How Many Employees Does One 24/7 Post Need in Sweden?
Holding one position every hour of 2026 in Sweden takes 8,766 staffed hours. One full-time employee is genuinely available for about 1,708 of them, so the post needs 5.13 employees, which is 6 whole people.
One ring per person, one year each
Each ring is one employee's year, broken wherever they are on holiday, on leave, or off sick. No single ring closes, which is the whole problem: one person cannot hold a post that never stops.
Stack 6 of them and the picture closes. Trace any line out from the center and it crosses at least one solid arc, so every hour of 2026 has somebody on it. That is the relief factor, drawn rather than asserted.
Where the number comes from
- 1
Staffing one position 168 hours a week comes to 8,766 hours across the year.
- 2
Sweden has 261 weekdays in the year, the starting point for one employee.
- 3
Take out 10 public holidays that fall on a weekday, 25 days of statutory paid leave, 9.5 days of average sickness absence, and 3 days of training: 47.5 days lost.
- 4
That leaves 213.5 working days per employee, and at a 40-hour week that is 8 hours a day, so 1,708 available hours a year.
- 5
8,766 coverage hours divided by 1,708 available hours is a relief factor of 5.13, so the post needs 6 people.
| Weekdays in the year | 261 |
| Public holidays on a weekday | −10 |
| Statutory paid annual leave | −25 |
| Average sickness absence | −9.5 |
| Training and onboarding (assumed) | −3 |
| Working days available | 213.5 |
| At 8 hours a day | 1,708 hours |
Paid public holidays are a statutory entitlement in Sweden, so they sit on top of annual leave and are deducted separately here.
The training allowance of 3 days is a planning assumption rather than a sourced statistic, and it is deliberately low. Every other figure on this page carries a source. If your operation runs heavy certification cycles, raise it and the relief factor rises with it.
What the usual rule of thumb gets wrong here
The common shortcut is to divide coverage hours by contracted hours and add a quarter for absence. In Sweden that gives 5.25 against a derived answer of 5.13, so the shortcut is high by 2.3 percent. A flat buffer travels badly because the things it stands in for, statutory leave and the length of the contracted week, are set nationally.
Nobody ever away. Not a real answer.
The usual shortcut, over by 2.3%.
From Sweden's own leave, hours, and absence.
Other coverage shapes
The same availability figure answers any coverage window. Only the hours the post must be staffed change.
| Coverage | Hours a week | Relief factor | People |
|---|---|---|---|
| Round the clock, every day | 168 | 5.13 | 6 |
| Round the clock, weekdays only | 120 | 3.67 | 4 |
| Two shifts, every day | 112 | 3.42 | 4 |
| Extended day, weekdays only | 60 | 1.83 | 2 |
If your contract is more generous
25 days is the statutory floor in Sweden, and most employers sit above it. Every extra week of leave is another week the post has to be covered by somebody else.
| Annual leave | Relief factor | People per post |
|---|---|---|
| 25 daysstatutory floor | 5.13 | 6 |
| 28 days | 5.21 | 6 |
| 30 days | 5.26 | 6 |
| 33 days | 5.33 | 6 |
The inputs, and what they do not say
How the leave figure is defined
Expressed in law as 25 semesterdagar (Semesterlag 1977:480, 4 §), and those are working days: 3 a § states that Saturdays and Sundays do not count as semesterdagar and equates public holidays (plus Midsummer Eve, Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve) with Sundays. So the 25 days already exclude public holidays and need no conversion.
Why the contracted week is not the legal maximum
This page divides by a 40-hour week, the typical full-time contract in Sweden, not by the 40-hour statutory figure. The two match here, so the distinction makes no difference to the answer.
What these figures cannot be used for
Not a ranking. The sickness figure here comes from a national statistical source, while other countries in this library use the OECD labour force survey. Those systems define absence differently, and self-reported survey figures undercount short spells that administrative records capture. Each number is the best available answer for planning inside its own country, and the gap between any two of them is partly a gap between statistical methods rather than between workforces.
A relief factor also says nothing about whether a roster is legal or humane. It sets how many people the post needs across a year; it does not check rest periods between shifts, consecutive nights, or weekend distribution. Those constraints decide whether the pattern you build on top of this headcount is one anybody can actually work.
Research notes on Sweden
STATUTORY WEEK: 40 hours is the ceiling on ordinary weekly hours in Arbetstidslagen 5 § ("Den ordinarie arbetstiden får uppgå till högst 40 timmar i veckan"), not a guaranteed norm. The same act caps total hours including overtime at 48 per seven-day period averaged over four months (10 b §), and most of the act is semi-dispositive, meaning a collective agreement can replace it, so sector rules govern in practice.
FULL-TIME CONTRACTED WEEK: Swedish collective agreements for ordinary daytime work almost always set 40 hours, and SCB measures the average agreed week for full-time employed aged 20 to 64 at 39.8 hours (2023), so 40 is the right planning default. Shift schedules are the exception and run materially lower (roughly 38 hours for mixed shift placement and mid-30s for continuous three-shift work), so a 24/7 Swedish roster should not be planned on a flat 40. Important trap: do NOT take Eurofound's 37.2 hour figure for Sweden as a full-time week. Eurofound sourced it from an LO report built on the SCB Labour Force Survey, which averages full-time and part-time contracts together; Eurofound's own sector tables put Swedish chemicals, metalworking and banking at 40.0, matching the statutory maximum.
LEAVE: the 25 days is an entitlement to leave, not automatically to paid leave. Paid days are earned in the preceding qualifying year (intjänandeår, Semesterlagen 7 §), so a first-year employee can have 25 days off with fewer of them paid. Collective agreements and most white-collar contracts add days above 25 (commonly 25 to 32, with age-banded extras normal in the public sector). Sweden separately has roughly 9 to 11 public holidays landing on weekdays; Eurofound counts 9 for Sweden. The single most common error in this data, stating leave inclusive of public holidays, does not apply here: 25 is clean of them.
SICKNESS: 9.5 days is derived, not published as a headline number, so here is the working. From SCB's Labour Force Survey (AKU) for 2025: sickness absence averaged 7,203 thousand hours per reference week across 5,263.0 thousand employed people aged 15 to 74, which is 1.37 hours per person per week, or 3.67 percent of the 37.3 hour average agreed week. Over 52 weeks that is 71.2 hours; at the matching average day length of 7.46 hours (37.3 / 5) that is 9.5 days per employee per year. Sanity check on the same inputs: total absence of all kinds was 41,418 thousand hours per week, or 7.87 hours per person, and 37.3 agreed minus 7.87 plus a little overtime reproduces SCB's published actual average of 29.7 hours per week for 2025, so the aggregates are internally consistent. Two cautions. First, this is a whole-economy average mixing full-time and part-time workers. Second, it includes long spells, so it sits well above the short-term absence a roster actually feels: SCB's separate sick pay period series, covering only days 1 to 14 paid by the employer, gives 4.84 compensated sick days per employment in 2025 (4.98 in 2024). If the model already covers long-term sickness through separate backfill, use the lower figure. Swedish sickness absence is also strongly seasonal, running from about 1.1 percent of hours in July to 2.6 percent in February on the sick pay period measure, so a flat annual average will understate winter cover needs.
Sources
Every figure above except the training allowance was checked against one of these.
Statutory maximum ordinary working time, 40 hours per week (Arbetstidslag 1982:673, 5 §); total working time including overtime capped at 48 hours per seven days averaged over four months (10 b §)
Statutory minimum annual leave, 25 semesterdagar per semesterår (Semesterlag 1977:480, 4 §); 3 a § excludes Saturdays and Sundays and equates public holidays with Sundays; 7 § governs how many of the days are paid
Agreed (överenskommen) working time for full-time employed aged 20 to 64: 39.8 hours per week, against 31.8 hours actually worked including absentees
Sickness absence hours in the reference week, 7,203 thousand hours (reason 'sjuk'), and total absence 41,418 thousand hours, employed aged 15 to 74, annual average; numerator for the 9.5 day derivation
Statistics Sweden (SCB), Labour Force Survey (AKU) statistical database, table NAKUFranvOrsakNAr2025
Average agreed (överenskommen) weekly working time, all employed aged 15 to 74: 37.3 hours; denominator for the sickness absence conversion
Statistics Sweden (SCB), Labour Force Survey (AKU) statistical database, table NAKUOkMedArbtidAr2025
Employed persons aged 15 to 74: 5,263.0 thousand, annual average; population denominator for the sickness absence conversion
Statistics Sweden (SCB), Labour Force Survey (AKU) statistical database, table AKURLSysIarbFrvAr2025
Sickness absence during the employer-paid sick pay period (days 1 to 14): 4.84 compensated days per employment for the year, monthly absence share averaging 1.87 percent; cross-check on the short-term component
Statistics Sweden (SCB), Sjukfrånvaro under sjuklöneperioden, table AntErsdgrSektKonN2025
Corroboration: Sweden statutory minimum paid annual leave 25 working days harmonised on a five-day week, plus 9 public holidays counted separately; sectoral collectively agreed weekly hours of 40.0 in chemicals, metalworking and banking; note that Eurofound's economy-wide 37.2 hour figure for Sweden comes from an LO report on SCB Labour Force Survey data
Eurofound, 'Working time in 2021-2022', Publications Office of the European Union2022
Common questions
- How many people does one 24/7 position need in Sweden?
- 6 people. One position staffed every hour of the year is 8,766 hours, and one full-time employee in Sweden is actually available for about 1,708 of them once 47.5 days of holidays, leave, sickness and training come out. That is a relief factor of 5.13, which rounds up to 6 whole people.
- What is a relief factor?
- The number of employees needed to keep one position filled continuously, once the days nobody works are taken out. It is coverage hours divided by the hours one employee is genuinely available. In Sweden that is 8,766 divided by 1,708, or 5.13. A factor below the headcount you actually employ means the post runs on overtime.
- Why is a flat 25 percent absence buffer not enough for Sweden?
- Because it overshoots here. A raw hours calculation gives 4.2 employees, and adding a flat quarter takes that to 5.25, against a derived answer of 5.13. That is 2.3 percent too high, because the rule of thumb assumes more leave and sickness than Sweden actually loses.
- Does the statutory leave minimum reflect what employers actually give in Sweden?
- It is a floor, not a norm. This page computes on the statutory minimum of 25 working days because that is the figure the law fixes and a source can be attached to. Most employers sit above it, and the sensitivity table on this page shows what the relief factor becomes at more generous entitlements, so a planner can find their own contract rather than taking the floor as the answer.
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