How is a city built, and who decides what?

Sweden's planning law begins with fires. The main purpose of the Building Ordinance of 1874 was to stop fire from spreading, and the means were wider streets and firebreaks.^{3, 13} Through the Town Planning Act of 1907 the plans gained legal backing, and municipalities got both the right and the duty to buy up land for streets.^{3, 13} The National Board of Housing, Building and Planning itself describes this as the origin of what is today called the municipal planning monopoly.^{3, 13}

With the Building Act of 1947 the step was taken in full. Municipalities could now decide where and when plans should be drawn up and what they should contain, and denser building could in principle only go ahead under a plan adopted in advance.^{3, 13} The Building Ordinance of 1960 brought the requirement for a building committee in every municipality, and the responsibility for drawing up plans moved from the landowner to the municipality.^{3, 13}

That order still applies, now through the Planning and Building Act of 2010.¹ This article follows the chain step by step, with the decision maker and the deadline set out, and then counts what happens when someone says no. The structures the city rests on are counted in S3:E1 Infrastructure. This one is about the decisions.

The municipality decides, and that is the whole point

The phrase municipal planning monopoly does not appear in the law, but its meaning does. The municipality normally decides on detailed plans. The exception is in Chapter 11, Sections 15 and 16 of the Planning and Building Act: the government may order a municipality to adopt, change or revoke a plan, and if the municipality does not comply, the government may have the county administrative board draw up the proposal at the municipality's expense and then adopt, change or revoke the plan itself.¹ Each of the country's 290 municipalities has a building committee that rules on permits.^{1, 14} Plans are adopted by the municipal council, which under Chapter 5, Section 27 may delegate to the municipal executive board or the building committee the adoption of a plan that is not a matter of principle or otherwise of major importance.¹

The comprehensive plan covers the whole municipality and shows how land and water are meant to be used. It is not binding, but in practice it steers what becomes possible later. The municipal council must adopt a planning strategy no later than 24 months after each ordinary election, and if it does not, the comprehensive plan counts as out of date.¹ At the end of 2025, in addition, all comprehensive plans adopted before 1 Jan 2004 ceased to apply.^{1, 4} Four municipality-wide comprehensive plans in the country had gained legal force in the period 1990 to 2003.⁴

The detailed plan is the opposite. It covers a block or a few properties, it is legally binding, and it decides what may be built and how high. The way to it goes through consultation and review, and in 2025 close to one in four detailed plans was drawn up using the more extensive procedure instead of the standard procedure.⁴

Seven steps, seven decisions

The order is firmer than it looks. The municipal council decides on the comprehensive plan and the detailed plan. The building committee decides on the building permit, the start notice and the final notice.¹ Lantmäteriet, the land survey authority, divides up the land. When a detailed plan is appealed, the court can only uphold or revoke the decision, never adopt a plan in the municipality's place. For appealed permits the usual rules apply, and the higher body can change the municipality's decision.¹

One step in the chain carries a deadline with a penalty, and that is the building permit. The building committee has ten weeks to decide, counted from when the application is complete, and the deadline may be extended once by at most ten more weeks.¹ If it is exceeded, the law says the fee must be reduced by one fifth for each week or part of a week.¹

It is one of the few places in Swedish administrative law where the individual gets money back when the authority is late. The rule also shows why the process can still take years: the ten-week deadline applies to one of seven steps.¹ Before it come the comprehensive plan, the four months for the planning notice, the consultation and review of the detailed plan, and the wait for legal force. After it come the start notice and the final notice.

The rules changed recently. On 1 Dec 2025 a new ninth chapter of the Planning and Building Act came into force.^{1, 16} Attefall houses and friggebod sheds were replaced by a pool of square metres, the special duty to notify for works exempt from permits was removed, and the ten-week deadline moved from Chapter 9, Section 27 to Chapter 9, Section 99.^{1, 4, 16}

The permit is not permission to start

A granted building permit does not mean the spade can go into the ground. Under the law, work may not begin before the building committee has given a start notice, and before that there is usually a technical consultation where the inspection plan and waste handling are gone through.¹ In the start notice the committee sets the inspection plan and decides which documents must be handed in before the end.¹

During construction the committee must visit the site at least once if the start notice was preceded by a technical consultation, and always if the project is large or complicated.¹ When everything is finished, the building may not be used until the committee has given a final notice, which is issued when the developer has shown that the requirements in the permit, the inspection plan and the start notice are met.¹

The permit also has a shelf life. A building permit ceases to apply if the work has not begun within two years and been completed within five years of the decision gaining legal force.¹

The step nobody counts on

Property formation can sit between the detailed plan and the building permit. If the project needs a new property or changed property boundaries, a cadastral procedure is required, and that step has neither a statutory deadline nor public attention. The municipality decides separately on the street address.

Lantmäteriet itself gives an average queuing time of around one month, and on top of that an investigation time of around six months for the simplest case, a private person who is going to build a house.⁶ For creating or changing a public facility it gives eleven months, and for public infrastructure seventeen.⁶ The authority has handled around 12,000 applications in the past year.⁶

Six months is longer than the building permit's ten weeks, and for that step there is no fee reduction.^{1, 6}

When someone says no

Why plans are revoked

In 2025 the country's municipalities made 1,036 decisions on detailed plans.⁴ The same year, 269 planning cases were appealed to the Land and Environment Courts.⁴ The appeals cover detailed plans and area regulations and should not be read as a share of that year's municipal decisions in particular.⁴ During the year, plan decisions were revoked in 47 cases.⁴

The National Board of Housing, Building and Planning's review of the 47 shows that the most common reason was not the content of the plan.⁴ In 16 cases the reason was that the municipality had handled the planning process badly, and in 13 cases there were shortcomings in investigations and planning documents.⁴

What the court may examine

This is linked to a rule few people know about. Under Chapter 13, Section 17 of the Planning and Building Act, the court only examines whether the decision breaks a rule of law.¹ The main rule is that the decision is upheld or revoked as a whole, but if the municipality agrees, the decision may be revoked in part or changed in some other way, and changes of minor importance may be made without the municipality's consent.¹ The reasons are rarely about what the houses look like: among the 47 revoked plans, process errors were given in 16 cases and the design of the planning documents in 13.⁴ Process error is a wider category than a mistake in the consultation.

The right to appeal is used a lot and rarely changes the outcome. In 2025 the Land and Environment Courts received 2,236 cases under the Planning and Building Act and had 880 outstanding at the turn of the year.⁵ The Land and Environment Court of Appeal decided 1,146 such cases and changed the lower court's ruling in 111 of them, or 9.7%.⁵ The same year, 32.5% of criminal cases were changed in the courts of appeal.⁵

Two limits are worth knowing about. As a main rule, only someone who has put forward comments in writing no later than during the review period, and not had them met, may appeal a detailed plan. The law makes exceptions, among others when the proposal has been changed after the review period.¹ And the order of appeal is different for the two decisions: a detailed plan is appealed directly to the Land and Environment Court, while a building permit first goes to the county administrative board.¹ A building permit can therefore pass through four levels, a detailed plan three.¹

The same law, six times as long a wait

All 21 county administrative boards apply the same law to the same kind of case.^{4, 14} The average processing time for an appealed permit or advance notice was 107 days nationally in 2025.⁴ Between the counties the range went from 48 days to 303 days, a factor of 6.3.⁴

The government has set four target goals for processing times.⁴ Six of 21 county administrative boards met all four.⁴ The country as a whole met one of four.⁴ So your neighbour's appeal costs you roughly a month and a half in one county and ten months in another, with identical legal text.⁴

What the process lets through

In 2025, 9,748 building permits for new construction were granted, of which 4,729 were for residential buildings. The residential permits covered 35,663 homes.^{7, 17, 18} The same year, building started on 29,353 homes in new buildings and 31,359 were completed.^{7, 19} More were completed than started because a building project stretches over several years, so the figures come from different years of started projects.

Statistics Sweden's series starts in 1938 and makes the scale understandable.^{7, 20} The record year is 1970 with 109,843 completed homes, and the low point is 1998 with 11,459.²⁰ In the ten-year period 1965 to 1974, 1,005,578 homes were completed.²⁰ In the last ten years, 2016 to 2025, the figure was 498,218, just under half as many, in a country that has grown by just over 2.5 million inhabitants in the meantime.^{9, 20, 21} Counted per person, 13.6 homes per 1,000 inhabitants were completed in 1970 and 3.0 per 1,000 in 2025.^{9, 20, 21}

The movement is strong in the short term too. Homes started fell from 67,873 in 2021 to 27,183 in 2024, a fall of 60.0%, and stood at 29,353 in 2025.^{7, 19}

What it costs to build

Costs can be followed in an index of their own. Statistics Sweden's construction cost index for blocks of flats, with 2015 as the base and excluding wage drift and VAT, rose from 99.5 in January 2015 to 155.3 in July 2026, or 56.1% in eleven and a half years.^{10, 22} The rise is spread unevenly: the materials part rose 74.7% and the wages part 33.6%.^{10, 22}

Nor is the movement even over time. Between January 2022 and January 2023 the total index rose 16.5%. In the seven years before that, from January 2015 to January 2022, it rose 24.3%.²²

How applicants experience the process is measured too. Building permits are one of four compulsory areas of authority in the service survey that the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions, SKR, carries out among the municipalities.¹¹ In the survey for 2025, 217 municipalities and 15 joint administrations took part, and the combined result was unchanged at 74 out of 100.¹¹ The share of participating municipalities with a low result fell from 24% in 2012 to 0.5% in 2025.¹¹

What the figures do not say

Granted, started and completed homes measure three different things at three different points in the same project. They should never be added together and rarely be set against each other as a change.

The housing stock is a fourth measure. It was 5,291,493 homes in 2025 against 5,260,876 the year before, a net addition of 30,617.^{8, 23} That figure is smaller than the 31,359 completed, because the stock also shrinks when homes are demolished or merged.^{7, 8, 19, 23}

And the figure of 3.0 homes per 1,000 inhabitants mixes points in time: the numerator refers to 2025 and the denominator to the population on 31 Dec 2024.^{9, 21} It is an order of magnitude, not an exact measure.

The direction may also be about to change. In the National Board of Housing, Building and Planning's survey, the municipalities say the change in the law on 1 Dec 2025 is generally expected to bring a shift from checking works in advance to checking them afterwards through supervision.⁴ That is the municipalities' own assessment, not an outcome.

What to take away

In 2025 the municipalities made 1,036 decisions on detailed plans, 269 planning cases were appealed and plan decisions were revoked in 47 cases.⁴ The same year, 9,748 building permits for new construction were granted, building started on 29,353 homes and 31,359 were completed.^{7, 17, 19} What makes this a slow force is the order: seven decisions by different bodies, where only the building permit has a deadline with a penalty, and where property formation has no deadline at all.^{1, 6} The lead times are in the law, not in the economic cycle. Follow three recurring publications: Statistics Sweden's quarterly figures on homes started and completed, the National Board of Housing, Building and Planning's annual account of planning and building law with detailed plan decisions and the county administrative boards' processing times, and Statistics Sweden's construction cost index every month.^{4, 7, 10}

The next episode is S3:E3 Smart Cities, about what became of the promises and which of them could be measured.

Education, not advice.