Personal identity number (Sweden)

Other companies often ask for it in return for a post-paid service, such as a telephone subscription, to be able to check e.g. the person's credit record or address or if needed to perform debt collection.

Redistribution of these numbers using computers is, however, governed by the law of personal details, in line with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

For automated data treatment the format for the date of birth is typically eight digits, YYYYMMDD.

Originally, when the personal identity number was introduced, it had nine digits and the seventh and eighth denoted the county (Swedish: län) in which the subject was born or had been living in 1947 - see above.

Even easier is to call the tax authority and ask, since the personal identity number is public information.

With citizens and other persons born in Sweden, the identity number is issued soon after the birth of a child has been reported by the parents and medical professionals.

In exceptional cases, the number may be changed later in life, typically because the date of birth or the registration of gender of the child were in error.

A review on the Swedish Personal Identity Number was published in 2009 by medical researchers and representatives of the Tax authority, Statistics Sweden and the National Board of Health and Welfare.

People who have no known Swedish personal identity number or co-ordination number but need health care, e.g. foreign tourists, unconscious people, newborn children needing special care (healthy newborn children are registered in their mother's medical record) and some more (e.g. for special privacy protection such as HIV tests), will get a reserve number (Swedish: reservnummer) which is temporary and used only for the health care.

The taxable assets of deceased people are, if not fully sold or inherited within 1–2 years, reassigned to organisation numbers,[citation needed] in order to free up Personal identity numbers for future children.

[citation needed] For asylum seekers, the Swedish Migration Agency (Migrationsverket) issues LMA numbers (Swedish: LMA-nummer), an abbreviation of the 1994 law governing the rights of asylum seekers in Sweden [sv].