Legater and foundation grants you can apply for yourself
Norway has over 2,000 private foundations that hand out money for education, and almost none of them care who teaches the course. The grants are small next to a bootcamp fee, and the deadlines belong to each fund. What makes this route different is that nobody has to approve you first: no employer, no caseworker, just the evenings you put into applying.
What a legat is, and why it suits retraining
A legat is a private foundation that pays out the return on a capital sum for a stated purpose, and education is one of the most common purposes in Norway. There are more than 2,000 of them. legatsiden.no is the searchable one, free to use, where you filter by field, by home municipality and by the kind of applicant a fund was set up for; Legathåndboken is the annual printed directory of the same ground, and most Norwegian public libraries carry the current edition. Typical grants run from NOK 5,000 to NOK 30,000, occasionally more, and many funds are written expressly for adults retraining, for particular municipalities and counties, or for particular fields. The reason they are worth the evenings is that they almost never attach any condition to who runs the course: what the board looks at is your documented education costs and whether your plan matches the purpose in the statutes. Each foundation writes its own statutes, so read the call before you write to it.
It depends entirely on the individual fund, and that is the point of applying widely. The statutes usually narrow the field by home municipality or county, by age, by subject area or by financial need, and some by all of them at once. A fund you do not fit is not a rejection, it is an evening you were right not to spend. Read the purpose paragraph first and the application form second.
Home municipality is the criterion that decides most often and that applicants overlook most often. A great many legater were founded with a particular kommune or fylke in mind, and the databases let you filter on exactly that. Search on where you live now, and on where you grew up if that is somewhere else, before you narrow by subject. A local fund with a modest capital is still a fund whose purpose you fit precisely.
Adults retraining are exactly who many general education funds were written for. Legater are easy to picture as something for first-time students, and plenty are, but many of the education funds use wording like utdanning og videreutdanning that covers someone changing career in their thirties or forties just as squarely. Read the formålsparagraf with that in mind rather than assuming you have aged out of the category.
You need to document your education costs and show that you have a place on the course. Most funds ask for a simple budget of what the training costs and what you are covering yourself, plus confirmation of admission. That is the same pack whether you apply to one fund or fifteen, which is why the first application takes an evening and the tenth takes a quarter of an hour.
Nobody has to sponsor you, and no public body is involved. This is the one route on the site where you are not asking an employer for a budget line or a caseworker for a decision: you find the funds yourself, you write to them yourself, and the board that reads your application is the only one deciding. What it asks of you instead is evenings.
Frequently asked questions
How many legater can I apply to at the same time?
As many as you genuinely fit, and applying widely is the right strategy here precisely because each award is small. Send a tailored letter to every one of them: the documentation pack can be identical, but the letter should answer the purpose written into that fund's statutes rather than read as a circular. Some forms ask you to state other funding you have applied for or received, and you simply say what it is. The work is front-loaded, so the tenth application costs a fraction of the first.
When will I hear back?
Each foundation runs on its own calendar: many boards meet once a year, some twice, and the decision follows the meeting rather than your start date. That makes a legat a poor thing to plan a cohort around and a good thing to have running in the background while you fund the course another way. Apply in parallel rather than one at a time, so the applications are already in when the boards sit. If an award comes through after you have started, it reduces what is left to pay rather than arriving too late to matter.
Does Code Labs Academy have to be approved or accredited in Norway?
Almost never, and that is the good news about this route. Private foundations set their own criteria, and most of them look at your documented education costs and at whether the purpose fits, not at whether the course provider appears in a Norwegian register. Live online teaching from a German school is an ordinary education cost to them. A small number of funds do write a requirement about the institution into their statutes, and when they do it is stated in the call, so read it before you spend an evening on the application.
Is it worth the work when the amounts are small?
It depends on how many funds you genuinely match and how many evenings you have. Three awards of NOK 10,000 is a real dent in a bootcamp fee, and nothing stops you applying while your employer considers covering the rest or while you pay in instalments. If you have an employer who could fund the whole thing, that conversation is worth your first evening rather than your tenth, so start with employer-paid education. Legater are the route to work at when no employer and no agreement is in the picture.
Where do I start if I have never looked at legater before?
Start with the directories rather than with a list somebody posted online: legatsiden.no lets you search by field, by home municipality and by the kind of applicant a fund was founded for, and the current Legathåndboken covers the same ground on paper if your library has it. Do the municipality search before anything else, because that filter quietly decides a great many awards. Then read the purpose paragraphs and keep only the funds you actually match. Ask us for the course documentation and the price in the same week, so your first application is not waiting on us.
Get Personalized Advice
Want help navigating tuition and funding in Norway? Book a one-to-one call with an education specialist. We can explain payment plans, share employer-friendly details (like invoices and programme summaries), and point you toward Norway-relevant routes such as employer sponsorship, a union education fund, or education in a severance agreement. The goal is to make financing clear, so you can focus on learning.
