Sweden’s ministers keep full pay while sick as the government defends the sick-day penalty

Several Swedish ministers have cancelled meetings or trips because of illness during this term. Yet none of the government’s 24 ministers had registered sick leave, and none had lost pay, when their records were examined this summer. Their explanation was that they remained on duty and did other work. That may satisfy the rules. It also reveals how differently sickness is experienced at the top.

The review cited cancelled engagements involving, among others, Culture Minister Parisa Liljestrand, Rural Affairs Minister Peter Kullgren and Climate Minister Romina Pourmokhtari. The ministers were not shown to have stopped all work, and it would be wrong to claim fraud from a cancelled diary item alone.

But the contrast with an ordinary worker is glaring. From July, Sweden’s prime minister receives SEK 211,000 a month and every other minister SEK 166,500, according to the official decision. That is almost SEK 2 million a year for a minister before other considerations. At that level, work can be rearranged around a lung infection, a hospital visit or a positive Covid test without an immediate hole appearing in the household budget.

A care assistant, preschool worker, bus driver or warehouse employee usually has no such option. If they cannot safely perform their physical shift, they lose income through the karensavdrag. The deduction is normally 20 percent of an average week’s sick pay, roughly one day’s sick pay for a standard five-day worker, as Försäkringskassan explains. Checking email from bed does not turn their absence into a fully paid working day.

This matters because the government has resisted calls to abolish that penalty. Social Insurance Minister Anna Tenje has offered arguments that deserve to be stated fairly. In a Riksdag debate, she cited estimates of SEK 14 billion in direct annual employer costs, potentially rising to SEK 24 billion if behaviour changed. She also argued that targeting selected occupations is difficult and that collective agreements can already soften the deduction.

Cost is a real question. So is the risk that any insurance system is abused. But a government capable of designing tax cuts, employment subsidies and detailed eligibility rules can also design compensation for small employers, tighter controls for repeated suspicious claims or a fairer ceiling. It does not have to finance caution by charging the sick worker first.

The burden is not evenly shared. A government review acknowledged that people in contact-heavy jobs have less opportunity to work from home and more exposure to infection. It estimated that a female childcare worker with average pay lost about SEK 2,400 in disposable income from sickness deductions in 2021. Women in care and education repeatedly carry both the infection risk and the penalty for responding responsibly.

Ministers have an unusual job. They are expected to remain reachable around the clock, and the law requires a deduction only when illness prevents them from performing their duties. Fine. Then political honesty requires admitting that control over one’s schedule is itself a valuable privilege.

The scandal is not necessarily that ministers broke a rule. It is that the people writing the rules can be sick on flexible, fully paid terms while defending a blunt financial punishment for people who cannot move a shift to the sofa. If the government wants workers to accept the karensavdrag, its ministers should first explain why sickness at SEK 166,500 a month deserves more flexibility than sickness on a care worker’s wage.

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