The moving guide

This page used to be a guide built around choice screens. Click whether you are moving within Sweden or to Sweden, click where you are coming from, receive a numbered checklist. The problem was that the checklist existed in a hundred other places, and that it was written as if it were the most important thing this site had to say. It was not. So here is what I actually believe about moving, and what you can use this site for.

The paperwork is the easy part

Almost everything practical about a move is handled by authorities that do their job well. It takes one evening at the kitchen table:

• File your change of address with Skatteverket no later than one week after moving. It is free and takes a few minutes with BankID.
• Mail forwarding and notifying companies is a separate service via Adressändring. It costs a small fee and is optional.
• If you have children, apply for preschool or school places with your new municipality. This is the one item on the list that is genuinely urgent, because waiting times differ enormously between municipalities.
• Register with a health centre through 1177 once you have arrived.
• If you receive benefits from Försäkringskassan, they need to know you changed municipality.

That is the entire paperwork. The rest of this text is about the part that actually takes time: deciding where to go.

The hard part is choosing a place

Sweden has 290 municipalities and most of us could name maybe thirty. So the choice is nearly always made based on where you happen to know someone, where the job is, or where you once spent a summer. That is not stupid. But it means well over 250 of the 290 are never even considered, and some of them would have suited you better than the one you end up in.

The whole point of this site is to make the rest of them visible. Not to talk you into moving north, but so you can ask "is there a place that looks like this?" and get an answer.

How I would use the map

Start with the map. It carries more than 400 layers and point types, which sounds like a lot because it is. The trick is not to look at all of them, but to switch on the three or four that describe your daily life. If commuting decides it, use the trip planner and test real travel times instead of guessing from distance on the map. If it is the children, add schools and preschools. If it is quiet you want, add noise and protected nature. If it is money, add housing prices, rents and municipal tax.

When a municipality looks interesting: click it and read the municipality page, save it so it lands in the bookmark in the header, and put it next to two others in Compare. If you would rather see everything as a table there is statistics, and to filter places by size or job market there is the list.

If you have no idea where to start, the quiz is a more honest entry point than it looks. It matches your answers against all 290 municipalities and hands you a few suggestions to reject. Rejecting suggestions is information too. The front page also has situation cards, which are the same idea without the questions: click "commute from a smaller town" or "work remotely" and the map opens preconfigured.

Two things that are easy to miss: you can save an entire map view including layers and position, and you can transfer everything you have saved to your phone through a link. Both live under the bookmark button.

What the numbers do not tell you

Here are the limitations, because they are real:

• Almost all statistics sit at municipality level. A municipality can be larger than Skåne and contain both a town with a housing shortage and villages losing people. The median hides both.
• Some layers are modelled, not measured. Mobile coverage, shoreline protection and several risk maps are calculations based on terrain and regulation. The legend says so where it matters, and you should read them as "roughly here", not as an official ruling.
• Data updates at different speeds. Population arrives yearly from Statistics Sweden, housing prices lag, weather is same-day. Every source is listed under data sources.
• There is no ranking and there will not be one. "Best municipality" depends entirely on who is asking, and a top ten list would be entertainment, not help.

The best evidence is still going there. Preferably on an ordinary weekend in November rather than in July. This site exists to help you pick which three places are worth that trip.

If you are moving to Sweden from abroad

I do not know immigration law and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What applies to you depends on citizenship, grounds and timing, and the only source worth anything is Migrationsverket. Everything else online, including what this page previously claimed, is a simplification that may well be out of date.

What I can tell you is the usual order once your permit is granted: you register your address and receive a personal identity number from Skatteverket, after which you can open a bank account and get BankID, which in practice is the key to most digital services in Sweden. Every municipality offers free Swedish tuition for immigrants, SFI, and you apply for it through the municipality you live in.

After that this site is exactly as useful to you as to someone moving from Malmö to Umeå. The map does not care where you came from.

What this site does not do

• It has no property listings and is not an estate agent. Look for housing where housing is listed.
• It has no login. Everything you star, pin or save stays in your own browser, not with me. That is why transferring to another device happens through a link rather than an account.
• It does not sell your data, because it does not have it.

If you find something wrong, or miss a layer that would settle your decision, write to kontakt@mapandmove.se. That is often how new layers come about.