s highest youth unemployment holds only for single months and for another measure, so we use the EU’s annual figure. An often-quoted 5–10% higher pay for those who worked as teenagers comes from a review that could not be traced. The US results on crime are not carried over to Sweden. And there are no Swedish figures for what young creators earn per video, so the article shows no such amounts.

Gaps in the evidence

There is no national figure for municipal summer jobs after 2023 and no SCB register figure for summer 2025. 13–15-year-olds appear only in a survey of children, with wide margins. The figures on sectors by age are from November 2021, in the middle of the pandemic. Much of the research on what an early job gives is American, and the contact studies cover vocational students. The age limits at many large employers, and the pay for babysitting, tutoring and app jobs, could not be confirmed. Whether pension right applies from age 16 has not been checked, so the article instead says it starts in the first year above the line.