Can you get a tech job in Sweden without speaking Swedish?

In tech, yes, more often than not. Tech jobs in Sweden for English speakers are common. On Swedish employers' own careers pages, 64% of tech and product job titles are in English, against 13% of every other job, and Stockholm and Malmö lead. An English ad isn't a promise, though. In my own search, one English ad in twenty still required Swedish, and said so near the end.

I moved to Stockholm seven years ago, and I still don't speak Swedish. I'm looking for my next role now, so I have the same question every newcomer asks: is it even worth applying? Most answers online are anecdotes, so we counted.

Two in three tech job titles are in English

If you work in data, product or design, most Swedish employers write the job in English, because the team already works in English. Outside tech it's the other way round. In healthcare, schools and restaurants we didn't find a single English title.

Data: more than 9,000 open jobs on the careers pages of employers hiring in Sweden, over a limited window in September 2026. A job counts as English or Swedish by the words of its title; titles that are neither are left out of the shares.

English-speaking jobs: Stockholm first, then Malmö

The city matters too. In Stockholm, seven in ten tech jobs are written in English. Outside the three big cities it's fewer than half, and for every other kind of job it drops to about one in nine.

The careers page gives it away

The system a company uses for its job ads turns out to be a good hint about its working language. You can usually tell which one it is from the job page's address, or from the name at the bottom of the page.

Teamtailor runs most of the Swedish careers pages we've seen, so a Teamtailor page doesn't rule a job out. A page on one of the systems international tech companies use, though, usually means the job is written in English.

Data: the same careers pages, by the system behind each.

An English ad is not a promise

My own search gives a second view. It covers every ad in Sweden that a month of searching for product manager roles in English turned up, each checked against my resume, which lists no Swedish.

The ad reads as an international role until the requirements, where fluent Swedish appears, almost always in the second half.

Those are the ads that cost the most, because you read every paragraph before the one that rules you out. Across my whole search, that kind of reading is where most of the hours went. I added them up in how much time a job search takes.

Data: every ad in Sweden my searches on Sherpa found between 27 August and 26 September 2026. My searches were in English, so they find English ads more than a Swedish search would: the 84% is a share of what an English search returns, not of the whole Swedish market.

How to find jobs in Sweden without Swedish

• Look where English is the norm: data, product, design and software, in Stockholm and Malmö first.
• Check the careers page before the ad. An international hiring system is a good sign.
• Search the ad for "Swedish" and "svenska" before you read the rest, and tell "meriterande" from "krav".
• Put your languages and their levels on your resume. If you're learning Swedish, say what level you're at. For many roles that's enough.
• Let an AI job search tool do the checking, if it reads the whole ad. One that only matches titles won't see the line that rules you out.

In SherpaThe language line, read for you