Sweden has been in the Visa Waiver Program since 1989, so a Swedish e-passport and an approved ESTA are enough for visits of up to 90 days. Apply online before you book the long flight west.
90 days
Maximum stay per visit
2 years
ESTA validity
Multiple
Entries permitted
72 hours
Apply at least this far ahead
100% online
No embassy visit
Overview
Few European countries have as much family history in America as Sweden. More than a million Swedes left for the Midwest in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the traces are still visible in Minnesota and in Chicago's Andersonville. Today the traffic is driven less by emigration than by holidays in New York and Florida, road trips through California and a steady flow of business travel.
Sweden was among the second group of countries admitted to the Visa Waiver Program, in 1989, which means Swedes have travelled to the United States without a consular visa for well over three decades. What they do need is an ESTA, the online travel authorisation run by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. It is checked by the airline at Arlanda, Landvetter or Kastrup before you are allowed to board.
For a country used to BankID and doing almost everything with the authorities from a phone, the form itself holds few surprises. The points that trip Swedish applicants up are specific ones: a passport that lasts only five years, names containing å, ä and ö, and the exclusions that affect a large number of Swedes with roots in the Middle East and the Horn of Africa.
At a glance
Eligibility
Yes. Swedish citizens travelling without a visa need an approved ESTA for any visit to the United States, whether they are spending a week in Manhattan, attending a trade fair in Las Vegas or simply changing planes in Newark on the way to Mexico. The requirement covers arrivals by air and by cruise ship, and it has applied at the land crossings from Canada and Mexico since 2022.
The authorisation is individual. A family of four flying to Orlando over sportlov needs four of them, and a baby travelling on a parent's lap is no exception. Because each one is tied to a single passport number, the details for every child have to be taken from that child's own Swedish passport and not copied across from a sibling's.
Some Swedish passport holders cannot use the scheme at all. Anyone who has been in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Libya, Sudan, Yemen or North Korea since 1 March 2011, or in Cuba since 12 January 2021, must apply for a visa instead. So must Swedes who also hold Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian, Sudanese, North Korean or Cuban nationality. Sweden's sizeable Iranian-, Iraqi- and Syrian-born communities make this far more than a theoretical footnote here.
Purpose matters too. A Swedish developer flying to meetings at a client's office in San Francisco is within the rules; one who is going to be employed there is not. A term at an American university for credit needs a student visa.
Stay & validity
Each visit can last up to 90 days, and the authorisation itself normally runs for two years with as many entries as you like. For a Swede the practical limit is often the passport instead. Swedish passports are issued for five years to adults and children alike, and an ESTA ends on the day the passport it is attached to expires.
That makes the order in which you do things important. If your passport has ten months left, an ESTA granted today will have ten months left too, and you will need a fresh one after collecting the new booklet from the police passport office. Renewing first and applying second gives you the full two years.
The 90 days are counted from the day you are admitted and do not pause if you leave for a neighbouring country. A Swedish couple who fly into Seattle, drive up to Vancouver for a fortnight and return to the States are still on the same clock. The same goes for a detour to Cancún or a week in the Bahamas in the middle of a Florida trip.
Pricing
Live fees for Swedish passport holders, shown all-in — the US government charge and our service fee together, with nothing added later.
Your nationality is pre-selected as Sweden
Requirements
Everything Swedish passport holders need before starting an application. The first five items apply to every applicant; the rest are specific to your nationality.
A biometric e-passport from a Visa Waiver Program country, carrying the chip symbol on its cover
A valid email address, which is where the decision is sent and which you should keep accessible while travelling
A credit or debit card to pay the government ESTA charge and our service fee together
Your home address, phone number and an emergency contact
Employer details and, if you have them, the address of where you are staying in the United States
Simple process
Four steps, entirely online, with our team checking every field before anything reaches U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Enter your passport details exactly as printed, your contact and employment information, and answer the eligibility questions. Most applicants finish in about fifteen minutes.
Our team checks your passport number, name spelling, dates and declarations against CBP requirements before anything is submitted.
Your application goes to U.S. Customs and Border Protection with the government charge paid, and we track its status until a decision is issued.
There is nothing to stick in your passport. The authorisation is held electronically against your passport number, and the airline verifies it when you check in.
Most Swedish applications are answered quickly, often the same day. CBP nevertheless advises applying at least 72 hours before departure, because a share of cases are held as pending while further checks run, and there is no way to hurry those along from Sweden.
The sensible moment is when you book the flights, or earlier. Fares from Stockholm to the East Coast are usually bought months ahead for the summer and for the Christmas and New Year period, and adding the ESTA at the same time costs nothing in flexibility since it is valid for repeated trips.
If your answers mean you are not eligible, the alternative is a visitor visa with an interview at the embassy in Stockholm. Anyone who suspects they fall outside the waiver, for instance because of a past trip to Tehran or Baghdad, should start that process well before paying for tickets.
On arrival
An approved ESTA gets you on the plane. This is what happens once you land, and how to make the arrival as quick as possible.
Visa Waiver travellers are seen by U.S. Customs and Border Protection at the first American airport they land at, even when connecting onward. The officer takes a photograph and, for most adults, fingerprints.
There is no paper form to fill in on the aircraft. Your arrival record, the I-94, is created digitally and shows the date by which you must leave. You can look it up online afterwards.
Expect to be asked where you are staying, for how long and what you do for a living. A return ticket and the address of your first night are usually all it takes.
Queues at the busiest gateways can run past an hour at peak arrival times. If you are connecting to a domestic flight, leave a generous margin, since you also reclaim and recheck your bags.
Getting there
Stockholm's own nonstop choice is thinner than the city's size suggests and is largely seasonal, so most Swedes cross the Atlantic with one change. Copenhagen is the natural hub for SAS and is a short train ride from Malmö and Lund, while Gothenburg passengers typically connect through Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Frankfurt or London. Finnair via Helsinki and Icelandair via Keflavik are popular alternatives from Arlanda.
Best time to go
The Swedish calendar and the American one fit together better than you might expect. Sportlov falls between mid-February and mid-March depending on the county, which is the dry, warm part of the Florida year and comfortably outside hurricane season.
The long sommarlov from mid-June to mid-August coincides exactly with the American school summer. National parks such as Yellowstone and Yosemite are at their busiest then, and accommodation near them is booked out far ahead. Swedes who are free to travel in late May or September get the same landscapes with far fewer people.
Höstlov in week 44 is a good fit for New York, which is cool and clear at the end of October and has not yet reached the Thanksgiving and Christmas crowds. A pre-Christmas shopping weekend in Manhattan is something of a Swedish tradition, though the week of Thanksgiving itself is the most congested for domestic flights.
New York is six hours behind Stockholm and California nine. For a few weeks in March and again around the end of October the gap narrows by an hour, because the two sides change their clocks on different dates.
Avoid these
Refusals are rare, and almost always technical rather than substantive. These are the problems that come up most often on applications from Sweden — we check for every one of them before submitting.
The five-year Swedish passport catches people constantly. An authorisation granted against a passport that expires next spring ends next spring, and nothing carries over to the replacement. Check the date before applying, and renew first if the remaining time is short.
The form accepts only unaccented letters. Use the spelling in the machine-readable zone at the bottom of the photo page, whatever it shows for your name, so that Sjöberg or Åkesson is entered the way the passport chip records it.
Swedes born in Iran, Iraq or Syria often still hold that nationality whether or not they have ever used the passport. It has to be declared, and it means the waiver is unavailable.
Someone registered as Karl Erik Gustav who has been called Erik all his life must still enter every given name in passport order. An application under the everyday name alone does not match the document the airline scans.
Travel to a restricted country
Anyone who has been in Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, Libya, Somalia or Yemen on or after 1 March 2011, or in Cuba on or after 12 January 2021, is generally not eligible for the Visa Waiver Program and needs a visa instead.
A previous visa refusal or overstay
An earlier refusal of a US visa, a denied entry or a past overstay must be declared. Each one commonly leads to an ESTA being refused and the traveller being directed to apply for a visa.
Passport details that do not match
A single wrong character in the passport number, or an expiry date typed in the wrong order, produces an authorisation the airline cannot find at check-in.
Conditions
These conditions are set under the Visa Waiver Program and do not vary by nationality. The 90-day limit and the passport-linking rule catch out a great many otherwise well-planned trips.
Your authorisation is held electronically against the passport number you enter. If you renew or replace that passport, change your name or change citizenship, the ESTA no longer applies and you need a new one.
Every person travelling under the Visa Waiver Program needs their own ESTA, including babies and children, each linked to that traveller's own e-passport.
An approved ESTA generally lasts two years from the date of authorisation, or until the passport it is linked to expires, whichever comes first.
Within its validity you can make repeated trips. Each stay can be up to 90 days, and time spent in Canada, Mexico or the nearby Caribbean islands during a trip counts towards those 90 days.
A Visa Waiver stay cannot be extended and cannot be converted into another immigration status from inside the United States. Anyone who needs longer must apply for a visa before travelling.
An ESTA lets you board a carrier bound for the United States. Admission is decided by a CBP officer at the port of entry, who can ask about your plans, your funds and your ties to home.
Consular services
The American embassy in Stockholm takes no part in ESTA decisions, which are made online by CBP. Swedish travellers deal with it only when they need a visa, for example after a refusal or for work, study or a stay beyond 90 days.
FAQs
The questions Swedish passport holders ask most often about travelling to the United States.
No, not for visits of up to 90 days. Swedish citizens travel under the Visa Waiver Program and need an approved ESTA instead of a visa for tourism, business meetings, medical treatment or transit. A visa is required for work, academic study, journalism or longer stays.
Up to two years, but never beyond the passport's own expiry date. Because Swedish passports last five years, many applicants get less than the full period. Renewing the passport before applying is the way to secure all of it.
Follow the machine-readable zone on the passport's photo page, the two lines of capitals and chevrons at the bottom. Whatever plain-letter spelling appears there is the one to use. Do not enter the Swedish characters themselves.
Place of birth alone does not decide it; nationality does. If you still hold Iranian, Iraqi or Syrian citizenship alongside your Swedish one, you are not eligible for the waiver and must apply for a visitor visa at the embassy in Stockholm.
Nonstop service from Arlanda is limited and mainly seasonal, with New York the usual destination. Most Swedish travellers connect once, typically in Copenhagen, Helsinki, Reykjavik, Amsterdam or Frankfurt.
Yes, every child needs one, including infants. Each is linked to the child's own Swedish passport, which also runs for five years, so check each expiry date separately before a family trip.
Employment for an American employer is outside the waiver, and internships generally are too. Attending meetings, conferences and negotiations for your Swedish employer is allowed.
Yes. Since 2022 the authorisation has been required at land crossings as well as airports and seaports. Days spent in Canada during the same trip also count towards your 90, so a long cross-border road trip needs careful arithmetic.
Your nationality is already set to Sweden. Complete the form in about fifteen minutes, and our team will check every detail before it reaches CBP.
Other nationalities
Routes, passport rules and the practical details differ by country. Here are the guides for other Visa Waiver Program nationalities.
