EEA nationals, as Swedish law writes their right of residence
Chapter 3 a of the Swedish Aliens Act transposes Directive 2004/38/EC and calls the result uppehållsrätt, a right of residence. It belongs to EEA nationals and their family members and to nobody else, and Swedish law uses it as a switch in four separate places: chapter 2, section 8 b lifts the residence permit requirement, chapter 2, section 8 c lifts the work permit requirement, chapter 1, section 4 of the Driving Licence Act puts an EEA licence outside the definition of a third-country licence, and section 20 of the citizenship Act treats the right as equivalent to a permanent residence permit.
**Of this corpus that is seven states**, the European members covered here. For every other nationality on this site the chapter changes nothing, and the Aliens Act's permit chapters answer the question instead.
**The right is conditional while it lasts.** Chapter 3 a, section 5 says it exists for as long as the conditions in section 3 are met. Five years of lawful uninterrupted residence under section 6 makes it permanent, and only then is there nothing left to satisfy.
Where it actually bites
Membership is one thing and what a destination does with it is another. These are the countries covered here that treat these nationalities differently, and on which question.
Sweden- Becoming a citizen · Your Right of Residence Counts as the Permanent Permit, and the Eight Years Still Run
- Driving and licence exchange · Your Licence Does Not Expire Here, and It Can Be Exchanged Once You Settle
- Residency under a regional treaty · No Permit, No Work Permit, and After Five Years Nothing Left to Satisfy
- Residency through work · The Salary Requirement Is Not Your Problem; You Need No Work Permit at All
- consolidatesUtlänningslag (2005:716), consolidated text as amended to SFS 2026:1752
Sveriges riksdag, Dokument och lagar
About this source
The Swedish parliament's public database of the Svensk författningssamling, serving every Act and ordinance as a single consolidated page at a stable address of the form /sv/dokument-och-lagar/dokument/svensk-forfattningssamling/<slug>_sfs-YYYY-NNN/. Each record prints the SFS number, the department responsible, the date of issue and an Ändrad line naming the last amending SFS incorporated, and each amended section carries in its own body the Act that gave it its present wording. Provisions not yet in force are printed alongside the current text and marked /Träder i kraft I:<date>/, and repealed sections are kept in place reading Har upphävts genom lag (YYYY:NNN), so the page shows what has gone as well as what is there. Transitional provisions are printed at the foot under Övergångsbestämmelser, but only for those amending Acts that have them.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: The Ändrad line names the last amendment incorporated. It is not a sweep date and must not be recorded as a consolidation cut-off: it says nothing about when the page was last checked against the statute book. The consolidations are unofficial - the authentic text is the Svensk författningssamling as published by the Government Offices - and riksdagen prints a link to the Government Offices' own full text beside each record. An amending Act's own entry-into-force date is usually not on the page at all: where the Act has no transitional provisions, the date has to be read in the SFS as published. Where a section exists in several future versions the page prints them all, so an article number alone does not identify the text in force. The site is a Next.js application serving the whole statute inside the initial HTML; the extraction service returns nothing at all for some of the larger documents, which has to be met with a direct fetch rather than read as an absence.
We re-read it every 45 days. More about this source