Forestry Labour Force

This page includes statistics on employment and income from forestry and the forest industry.

In 2024, 31,900 people were employed in forestry, which is not a significant change from the previous year. The proportion of women is still not over 15 percent. During the same year, the forest industry employed 48,400 people.

The number of people employed in forestry has fluctuated between 25,000 and 32,000 people since 2007. The changes between individual years are often too small to be statistically reliable increases or decreases. Forestry refers to the industry classification, NACE 02. See more about employment concepts here:

Decrease in employment in the forest industry

In the forest industry (NACE 16 and 17), employment has decreased since 2005. The largest decrease is in the industry for paper manufacturing, where the number of employed has decreased by 40 percent.

The share of employed women is higher in the forest industry compared to forestry. In forestry, the share has fluctuated between 10 and 15 percent since 2016. Before 2016, the share of employed women was approximately 10 percent or lower.

Larger difference in number of employees

Number of employees refers to the average number of employees reported in the companies' official annual reports. However, self-employed persons are not included in the term employees. Since there are many self-employed persons in forestry, there is a greater difference between forestry and the forest industry in terms of the number of employees compared to the number of persons employed. Around 14,000 are employed in forestry, while the two parts of the forest industry have approximately 28,000 or 31,000 employees each.

Since 2010, the number of employees in both forestry and the forest industry has remained relatively unchanged. Between 2001 and 2010, the number of employees in the forest industry decreased, especially in the paper manufacturing. The number of employees in forestry increased slightly during the same period.

The income provides more information

By producing statistics on income, using tax declarations and employer’s verification statements, we can capture perspectives that are otherwise difficult to highlight in more traditional statistics on employment. This applies particularly to forestry, which is characterized by a large number of individual forest owners and many forest owners are also very old. It is important to note that as a forest owner, you can spread your income over several years in the tax declaration, and when processing these statistics, we cannot take that into account. In these statistics we also only include persons who had a positive annual income.

In 2023, almost 43,500 people had an income primarily from forestry, which is a decrease from 46,000 people the year before. From the manufacture of wood products and the manufacture of paper, there were 38,500 and 32,000 persons respectively who had an income, also decreases compared to 2022.

More common with lower incomes and older age in forestry

There are more persons who have income from forestry than the number who are employed or employees within forestry. There is a smaller difference between these within the forest industry. The reason for this is the distribution of age and income in forestry, which is slightly different from the forest industry. For example, some individual entrepreneurs who had income from forestry are not included in the definitions regarding the terms employed or employed.

Figure 5 shows the distribution of the number of persons in five different income classes for the three classes of economic activity. In the lower income classes it is more common to find people with income from forestry. In the higher classes, the two forest industry classes are more prominent. This does not necessarily mean that people with jobs in forestry have a lower annual income. Instead, this could be caused by forestry as an activity on the side of another job or retirement. On the other hand, the forest industry is more characterized by employees than by self-employment.

Regarding the distribution of age classes, forestry differs from the forest industry. The forest industry is more focused around the age classes up to retirement. The largest groups range between 45 - 54 years and 55 - 64 years. After that, the number of persons with income from the forest industry declines sharply, while persons continue to receive income even past retirement age in forestry. This can be compared with the term employment which only includes people who are up to 74 years old.

An in-depth look at the oldest age class (over 74 years) shows that the number of persons with income in forestry increased between the years 2008 and 2022. In 2023 it decreased, but there was also an overall decrease in persons with income from forestry during that year. There is no corresponding increase in the forest industry. Notably, there is also an increase in number of forest owners older than 74 visible in the statistics on property and ownership structure.

Most people with annual income over SEK 300,000 in the county of Västra Götaland

The statistics on income are divided by county and income class. County refers to where the person resides, not the county of the workplace.

An example is shown in Figure 8, where people with an annual income over SEK 300,000 are reported for the three industry classes. Figure 5 showed that people with income from the forest industry were the most frequent in the higher income classes. This can also be seen in Figure 8, where people with income from forestry were in minority in most counties. In total, there were approximately 43,500 people with a primary income in forestry in 2023, approximately 12,700 of these had an income over SEK 300,000.

Overall, for the three industry classes, the largest number of people with an annual income over SEK 300,000 were in Västra Götaland County. Approximately 7,200 people had an income there and paper manufacturing was the dominant industry. Somewhat lower, just over 4,900 people, were in Jönköping County, but wood product manufacturing was the most common industry there.

Higher income among employees

A breakdown by income and primary occupational status shows that self-employed persons in forestry are more common in the income group below SEK 300 000. For incomes above SEK 300 000, employees and self-employed with their own joint-stock company are more common. One explanation for this may be that self-employed in forestry mainly refers to forest owners themselves and their income from felling, while employees and those with their own joint-stock company are more likely to be employed in felling and silviculture.

A comparison of occupational status between the three sectors again shows how forestry differs from industry. Among those who had an income from forestry, more were self-employed in some way. In forestry, almost all those with an income are also employees, and a much smaller proportion are self-employed.

Self-employment in small-scale forestry

Over time, self-employment has declined in small-scale forestry. Self-employment is more common in silvicultural activities than in felling, but it is also in silviculture such as planting and precommercial thinning that self-employment has fallen the most since 1992. The survey was not carried out in 2018, as can be seen from the time series below. Self-employment is not surveyed every year and the estimates from 2021 are therefore the latest available.

• Last Updated: 10/11/2023