Education
Increasing numbers of Malmö residents have a higher education. At the same time, approximately one-third of job-seekers in Malmö lack an education beyond upper secondary school. The percentage of students who are eligible for upper secondary school has increased and the merit rating for students in the 9th grade has increased.
Post-secondary education in Malmö
Educational attainment in Malmö has increased over time. According to Statistics Sweden’s (SCB) education statistics for 2025, 38.4 per cent of Malmö residents aged 25–65 had at least three years of post-secondary education. The corresponding figure for Sweden as a whole was 31.9 per cent. Malmö therefore had a higher proportion of residents with a longer post-secondary education than the national average.
Merit rating in Malmö
The average merit rating for Year 9 students in Malmö’s municipal compulsory schools was 229.4 in the 2024/25 school year. This result is broadly in line with the levels recorded in previous years. For comparison, in the 2023/24 school year, the average merit rating was 222.6 in municipal schools nationwide, 247.8 in Stockholm’s municipal schools, and 219.8 in Gothenburg’s municipal schools.
Source: Swedish National Agency for Education (Skolverket).
Upper secondary school eligibility in Malmö’s municipal compulsory schools
In the 2025/26 school year, 84.0 per cent of Year 9 students in Malmö’s municipal compulsory schools were eligible for a national upper secondary school programme. This represented an increase of 1.9 percentage points compared with the previous school year, when the figure was 82.1 per cent. This is the highest level recorded since the beginning of the 21st century.
Source: Swedish National Agency for Education (Skolverket), via the City of Malmö..
Children in preschool
The chances of being able to take advantage of teaching in primary school are greater among those children who have attended a high-quality preschool. Preschool has the potential to promote social equalization and early investments in preschool yields a high payoff in terms of lifelong learning. For these reasons, it is therefore important that as many children as possible attend a high-quality preschool.
- The number of municipal preschools for 2026: 177.
- The number of children in municipal preschools 2025 (refers to 1-5 years) was 15,513 (the average number, as the number of children varies from month to month throughout the year).
- The proportion of children in municipal preschools 2025 (refers to 1-5 years) was 83 percent.