Coverage
The coast, region by region
Ferry data arrives labelled with an administrative region — a fylke in Norway, a län in Sweden. Our in-depth guides are written around stretches of coast instead, which is why "Vestland" and "Western Fjords" describe overlapping but different things. This table matches the two.
16 administrative regions carry a crossing on SailNordic — 12 Norwegian counties and 4 Swedish län. Nordland is the largest with 42 crossings across 51 terminals, while 6 regions carry fewer than five crossings each. The distribution is not an accident: ferries cluster where the coastline is broken, and a county with a straight shore simply needs fewer of them.
These labels come with the timetable data itself, from the operator or the transport authority that publishes it. That has one consequence worth knowing: the region attached to a crossing is the region of its departure quay. A route that starts in one county and lands in another is filed under the first, which is why the terminal counts in the table below and the ones on the terminal index are counted from different angles and need not match line for line. A further 10 crossings arrive without a usable region label and are grouped as “Other crossings”.
| Region | Country | Terminals | Crossings | Sailing times | Read about it |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nordland | Norway | 51 | 42 | 468 | Lofoten |
| Vestland | Norway | 52 | 34 | 1,002 | Western Fjords |
| Bohuslän | Sweden | 19 | 21 | 1,662 | Gothenburg Archipelago |
| Møre og Romsdal | Norway | 23 | 14 | 568 | Geiranger & Møre |
| Rogaland | Norway | 23 | 14 | 120 | Lysefjord & Preikestolen by ferry |
| Stockholm | Sweden | 12 | 13 | 919 | Stockholm Archipelago |
| Finnmark | Norway | 16 | 10 | 50 | Finnmark & Nordkapp ferries |
| Other crossings | Norway | 11 | 8 | 500 | Lofoten |
| Troms | Norway | 10 | 7 | 69 | Tromsø & Lyngen ferries |
| Oslo og Akershus | Norway | 9 | 6 | 117 | Oslofjord ferries |
| Trøndelag | Norway | 8 | 6 | 114 | Hurtigbåt express boats explained |
| Vestfold og Telemark | Norway | 7 | 4 | 46 | Southern coast island ferries |
| Agder | Norway | 4 | 2 | 26 | Southern coast island ferries |
| Innlandet | Norway | 3 | 2 | 2 | country page |
| Other crossings | Sweden | 2 | 2 | 124 | country page |
| Skåne | Sweden | 2 | 2 | 125 | country page |
| Uppsala | Sweden | 2 | 2 | 124 | country page |
| Østfold | Norway | 2 | 1 | 83 | Oslofjord ferries |
What a region feels like
The same country, two different journeys
Region names tell you where you are; they do not tell you what the crossing is like. Two regions can carry a similar number of routes and offer completely different travel: in Stockholm the average crossing runs 3 min, in Finnmark it is 48 min. One is a set of traffic lights on water, the other a sea leg with a cafeteria.
The pattern behind those averages is geography. Where the coast is a maze of close islands — the Swedish archipelagos, the fjord mouths of western Norway — the boat is a shuttle: it leaves constantly, it crosses in minutes, and nobody plans a day around it. Where the coast opens out into long stretches of water, as it does through Finnmark, the same word "ferry" means a scheduled sea leg with a handful of departures and a real consequence if you miss one.
The busiest link column shows the same thing from the other side. A region whose busiest crossing runs a hundred times a day is a region where the ferry has been absorbed into the road network. One whose busiest runs a dozen times a day is a region where it is still a journey.
| Region | Crossings | Average | Busiest link |
|---|---|---|---|
| NordlandNorway | 42 | 44 min | Bodø → Moskenes37/day |
| VestlandNorway | 34 | 24 min | Lavik → Oppedal98/day |
| BohuslänSweden | 21 | 6 min | Hönö Pinan → Lilla Varholmen122/day |
| Møre og RomsdalNorway | 14 | 15 min | Linge → Eidsdal66/day |
| RogalandNorway | 14 | 22 min | Oanes → Lauvvik26/day |
| StockholmSweden | 13 | 3 min | Gåshaga → Hasseludden123/day |
| FinnmarkNorway | 10 | 48 min | Korsfjord → Nyvoll13/day |
| TromsNorway | 7 | 45 min | Lyngseidet → Olderdalen16/day |
How long you are aboard
Most crossings are short
Of the 190 crossings published here, 46% take a quarter of an hour or less. That single figure explains most of what confuses visitors: a Nordic ferry is usually a piece of road, not an excursion.
- 15 minutes or less88a road crossing; you stay in the car
- 16–45 minutes77long enough to leave the car and go up on deck
- 46–90 minutes15a proper sea leg, usually with a cafeteria
- Over 90 minutes10an island or coastal run, often once or twice a day
In depth
The five region guides
Each of these covers one stretch of coast in full — the crossings, the timetables, and the local boats that serve it.
Five guides against 16 regions looks like thin coverage until you look at what they carry: those five account for 69% of every crossing on the site. They were written around the places travellers actually go — the Lofoten islands, the western fjords, the two archipelagos — rather than around administrative boundaries that no visitor navigates by. A guide can also span more than one county, and a county can feed more than one guide, which is why the two lists on this page do not line up one to one.
The regions without a guide are not neglected; they are reached from the country pages, where every crossing is listed under the coast it belongs to.
Why a region can appear twice. The guides follow the coast, not the county boundary, so a single stretch of water can sit in two administrative regions and one region can feed two guides. Lofoten is the clearest case: the islands are in Nordland, but so is a long run of the Helgeland coast that has nothing to do with them.