Renting versus buying in Finland
Varainsiirtovero is 3% when you buy real property, meaning a house and its land. Buying shares in a housing company, which is how most Finnish flats are owned, is taxed at 1.5% instead, exactly half. As in Sweden, the rate turns on the legal form of what you are buying rather than its price, so check which one you are looking at before trusting the entry cost above.
The rates were cut and the first-home exemption was abolished with effect from 1 January 2024. A first purchase used to escape the tax entirely; it no longer does, and older Finnish advice on this point is out of date.
Everything else about getting in is cheap: registration, survey and legal costs come to about 0.5%. Getting out is where the money goes, at 2.5% to 4.5% agent commission including VAT, five to nine times the 0.5% of fees on the way in, which is unusual and makes the length of stay matter more here than the transfer tax does.
Kiinteistövero is set by each municipality within statutory limits, with the permanent-residence band running from 0.41% to 1.00% of taxable value.
Both rent growth and house-price appreciation default to 2%, the flattest pair in Europe on this tool. When prices and rents grow at the same rate the leverage argument for buying does very little work, and the answer comes down almost entirely to the mortgage rate against the renter's investment return.
There is no mortgage insurance; lending is limited instead by a loan cap of 90% of collateral value for a first home and 85% otherwise.