How much crime is there, and what does punishment cost?
Short answer: The police received 1.44 million crime reports in 2025, five times more per inhabitant than in 1950. Reports mostly measure what gets reported, though: in the surveys the share who are assaulted has stayed between 2 and 4 percent since 2006. Two in three released from prison are convicted of a new crime within three years. A prison place costs 4,110 kronor a day, about 1.5 million kronor a year, and the prisons are overcrowded.
Drug offences per municipality and drug deaths are on Alcohol, drugs and gambling. Bribery and corruption in the municipalities are covered on Corruption and procurement. The courts, the police, clearance and the prisons are on Justice.
Reports since 1950.
Five year steps until 1975, then every year. The curve also follows the laws and how the police count: new offences introduced, the sexual offence laws of 2005, 2013 and 2018, and reporting online mean the same reality can give more reports. Drug offences and drink driving are found almost only when the police look, so they measure police effort more than crime.
What people themselves say they have experienced.
Many crimes are never reported. So every year the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brå) asks a sample of residents aged 16 to 84 whether they have been victims themselves. The Swedish Crime Survey (NTU) has its own sources of error but is not affected by new laws or by how the police work.
New source or survey method, before and after cannot be compared directly Faint line: Statistics Sweden's Living Conditions Survey (ULF), closest question, two-year averages until 2019
All Men Women New source or survey method, before and after cannot be compared directly Faint line: Statistics Sweden's Living Conditions Survey (ULF), stayed in out of fear, two-year averages until 2019
Reported versus experienced, 2025
| Type of crime | Victims according to NTU, approx. | Reported crimes | Victims per reported crime |
|---|---|---|---|
| Assault | |||
| Sexual offences | |||
| Robbery |
Victims = the share in NTU 2026 (which asks about 2025) times the 8,510 774 inhabitants aged 16 to 84. That counts people, while reports count crimes: one person can be a victim several times, and reports cover all ages. The ratio is therefore a rough measure of how much never reaches the police, not an exact count of hidden crime.
Reported crime per inhabitant, municipality by municipality.
Crimes are counted where they were committed, not where the offender lives. Municipalities with large shopping centres, nightlife, tourists or a port therefore get high figures, and small municipalities jump a lot between years. Compare a municipality with itself over time rather than with its neighbour. More crime types per municipality are on statistics page.
How many are convicted again?
Reoffending = a new conviction, summary penalty or waiver of prosecution within one or three years of the judgment or release. Brå follows everyone sanctioned in a given year, so the three year figure only exists three years later and rests on an older cohort than the one year figure. Sentence length is only in the three year series. The differences between sanctions mostly show who gets them: people sentenced to prison have more often been convicted before, so the figures do not say that prison in itself raises or lowers reoffending.
More inmates than places.
Average inmates during the year Places The Prison and Probation Service counts places in a new way
Inmates and places are annual averages. More inmates than places means double occupancy, two people in cells built for one. New prison sentences = prison sentences started during the year.
What a day costs
| Kronor per day and person | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Prison | 3,773 | 3,874 | 4,110 |
| Remand prison | 3,488 | 3,564 | 3,664 |
| Probation | 341 | 392 | 426 |
Average cost: everything the Prison and Probation Service spends on its operations divided by the number of days. Premises, staff and care are included; police, prosecutors and courts are not. Current prices, from the Prison and Probation Service annual report 2025.
What does a prison sentence cost?
Calculated with the 2025 average cost: 4,110 kronor per day in prison and 426 on probation, 365 days per year. With conditional release, two thirds are served in prison, at least one month, and the rest counts as time under probation supervision. That is an assumption: not everyone is supervised, and time on remand before the judgment is deducted but costs almost as much. The cost to the person who loses their income and to the victim is not included.
What the justice system costs the state.
Distribution
Central government outturn per appropriation, adjusted with CPI. Municipal spending on safety and crime prevention is not included. The whole budget is on the state budget page.
What crime costs everyone, and why nobody knows for sure.
There is no official estimate of what crime costs Sweden in total. The figures that exist measure different things and should not be added up:
- 86 billion kronor went to the justice system in the state budget 2025: police, courts, prosecutors and prisons (chart above).
- 352 billion kronor was the turnover of the black and illegal economy in 2024 according to the Expert Group on Public Economics (ESO 2026:1), about 5.5 percent of GDP. That is turnover, not a cost, and it includes undeclared work. ESO itself calls the figure a conservative estimate.
- 98 billion kronor a year is what crime costs businesses according to Confederation of Swedish Enterprise 2023: direct losses, protection such as locks and guards, and lost revenue. The figure is based on a survey of businesses and is an interest organisation's own estimate.
What all three leave out is the hardest to measure: victims' suffering, lost health and working capacity, and what fear of crime does to how people live. That is why we do not calculate a total.
Punishment, the risk of getting caught and the shootings.
Lethal violence in Sweden has fallen in recent years. Brå counted 121 cases in 2023, 92 in 2024 and 84 in 2025, or 0.8 per 100,000 inhabitants, fewer than in any year since 2016. Shootings have fallen even more: the police counted 368 confirmed shootings in 2023 and 158 in 2025. Even so, half of all cases of lethal violence in Sweden still involve firearms, and that is where Sweden differs from its neighbours.
For a long time Sweden ranked low in Europe for lethal gun violence. The rise began in the mid 2000s, and in Brå's comparison from 2021 the country ranks very high, with around 4 deaths per million inhabitants against a European average of around 1.6. The rise is almost entirely among people in their 20s and, according to Brå, is strongly linked to criminal networks in deprived areas. Counting all lethal violence, Sweden in 2024 was on a par with Denmark and below Finland.
Research on what helps points in several directions at once. The risk of getting caught deters more clearly than the length of the sentence. School, work and early support for young people reduce crime over time. And who becomes a crime suspect is strongly linked to age, sex, income and the environment people grow up in, although the differences between groups do not disappear entirely when these are accounted for.
Lethal violence in the Nordic countries
| Country | Lethal violence per 100,000 inhabitants 2024 | Number of cases 2024 |
|---|---|---|
| Sweden | 0.87 | 92 |
| Norway | 0.70 | 39 |
| Denmark | 0.87 | 52 |
| Finland | 1.78 | 100 |
| Iceland | 1.82 | 7 |
Source: Eurostat (completed intentional homicide as recorded by the police). Countries count cases and victims differently, and a single year with few cases makes the rates jump, especially for Iceland. The figures for Sweden 2025 come from Brå.
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Do longer sentences reduce crime?
Not much, according to research reviews. What clearly deters is the risk of getting caught. Harsher sentences have a considerably weaker and less certain effect.
Nagin (2013), Crime and Justice.
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Do more police officers help?
Yes. When the errors in US statistics on police numbers are corrected, a clear link appears: more police means less crime, and the estimates are most certain for the most serious crimes such as murder.
Chalfin and McCrary (2018), Review of Economics and Statistics.
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Does prison make people more criminal?
Not necessarily. In Norway cases are randomly assigned to judges, which makes it possible to isolate the effect of prison. Prison reduced reoffending, above all among those who had no job beforehand, since more of them found work afterwards. For those who had a job, reoffending did not fall, and more of them lost their foothold in the labour market.
Bhuller, Dahl, Løken and Mogstad (2020), Journal of Political Economy.
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Does electronic monitoring work?
Swedish prisoners released early with electronic monitoring and support reoffended less than a comparison group: 26 against 38 percent were convicted again within three years. The study cannot separate the effect of the monitoring itself from the rest of the programme.
Marklund and Holmberg (2009), Journal of Experimental Criminology.
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Does more schooling reduce crime?
Yes, for men. When Sweden extended compulsory schooling, an extra year of school reduced the risk of being convicted of a crime by 6.7 percent and the risk of going to prison by 15.5 percent. For women there was no clear effect.
Hjalmarsson, Holmlund and Lindquist (2015), The Economic Journal.
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Can young people be kept out of crime?
Yes, with the right measures. In three randomised trials in Chicago, programmes of cognitive behavioural therapy for young men reduced arrests, including for violent crime, and kept more of them in school. The benefits were judged to be many times larger than the costs.
Heller et al. (2017), Quarterly Journal of Economics.
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Is crime linked to immigration?
People born abroad and people born in Sweden to two foreign-born parents are more often registered as crime suspects, 2.5 and 3.2 times as often respectively as people with two Swedish-born parents. When age, sex, income, education and type of municipality are taken into account, the gap shrinks to about 1.8 and 1.7 times, but it does not disappear. A study of young people in Stockholm found that parental resources and neighbourhood explain between half and three quarters of the gap for men. Both measure registered suspicions and convictions, not all crimes committed.
Brå (2021), report 2021:9. Hällsten, Szulkin and Sarnecki (2013), British Journal of Criminology.
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Why does Sweden have so many shootings?
Nobody knows for sure. No comparable increase is seen in any of the 22 other European countries in the comparison. Eight in ten fatal shootings now happen in criminal settings, against three to five in ten in the 2000s, and the increase is almost entirely among men in their 20s.
Brå (2021), report 2021:8.
Shootings, bombings, the networks, vulnerable areas and the law changes since 2022 are on Organised crime.
Where the figures come from.
- Brå, reported crime since 1950 by crime type, number and per 100,000 inhabitants.
- Brå, Swedish Crime Survey (NTU), table collection 2007 to 2026.
- Brå, reoffending by sex, age, sanction and sentence length, and Brå, prison and probation for prison sentences started.
- Brå's statistics may be reused freely.
- Prison and Probation Service, annual report 2025 (cost per day) and Kriminalvård och statistik 2025 (places and inmates), entered by hand.
- Reported crime per municipality: Brå and Statistics Sweden via Kolada.
- Government spending: Swedish Agency for Public Management, annual outturn per appropriation (CC0), and CPI from Statistics Sweden.
- ESO and the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise are only cited with their headline figures and a link.
All figures are retrieved, nothing is estimated by us except what the footnotes say: people victimised from the NTU share and the calculator's assumption about conditional release.