Statutory inspections for property owners — the year

As a property owner in Sweden you carry seven recurring statutory inspections: mandatory ventilation inspection (OVK), the energy performance certificate, radon measurement, systematic fire safety work, sweeping and fire safety inspection of heating appliances, refrigerant leak checks, and inspection of lifts and other powered installations. They are governed by five different acts, have four different supervisory authorities and almost no dates in common. This page collects them in one place.

Every statutory inspection in one table

Inspection	Legal basis	Interval	Supervision
Mandatory ventilation inspection (OVK)	Planning and Building Act ch. 8 s. 25, BFS 2011:16	3 or 6 years depending on building type and ventilation system	Municipal building committee
Energy performance certificate	Act (2006:985), Ordinance (2006:1592)	Valid for ten years	Boverket
Radon	Environmental Code ch. 9 s. 9, radiation protection ordinance	No fixed interval — the 200 Bq/m³ reference level as an annual average must be met	Municipal environmental committee
Systematic fire safety work (SBA)	Civil Protection Act (2003:778) ch. 2 s. 2, SRVFS 2004:3	Continuous and documented; self-monitoring to your own plan	Municipal fire and rescue service
Sweeping and fire safety inspection	Civil Protection Act, MSBFS 2014:6	Deadlines set by the municipality within the regulation's limits	The municipality
Refrigerants (F-gases)	EU 2024/573, Ordinance (2016:1128)	Leak checks every 12, 6 or 3 months by quantity; annual report by 31 March	Municipal environmental committee
Lifts and powered installations	Planning and Building Ordinance, Boverket's lift regulations	Recurring inspection by an accredited body; interval depends on type and use	Municipal building committee

The table describes what the law requires. Which of them you additionally want tracked in a system is a separate question.

Only two of the seven have a date in the calendar

That is the most important property of this list, and what makes it hard to run manually.

31 March — the refrigerant report for the previous year must be with the supervisory authority, if the installation contains at least 14 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in total.
1 October – 30 April — the radon measuring season. A long-term measurement must run for at least two months within that window, preferably three. Miss the season and you wait six months.

All the others are rolling per building. Ventilation control falls due three or six years after the individual building's last inspection date, the energy certificate ten years after it was issued. Two buildings in the same portfolio can therefore have due dates five years apart, and no calendar anywhere reminds you — the date exists only in the document.

Who is responsible, and for what

Responsibility lies with the building's owner, whether the building is used by the owner or let. That holds even when a property manager, an operations contractor or a framework agreement handles the practical work: you can buy the performance, but not the responsibility.

The supervisory authority performs nothing. The building committee, Boverket, the environmental committee and the fire and rescue service check that you have done what you should — they do not order the inspection for you and as a rule do not remind you either.

Which inspections does the owner arrange, and which does the municipality?

You order and pay for all seven. The municipality and Boverket are supervisory authorities, not performers. The exception is sweeping and fire safety inspection of heating appliances: there the municipality is responsible for the inspection being carried out, and you as owner for granting access and for the appliance being in order. In practice that means six of seven inspections never happen if nobody at your organisation has them on a list.

Inspection, supervision and self-monitoring are three different things

The words get mixed up, and that causes trouble in procurement and in boardrooms.

Inspection is the statutory examination: ventilation control, fire safety inspection, lift inspection, leak check. Carried out by a qualified or certified external party and documented in a report.
Supervision is the authority's review that you did what you should. The building committee, Boverket, the environmental committee or the fire and rescue service, depending on the area.
Self-monitoring is your own continuous work between the statutory inspections — the round, the checklist, the deviation noted and closed. In fire safety it is the very core of the requirement, see systematic fire safety work.

A common and expensive misconception is that self-monitoring replaces a statutory inspection. It never does. It can, however, mean the statutory inspection finds nothing.

What applies on acquisition

If you buy a portfolio, the duties follow the building, not the previous owner. Five items are worth requesting before completion, per building:

The latest ventilation inspection report with inspection date, result and ventilation system.
The energy performance certificate and its issue date — ten years passes quickly.
The radon measurement: when, how many flats, and the result.
The fire safety documentation and the latest self-monitoring round.
The refrigerant inventory with quantities in carbon dioxide equivalent and the latest leak check.

If any of them is missing, it is not primarily a price negotiation — it is a task landing on you from day one, with a deadline you did not set.

What happens when an inspection is missed

There is no automatic charge triggered when a date passes. The mechanism is supervision: the authority discovers the deficiency — often through a routine review of the register, a report from a tenant, or an inspection — and issues an order against the owner. An order can be coupled with a financial penalty (vite), an amount payable if you do not comply in time.

The consequence of a missed inspection is therefore rarely immediate and almost always drawn out. That is also why the deficiencies accumulate before anyone reacts. Read more in what happens when OVK is not carried out and in no energy certificate.

Read on, per inspection

Holding the calendar together across hundreds of buildings

With ten buildings a spreadsheet suffices. At a few hundred it stops working, for a specific reason: the due dates are not in the sheet but in the documents, and the documents arrive continuously from different suppliers in different formats. The sheet is therefore always a little out of date, and nobody knows by how much.

That problem — reading inspection date, building category and ventilation system out of incoming reports and calculating the next date per building — is what regulatory compliance in Emphyx does. The statutory inspections we track are those listed there, not all seven in the table above; lifts and sweeping, for example, are not included.

Beyond the seven inspections

The table above lists what has an interval or a date. Alongside it sit duties without a due date, which therefore rarely reach a calendar but which supervision asks about just as much:

Self-monitoring under the Environmental Code — the continuous work between the mandatory inspections, and the provision that ties radon, damp, temperature and water together.
Indoor temperature — the reference values in HSLF-FS 2024:10.
Legionella and hot water temperature — at least 50 °C at the tap.
Fire protection documentation — the building rules' requirement, which is not the same as SBA.

Two situations deserve their own treatment: compliance when buying property, where all of the above becomes yours on completion day, and housing co-operative board duties, where the same rules apply but continuity breaks at every change of board.

If you own a single-family house, most of this is not your problem: one- and two-dwelling buildings have neither recurring ventilation control nor SBA requirements in any real sense, and the energy certificate becomes relevant only on sale.