Hidden defects: how long do they last?

The question almost always comes in the same moment: you just found something wrong, and want to know if it is too late. The answer involves two wholly different time limits running at once.

One is the outer limit: how many years after purchase the seller can be held liable at all. The other is the complaint deadline: how fast you must speak up after finding the defect. The first is generous. The second sinks people. The whole question of how long hidden defects last has a page of its own.

Houses and villas: ten years from moving day

Buying real property, meaning houses, terraced or linked houses, or holiday homes, the Land Code applies. Seller liability for hidden defects stretches ten years from moving day. After that the seller is free, however serious the defect.

Ten years sounds safe, and unusually long against most else in Swedish consumer law. But the limit counts from moving day, not from when the defect appeared. Damp built in back in 1998 breaking out in 2026 with a buyer who moved in 2014 still sits inside the limit. Breaking out with whoever moved in 2011, it does not.

Tenant-owner apartments: two years, and it passes fast

A tenant-owner apartment is legally movable property, not real property. So the Sale of Goods Act applies instead, with the outer limit two years from moving day.

Two years is short. Many flat defects, damp behind tiles, a wrongly done bathroom renovation, or ventilation that never worked, just begin showing as the limit already runs out. The rules also differ in substance, with a separate walkthrough of tenant-owner hidden defects going into what is the seller’s responsibility and what is the association’s.

The complaint deadline: the clock actually killing claims

Here is the important part: staying inside the ten-year limit is not enough. You must also complain within reasonable time of noticing, or having should noticed, the defect. Failing that, you lose your right entirely, even just three years into ten.

What ”reasonable time” means is not fixed in weeks. Courts landed anywhere from a couple of months to much longer depending on circumstances: how obvious the defect was, whether you needed to investigate it, how complicated grasping the extent was. But the basic principle is simple: do not delay.

The usual mistake is waiting to speak until you know exactly what the repair costs. You need not. You complain first, investigate after. A complaint is a message stating you believe a defect exists and want to hold the seller liable, not a finished claim with an amount.

How you complain without losing the evidence

Write; do not speak. An email suffices, but it must be traceable and dated. Describe what you found, when you found it, and that you claim a defect in the purchase and will return with demands. Save the sending.

Photograph at the same time, before anything is torn up or wiped away. If you must break up a wall or floor to reach the problem, document every step. The burden of proof that the defect existed already at purchase sits with you, growing heavy once the damage is fixed and only the invoice remains.

Bring in an expert early. A survey statement describing the defect, its likely age and cause is often what decides whether the seller agrees to settle or not. Holding home insurance with legal protection, check what it covers before running up costs.

Time cuts both ways

This also covers you selling. Selling a house, your liability lives on ten years, which is why some sellers take hidden-defects insurance or write a disclaimer into the contract.

And that is why what you tell before the deal is worth so much. A defect the buyer learned about is by definition not hidden. An honest seller writing down what they know shrinks their own risk across the whole ten-year period. And a buyer inspecting properly shortens the list of things later becoming a dispute.

Legal basis

The ten-year limit for real property sits in Land Code chapter 4, section 19 b, with the reasonable-time complaint requirement in section 19 a. Defect liability itself lives in section 19. For tenant-owner apartments the Sale of Goods Act (1990:931) section 32 applies, stating both complaints within reasonable time and the outer two-year limit from the buyer receiving the home. Sale of Goods Act section 33 exempts the two-year limit if the seller acted grossly careless or against good faith.