Master's Programme in Business and Management

Uppsala University’s Master’s Programme in Business and Management is a two-year, 120-credit, fully English-taught master at the university’s Department of Business Studies, run in four separately-applied specialisations — International Business, Marketing, Organisation and Entrepreneurship.¹ ² ³ ⁴ It is a genuine pre-experience degree with no work-experience requirement, and, like every public Swedish university, it charges no tuition to citizens of the EU, EEA or Switzerland.⁵ Everyone else pays SEK 228,000 across the degree.¹

Two features make it behave differently from most of the field, and both should be checked before you invest an application in it: the academic gate is 90 credits in business studies, and selection is a mechanical ranking on GMAT score then credits, with no essay, reference or interview anywhere in it.¹

Overview

Uppsala University was founded in 1477 and today teaches over 50,000 students.⁹ The Business and Management master sits in its Department of Business Studies, and across all four specialisations it is built on a fixed study route rather than an open elective menu: a common first year in strategy, business theories and scientific method shared by all the department’s master’s students, the specialisation’s own courses layered on top, a third semester given over to an internship, electives or an international exchange, and a fourth semester that is a 30-credit master’s thesis.¹ ² ³ ⁴ The degree awarded is a Master of Science in Business and Economics (120 credits) with Business Studies as the main field.¹

Two honest caveats belong at the top, because they shape how to read everything below. There is no programme ranking. We could not find this master in the Financial Times Masters in Management table or QS’s Business Masters management table — the FT’s 2025 edition lists two Swedish schools, Stockholm School of Economics and Jönköping International Business School, and Uppsala is not one of them. So we set no rank and keep the programme off our rank-sorted shortlists, exactly as we treat any programme whose rank we cannot primary-verify. And Uppsala publishes no cohort or outcomes data for it — no class size, no admitted-student profile, no employment rate, no salary. We asked its own pages for those figures and they are not there, so this profile omits them rather than borrowing an aggregator’s estimate. If audited outcomes data is decisive for you, weigh the full rankings and read our best MiM in the Nordics shortlist for the schools that do report.

Who this programme is not for

Most profiles on this site bury entry requirements in the admissions section. This one earns a heading, because Uppsala’s gate excludes a group of readers who would otherwise spend a January on it.

The requirement is a bachelor’s degree equivalent to a Swedish Kandidatexamen and 90 credits in business studies.¹ ² ³ ⁴ That is a substantial business major, not a grounding — and it is three times what the University of Gothenburg asks for its MSc in Management (30 credits in business, economics, HR or labour relations, plus 15 in statistics or research methods). If your bachelor’s is in engineering, computer science, the natural sciences, law or the humanities, this is not your route into management, however strong the rest of your file is. The programmes that are built for that reader are the conversion-style masters — see MiM vs MSc in Management for the distinction and the best MiM in Europe shortlist for the open-entry field.

The corollary is the reason to want it. If your bachelor’s is a business degree, Uppsala is one of the few places where that fact is worth something concrete rather than being flattened into a general applicant pool — the cohort around you cleared the same 90-credit bar, and the first-year courses are pitched accordingly.

Curriculum & Structure

All four specialisations share the same skeleton — 120 credits over four semesters in a fixed course order — and differ in the specialisation courses layered onto the common core.¹ ² ³ ⁴

• International Business — courses in international business built on the common strategy, business-theories and scientific-methods core.¹
• Marketing — how customers use information and make decisions, how firms interact with other market actors to develop new products, and how organisational structure shapes customer relations, including service logic and business relationships.²
• Organisation — leadership, organisational theory, institutional analysis and consulting, taught under an explicit “Responsible management” frame that Uppsala describes as integrating *“ethical behaviour, social and environmental responsibility, transparency and sustainability.”*³
• Entrepreneurship — “Developing opportunities”, “Launching the firm” and “Corporate entrepreneurship”, aimed at founders and at intrapreneurs inside established firms alike.⁴

The third semester is the flexible one across all four: an internship, electives, or an international exchange, worth 30 credits.¹ ² ³ ⁴ The fourth is the 30-credit thesis.¹ That structure — a shared research-methods core, a genuine thesis, an optional placement — puts Uppsala firmly on the academic rather than the vocational side of the one-year versus two-year trade-off, and it is the standard shape of the Nordic two-year master rather than a quirk of this school.

Application & Deadlines

Uppsala admits once a year to a single late-August intake, and you apply through Sweden’s national service universityadmissions.se, not to the university directly.¹ The round opens in mid-October and the first-round deadline is 15 January for the following autumn — for the current cycle, applications closed on 15 January 2026 for a 31 August 2026 start.¹ ² ³ ⁴ Fee-paying applicants should treat that January round as the real deadline; later rounds mainly release places that remain open.

Selection is a two-step ranking, and it is unusually mechanical. Uppsala ranks applicants first by GMAT score, and then by higher-education credits, to a maximum of 285.¹ ² ³ ⁴ There is no essay, no motivation letter, no reference and no interview anywhere in that ladder. The practical reading is that the GMAT is not required but is genuinely advantageous — submitting a score puts you in the group considered first, which is close to the inverse of how test-optional usually works at the schools we profile. If you are mapping the test-optional field, our MiM in Europe without the GMAT guide covers it, and Uppsala belongs on that list only in the narrow sense that the test is not compulsory. Since there is no essay to write, the work that usually goes into building a MiM profile is better spent on the test and on getting the credit transcript documented correctly.

English is evidenced at the Swedish “English 6” level, which University Admissions equates to IELTS Academic 6.5 overall with no section below 5.5; the TOEFL iBT equivalence changed for tests taken from 21 January 2026, to a total of 4.5 on the 1–6 scale with no section below 4 (previously a total of 90 with 20 in the written test).⁸

One feature of the Swedish system is worth planning around: one SEK 900 application fee covers every course or programme you submit in that semester, no matter how many.⁷ So ranking more than one of the four specialisations — or Uppsala alongside another Swedish university — costs nothing extra in fees, which looks like a free hedge when places are allocated by a ranked ladder rather than a fit assessment.

It is free in money and not free in funding, and that distinction is the one to plan around. Uppsala’s own scholarship conditions require the Uppsala programme to be your first priority at University Admissions¹⁰ — and Lund and Gothenburg attach the same first-choice requirement to their own awards, each sourced on its profile. So the ranking is two decisions wearing one hat: an admissions hedge, and a declaration of which university’s scholarship you are in the running for. Rank a safer Swedish programme first and you have not lost the fee — you have taken yourself out of the Uppsala award. The Swedish Institute’s own scholarship imposes no ranking rule, so this constraint is university-specific, not a feature of the Swedish system; check the terms of each award you are counting on before you order the list. Line the dates up against the rest of the field on our deadline tracker.

Tuition & Funding

For citizens of the EU, EEA or Switzerland the programme is free. Uppsala is a public Swedish university, and tuition is charged only to students from outside the EU, EEA and Switzerland; permanent Swedish residence-permit holders, holders of a temporary permit granted for non-study reasons, and qualifying family members are exempt too.⁵

Everyone else pays SEK 228,000 in total — a first instalment of SEK 57,000 and the same each semester across the four — plus the one-off SEK 900 application fee, which is non-refundable.¹ ⁷ All four specialisations carry the identical figure.¹ ² ³ ⁴ Note that Uppsala’s central fees page quotes only a university-wide band of SEK 49,500–90,000 per semester across all programmes; that band is not this programme’s price, and the SEK 57,000 on the programme pages is.⁵

Against the other Swedish programmes profiled on this site, that places Uppsala second on the total cost of the degree for a non-EU student — below Stockholm School of Economics at SEK 360,000 and above Gothenburg at SEK 192,000 and Lund at SEK 160,000 — but that ordering is partly an artefact of programme length, and it is worth doing the division. Per year of study, Uppsala’s SEK 114,000 sits below both SSE (SEK 180,000) and Lund’s one-year master (SEK 160,000), and above Gothenburg (SEK 96,000). Whether the two-year shape is worth the extra year of tuition and forgone salary is the one-year versus two-year question, and it is a real one here.

On funding, Uppsala offers a limited number of scholarships each year to international fee-paying master’s students, awarded competitively, which cover the full cost of tuition but not living expenses.⁶ Its detail page names four schemes — the Uppsala University Global Scholarship (open to any fee-liable non-EU/EEA/Swiss citizen), Anders Wall’s Scholarship (citizens of a country in Africa), the King Carl Gustaf Scholarship (citizens of 18 named countries) and the Swedish Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong Scholarship — and attaches three conditions worth knowing before you rank your choices: the Uppsala programme must be your first priority at University Admissions, only one Uppsala scholarship can be awarded however many you apply for, and “only about 2% of those who apply are granted a scholarship.” The autumn-2026 round ran 16 January – 2 February 2026 and the next opens in early 2027.¹⁰

A separate route that does not apply uniformly here: Sweden’s flagship government award, the SI Scholarship for Global Professionals, is granted only for programmes on the Swedish Institute’s published eligible-programmes list, and for 2026/2027 only two of this programme’s four specialisations are on it — International Business (UU-M2111) and Marketing (UU-M2113). **Entrepreneurship and Organisation are absent.**¹¹ The list is re-published each November, so check the current edition; but a fee-paying applicant counting on SI funding should treat the specialisation choice as a funding decision as well as an academic one. Our scholarships for a MiM in Sweden guide covers the wider set of routes. For the whole cost picture, see how much a MiM in Europe costs, the low-cost and tuition-free round-up and the public versus private trade-off.

Career Outcomes

Uppsala publishes no employment rate and no salary figure for this programme, and we do not quote numbers we cannot source — so it does not appear on our highest-salary shortlist, which uses the FT’s audited figure. That is a genuine gap in this profile rather than a judgement about the degree, and it is the strongest argument for weighing Uppsala against schools that do report.

What the university does state is the shape of the outcome, specialisation by specialisation. International Business graduates go into roles as consultant, analyst, project manager and key account manager, at firms Uppsala names including Accenture, Deloitte, EY, H&M, Unilever and L’Oréal.¹ Marketing graduates go into account management, business development, market analysis and brand management, with Saab added to that employer list.² Organisation graduates go into consulting, analysis, research and decision-making roles.³ Entrepreneurship graduates found companies, work as intrapreneurs and business developers, or take product management, business control and management consulting roles — with former students at H&M, LinkedIn, PWC, Spotify and Tesla.⁴ Read those as illustrative employer lists published by the school, not as placement statistics.

The structural support is the third-semester internship, which is the main formal bridge into the Swedish market on a degree that is otherwise academic in shape.¹ Swedish-language ability widens the local market considerably even though the degree needs none — see working in Sweden after a European MiM, the Nordics career-outcomes overview and post-study work visas for the routes to stay. Weigh the broader return in is a MiM worth it in 2026?.

Reputation

The honest case for Uppsala is specific rather than broad: a two-year, English-taught business master at a 549-year-old university, free to EU/EEA and Swiss applicants and SEK 228,000 to everyone else, with four genuine specialisations, a thesis, an optional internship, and a selection process transparent enough that you can estimate your own chances before applying — which is rare, and which the essay-and-interview schools cannot offer.

The case against is equally clear, and you should hold both. No FT or QS programme ranking, no published cohort or outcomes data, a single intake with an unforgiving 15 January deadline, and a 90-credit business prerequisite that rules out the career changer entirely. There is also a subtler cost to the mechanical ladder: if your file’s strength is a compelling story rather than a test score and a credit count, there is nowhere in this application to put it.

For context, weigh Uppsala against the other Swedish and Nordic programmes we profile — Stockholm School of Economics, Lund University, University of Gothenburg, and the wider field in our best MiM in the Nordics shortlist and the full rankings. The head-to-head that matters most for a fee-paying applicant is Gothenburg versus Uppsala: two English-taught, two-year, unranked-by-the-FT Swedish publics, SEK 36,000 apart in total, with very different academic gates.

¹ Uppsala University — Master’s Programme in Business and Management – International Business (Master of Science in Business and Economics (120 credits) with Business Studies as the main field; 120 credits over 2 years / 4 semesters; English; Uppsala; starts 31 August 2026; application deadline 15 January 2026; tuition first instalment SEK 57,000, total SEK 228,000, for non-EU/EEA/Swiss citizens only; entry requires a bachelor’s degree equivalent to a Swedish Kandidatexamen from an internationally recognised university and “90 credits in business studies”, plus English 6; selection on (1) GMAT score, (2) higher education credits to a maximum of 285; fixed study route — strategy, business theories and scientific methods in year one, specialised international business courses, an optional internship or international exchange in semester three, and a 30-credit thesis in semester four; graduates into consultant, analyst, project manager and key account manager roles at firms including Accenture, Deloitte, EY, H&M, Unilever and L’Oréal; retrieved 30 August 2026).

² Uppsala University — Master’s Programme in Business and Management – Marketing (120 credits, 31 August 2026 – 4 June 2028; English; identical SEK 57,000 first instalment and SEK 228,000 total, 90-credit business-studies gate, English 6 requirement and GMAT-then-credits selection; course content on how customers use information and make decisions, how companies interact with other market actors to develop new products, service logic and business relationships; internship, electives or exchange in the third semester; graduates into account manager, business developer, market analyst, brand manager, consultant and researcher roles, with alumni at Accenture, Deloitte, EY, H&M, Saab and Unilever; retrieved 30 August 2026).

³ Uppsala University — Master’s Programme in Business and Management – Organisation (120 credits, 31 August 2026 – 4 June 2028; English; identical fees, entry requirements and selection method; year one core courses in strategy, business theories and scientific methods plus specialisation courses in leadership, organisational theory, institutional analysis and consulting; year two an internship, electives or international exchange worth 30 credits followed by a 30-credit thesis; “Responsible management” framing integrating “ethical behaviour, social and environmental responsibility, transparency and sustainability”; graduates into consultant, analyst, researcher and decision-maker roles with employers including Accenture, Deloitte, EY, H&M, SAAB and Unilever; retrieved 30 August 2026).

⁴ Uppsala University — Master’s Programme in Business and Management – Entrepreneurship (120 credits, 31 August 2026 – 4 June 2028; English; identical fees, entry requirements and selection; specialisation courses “Developing opportunities”, “Launching the firm” and “Corporate entrepreneurship”; third semester internship, electives or exchange; 30-credit final thesis; graduates as founders, intrapreneurs and business developers or in marketing, product management, business control and management consulting, with former students at H&M, LinkedIn, PWC, Spotify and Tesla; retrieved 30 August 2026).

⁵ Uppsala University — Tuition fees for Master’s students (students from outside the EU, EEA or Switzerland pay both an application fee and tuition fees; exempt groups include EU/EEA/Swiss citizens, holders of permanent Swedish residency, holders of temporary residency granted for non-study reasons, and family members of exempt persons with residence rights in Sweden; “Depending on the programme, one semester of full-time study costs between 49,500 and 90,000 SEK” — the university-wide band, quoted here only to note that it is not this programme’s figure; tuition payable by credit card or bank transfer; retrieved 30 August 2026).

⁶ Uppsala University — Scholarships for Master’s students (“Every year, Uppsala University offers a limited number of scholarships” for international fee-paying Master’s students; “These scholarships cover the full cost of tuition, but not living expenses, and are awarded on a competitive basis”; enquiries to tuitiongrants@uu.se. This summary page names no schemes, amounts or deadline; those are on the linked detail page recorded at footnote 10, which was read on 1 September 2026; re-read 1 September 2026).

⁷ University Admissions in Sweden — Pay your application fee (“900 SEK (Swedish kronor)”; payable by applicants who are not EU/EEA citizens for their application to be processed; one fee per semester covers everything applied for that semester — “It doesn’t matter how many courses or programmes you’ve applied for in that semester…you pay 900 SEK”; payment after the deadline results in late-application status; “As the application fee is an administrative fee, it cannot be refunded”; retrieved 30 August 2026).

⁸ University Admissions in Sweden — English language requirements (English 6 / English Level 2 defined as “studies equivalent to the Swedish upper secondary course English 6/English Level 2”; IELTS Academic equivalent “an overall score of 6.5 and no section below 5.5”; TOEFL iBT “Total score of 4.5 (scale 1-6) with no section less than 4” for results dated 21 January 2026 and later, and “Score of 20 (scale 0-30) in written test, total score of 90” for results dated 20 January 2026 and earlier; retrieved 30 August 2026).

⁹ Uppsala University — About Uppsala University (founded 1477; “over 50,000 students”. The page states that the university is “ranked among the best in the world” without citing a specific table or position, so no world-ranking figure is quoted here; retrieved 30 August 2026).

¹⁰ Uppsala University — Uppsala University Master’s scholarships (page last modified 5 March 2026; “only about 2% of those who apply are granted a scholarship”; four named schemes — Uppsala University Global Scholarship, funded by the Swedish Council for Higher Education, full tuition, non-EU/EEA/Swiss citizens; Anders Wall’s Scholarship, full tuition, citizens of a country in Africa; the King Carl Gustaf Scholarship, full tuition, citizens of 18 named countries; and the Swedish Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong Scholarship, part of one year’s tuition, Hong Kong SAR passport holders. Each requires the Uppsala programme to be “chosen as first priority”; “it is only possible to be awarded one scholarship from Uppsala University”; none covers living expenses. “The scholarship application for studies starting in autumn 2026 is now closed. The application period was 16 January–2 February 2026… The next scholarship round will open in early 2027.” The Master’s Programme in Business and Management is not on the page’s list of excluded programmes; retrieved 1 September 2026).

¹¹ Swedish Institute — Eligible master’s programmes for the SI Scholarship for Global Professionals 2026/2027 (31-page PDF, sha256:d22673676a93586e. Uppsala’s Business and Management programme appears twice — “Business and Management - International Business UU-M2111 120” and “Business and Management - Marketing UU-M2113 120”. No row exists for the Entrepreneurship or Organisation specialisations. The list is republished each November for the following academic year; retrieved 1 September 2026).