The Swedish school system is a highly comprehensive one, with "grundskola" (compulsory school) for 7- to 16-year-olds and the non-compulsory "gymnasieskola" (three-year upper secondary school) as the main types of school. Since the decentralization reforms of the 1990s, municipalities (290 in total) have been given considerable liberty in organizing education in their area. How much freedom individual schools enjoy depends very much on the municipality. As a general rule it can be said that municipalities governed by the Social Democrats tend to favour a higher degree of central steering by the municipality, while municipalities governed by the non-socialist block tend to give more freedom to individual schools (interview K.S.). The introduction of steering through goals and results from the 1980s onward has been much more momentous for the allocation of teaching hours and for the distribution of instructional time in Swedish schools than any changes in the weight of individual subjects within the timetable could ever have been. In this article, the author examines how teaching hours are actually allocated and used in practice in two different schools. As the Swedish school system is so decentralized and as the ways in which the central guidelines are put into practice differ greatly among different municipalities and different schools, this article serves as an exemplary glimpse into the practice of distributing teaching time in Sweden. (Contains 4 tables and 1 note.)