Refugee workers’ wages start low and adjust slowly to the wages of comparable native-born workers. The innovative approach in this study using unique Swedish employer-employee data is to show that the gap is mainly caused by occupational sorting into cognitive and manual tasks. Within occupations, it can be largely explained by differences in work experience, while the remaining gap might be caused by discrimination. The identification strategy relies on a control group of matched natives with the same characteristics as the refugees and by using panel data for 2003–2013 capturing unobserved heterogeneity.