Income and taxes|The number of Finns earning more than 100,000 euros is growing rapidly. Compared to their size, they pay a really large slice of Finnish income taxes.
Well-to-do the number of Finns is growing rapidly. The tax statistics published by the tax authority on Wednesday reveal that the number of Finns earning more than 100,000 euros per year has almost doubled between 2014 and 2023. Income includes aggregated total income, it includes taxable and tax-exempt earnings and capital income.
There were already more than 162,000 such persons last year. In 2014, only a good 85,500 Finns reached an income of more than 100,000 euros. Now, 3.3 percent of all Finnish income earners already reached an income of more than 100,000 euros, while in 2014 the share was only 1.8 percent.
The change indicates a rapid increase in nominal earnings.
In the process the importance of those earning more than 100,000 euros in terms of Finnish tax revenues has increased. As recently as 2014, they paid more than 17 percent of Finland’s income taxes and tax-related payments, last year already 24.8 percent. The tax bracket is quite large when you take into account that this group includes about 3.3 percent of Finns.
The share of taxes paid by those earning more than 100,000 euros is also large, in that last year they received slightly more than 16 percent of all income that came to the attention of the taxman.
On the other hand, the share of taxes paid by the highest-income Finns has decreased slightly over the past few years.
In 2021, Finns earning more than one million euros paid about 4.2 percent of income taxes and tax-related payments. Last year, the share had dropped to 2.7 percent. The share is still large compared to their number, as the share of people with incomes over a million was 0.02 percent of all income earners.
There were a total of 1,206 people earning more than a million last year. The highest number since 2014 was in 2021, when there were 1,632 of them.
Well-to-do despite the increase in the number, the majority of Finns still have very low incomes. The share of those earning less than 30,000 euros per year was almost 52 percent last year. The increase in nominal earnings can also be seen in that group, as in 2014 they were more than 63 percent of Finnish income earners.
There are still many people with very low incomes living in Finland. According to the taxman’s statistics, almost 460,000 Finns earned less than 5,000 euros last year. Almost 1.8 million Finns had an annual income of less than 20,000 euros.
In the case of small incomes, it should be noted that part of the benefits granted by Kela are tax free. Such subsidies include, for example, subsistence allowance, general housing allowance and child allowance. This kind of support does not appear in the taxman’s income statistics. For example, in 2022, a total of just under 4.4 billion euros was paid in child benefits, housing allowances and basic income support.
Taxation progress can be seen in Finland in the fact that those who earn less than 30,000 euros a year pay quite a small part of Finnish taxes.
For example, last year they paid about 11.4 percent of the income taxes and tax-related payments paid in Finland. The share is small when you consider that almost 52 percent of Finns belong to this income category.