How ROT is actually calculated, line by line

TL;DR

ROT is thirty per cent of the labour cost including VAT. Three words in that sentence do the work: thirty, labour and including. Get the rate right and the base wrong and the claim is wrong; get the base right and put it on a materials line and the claim is wrong in a way that is harder to spot. Below is a full job worked through, followed by the three mistakes that cost real money and the one figure this system deliberately refuses to compute.

The rule, stated exactly

• The rate is 30 per cent for ROT. (RUT is 50 — see RUT for cleaning firms.)
• The base is the labour, and only the labour.
• The base is taken including VAT, not net.
• Materials, travel and fees are excluded, and they are excluded by line type, not by a setting somebody ticks.

That last point is the one worth dwelling on. A deductible job still buys materials that are not deductible. A customer entitled to ROT is not entitled to it on the cable. So a line only carries a deduction if it is both flagged eligible and of a type that is labour — and an article that is not labour cannot become labour by being flagged.

A bathroom renovation, worked to the öre

Fictional invoice, four lines, all at 25 per cent VAT:

Net: 53 290,00. VAT: 13 322,50. Before rounding: 66 612,50. Öresavrundning adds 0,50, so the invoice total is 66 613,00 kr.

Now the deduction. Eligible labour gross is 29 450,00 + 12 600,00 = 42 050,00 kr.

42 050,00 × 30 % = 12 615,00 kr

And so:

Invoice total                66 613,00
ROT deduction               -12 615,00
Customer pays                53 998,00

The customer transfers 53 998,00 kr. The remaining 12 615,00 kr is claimed from Skatteverket. Both figures are printed on the invoice, because the customer pays one half and the state pays the other, and a document showing only the total is one neither party can check.

Mistake one: computing on the net

Take the same job and apply 30 per cent to the net labour instead:

(23 560,00 + 10 080,00) × 30 % = 10 092,00 kr

That is 2 523,00 kr less than the correct 12 615,00 — exactly one fifth. It is always exactly one fifth at 25 per cent VAT, because the gross is 1,25 times the net and 1/1,25 is 0,8. Every deduction computed on the net is 80 per cent of what it should be, on every invoice, forever, and nobody notices because the arithmetic is internally consistent.

The customer pays too much, the claim is short, and the company looks more expensive than its competitor who got it right.

Mistake two: the deduction reaching materials

If the tiles line were swept into the deduction, the base would be 42 050,00 + 23 000,00 = 65 050,00 and the deduction 19 515,00 kr. That is not a slip. It is an incorrect claim to the tax authority, and it surfaces long after the customer has paid their share — at which point the difference is invoiced to a customer who considered the job finished and paid for.

The defence is structural rather than procedural. Labour and materials are separate lines from the moment the invoice is built, not separated afterwards by guessing from the description. The line type decides. A cable somebody ticked as eligible still cannot carry a deduction, because goods are not labour however they are flagged.

Mistake three: travel

The delivery line above is of type travel, and travel is not labour. It does not enter the base. At 1 250,00 kr net that is 468,75 kr of deduction that a looser system would have claimed — small on one invoice, and not small across a year of them.

Shared ownership

Two people owning a property between them claim half each. The job carries the share, and the invoice basis — the view of what a finished job is worth billing — narrows the base by it before the rate is applied, each step rounded once.

On the same bathroom, at a 50 per cent share:

Eligible labour gross     42 050,00
× 50 % share              21 025,00
× 30 % ROT                 6 307,50

Two roundings, in that order, so both figures shown are the figures that were used to reach the next one. Applying the rate first and the share second gives the same answer here and a different one by an öre on plenty of other invoices.

Then the invoice is refused, on purpose. Building an invoice from a job with a partial share is blocked outright, with the job named and the share printed in the refusal. The invoice generator claims the statutory rate on the whole of the eligible labour — it has no way to express one owner's part — so an invoice raised automatically from a half-share job would over-claim by a factor of two. Skatteverket refuses that months later, and the customer is then asked for money they thought was settled.

So a shared-ownership job is written by hand, and the software says so while somebody is still looking at it rather than after the claim has gone. That is a limitation, and the honest description of it is that the basis does the arithmetic and the invoice will not act on it.

The figure we refuse to compute

There is an annual ceiling per person. This system does not apply it, and it cannot.

The ceiling depends on what every other company has already claimed for that buyer this year — the other builder in March, the cleaning firm every fortnight, the electrician in June. None of that is visible from here. An amount capped without that data is wrong in exactly the way nobody checks, because it looks conservative and reasonable.

So the invoice says so, in print, on every deductible document:

Det årliga takbeloppet per person har inte kontrollerats på den här fakturan. Det beror på vad samtliga utförare begärt för er under året. Om Skatteverket avslår hela eller delar av begäran fakturerar vi mellanskillnaden.

That last sentence is the commercial protection, and it belongs on the document rather than in a conversation nobody wrote down.

What is built, and what is not

Built: the calculation, the labour-and-materials split, the deduction line on the invoice, the receivable split in the books, and the record of what was claimed against what was approved — including the shortfall when Skatteverket approves less than was asked for. The ownership share is computed on the invoice basis and is a refusal on the invoice, as above.

The claim file is built as well. From paid ROT invoices Closepact builds Skatteverket's import file (XML, schema version 6, validated against Skatteverket's XSD): one file per deduction type and payment year, at most 100 buyers per file. It shows which invoices are ready to claim and what is missing on the rest, and flags the 31 January deadline in the year after payment. Skatteverket's work types — Bygg, El, VVS and so on — are set per invoice and per line.

Not done here: the submission itself. Skatteverket has no API for the claim, so you import the file in the e-service Rot och rut – företag and sign the request there with BankID. The decision — approved, partly approved or rejected — is then recorded by hand or read from Skatteverket's decision file, and booked: paid to 1630 against 1513, refused back to 1510 because the customer owes it again, öre that cannot be claimed to 3740. Part payments and credited invoices are still filed by hand.

The buyer's details are entered in the panel on the customer: the personal number, and the property designation (fastighetsbeteckning) for ROT, or for a bostadsrätt the housing association's organisation number and the apartment number. The personal number is validated when it is entered, stored encrypted and shown masked; the full number appears only through a reveal that is written to the audit log, because a table of Swedish personal numbers is a liability that a table of invoices is not. An invoice with a deduction cannot be sent until those details are there, and they are printed on it with the split between labour and materials and the address where the work was done.

Where it lands in the books

The customer's 53 998,00 goes to 1510, the ordinary receivables account. The 12 615,00 claimed from Skatteverket goes to 1513, a separate receivable.

That split is not tidiness. It is what stops the ageing report chasing the tax authority as though it were a customer. Ninety days out, the 1510 row is a genuinely late customer and the 1513 row is a claim in progress, and those are two entirely different conversations. The BAS accounts invoicing touches has the rest of the chart.

The deduction is also not booked as negative revenue. Booking it that way would understate the turnover of every company that does ROT work, and understate the VAT they owe along with it.

Which tier this is in

ROT and RUT sit in the Väx and Pro tiers of the invoicing module, not in Start. Start covers customers, articles, invoices, VAT, PDF and email, and credit notes, with a limit of 50 invoices a month.

Further reading

• RUT for cleaning firms: 50 per cent, and the lines it never touches
• VAT per line: why a blended rate cannot be declared
• Guide: ROT and RUT