Finland Start-up Visa

The Act sets no capital threshold at all, and on this route that silence is design rather than omission: the gate is not measured in money but in a statement of assessment.

Section 80 allows a continuous residence permit for a foreign growth entrepreneur where that person acts, or intends to act, full-time in a position of responsibility in a company registered or to be registered in Finland.

The condition is that the company's business model and the personal competence of the people working in it, according to a statement issued by the Innovation Funding Agency Business Finland, meet the conditions of that agency's own funding for early-stage innovative high-growth companies.

The financial standard is therefore borrowed wholesale from a separate funding programme, and section 80 a states plainly that the statement rests on Business Finland's discretion.

The criteria Business Finland publishes give that standard concrete form: a founding team of at least two people holding at least 60% of the company between them; a plan to incorporate a limited liability company rather than a sole proprietorship; a relocating business under five years old unless its operations change significantly in the move; and no annual quota of permits.

The one money condition the Act sets for itself sits in section 39 and carries no figure either: a permit may be granted only where means of support are secured, and secured is defined negatively.

For a first permit, support counts as secured if the cost of the person's stay is met from income regarded as ordinary from employment, entrepreneurial activity, pensions, assets or other sources.

That income must be at a level such that the person cannot be expected to need social assistance under Act 1412/1997 or an equivalent benefit. Social security benefits that merely reimburse costs do not count as income.

The applicant must give the authority an account of how their support in Finland is secured.

The consolidated text as a whole contains no schedule of figures, so the absence of a number here is a genuine silence of the Act.

The figure in the options table is not a capital threshold but the subsistence level the Finnish Immigration Service publishes for 2026, and it has three tiers by place of residence: a minimum net income of 1,210 euro a month in the Helsinki metropolitan area, comprising Helsinki, Espoo, Vantaa and Kauniainen, 1,090 euro in other large municipalities, and 1,030 euro in other municipalities.

The money must cover at least one year and must be held in the applicant's own bank account; a first permit is granted for two years only where the applicant has enough to cover living costs for two years. These levels sit on the agency's guidance page rather than in the Act.

What is received is a residence permit, but the part worth reading is who decides what, and the law splits that between two authorities.

Section 83 provides that the Immigration Service grants the start-up entrepreneur permit after the statement under section 80 a, and that for this route the Immigration Service itself assesses whether the means of support are secured.

Business Finland therefore rules on the business, while the Immigration Service rules on the money and is the body that signs — an application can clear one gate and fail at the other, and the two gates sit in authorities from different fields.

The permit also carries something the commercial write-ups rarely mention. Section 17 c provides for a long-term visa for accelerated entry to be granted to a person who has been issued the start-up entrepreneur permit under section 80.

The list of those entitled to that route has eight groups, and the start-up entrepreneur stands alongside the specialist under section 73 and the holder of an EU Blue card.

The legislator has placed this route among those given priority entry rather than among the ordinary ones, and that is part of what is received rather than a service bought separately.

And if the application is refused, the forum has been named in advance: section 192 provides that in a case concerning a start-up entrepreneur permit where the applicant does not live in Finland, the competent court is the Helsinki Administrative Court. An applicant living in Finland goes to the court of the district where they live.

This is one of the few routes where the authority binds itself with hard deadlines, but for a first start-up permit section 84 sets only one general deadline with two relieving provisions, while its one-month deadlines belong to other kinds of application.

The overall deadline: a decision on an application under this chapter must be taken at the latest within two months of the authority receiving a properly completed application with its attachments.

The starting point is defined precisely, and this is where applicants most often miscount: the processing time runs from the applicant attending in person at the authority to give biometric identifiers under section 60 d.

Not from the day an online form is submitted. The same sentence of the Act also mentions the applicant's and employer's obligations under section 71, but section 71 sets the conditions for a residence permit for employment, so that limb does not reach a start-up application.

For an applicant in Vietnam that appointment takes place before entry: a Vietnamese passport needs a visa for Finland, a first start-up permit must be applied for from abroad, and the Embassy of Finland in Hanoi states that residence-permit services are available only at VFS Hanoi, while the Ho Chi Minh City centre is listed for Schengen visas. Section 60 d allows an external service provider to take fingerprints, but the texts checked do not say whether a VFS appointment counts as the in-person visit that starts the clock.

The one-month deadlines in subsection 2 do not apply to a first application on this route. The Centre for Economic Vitality's partial decision, due within one month, belongs to the entrepreneur permit under section 79 a. For a growth entrepreneur, subsection 2 reaches only the extension application: Business Finland must give its statement at the latest within one month of the Immigration Service's request under section 80 b(2), and the Immigration Service must decide at the latest within one month of receiving it.

Two relieving provisions must be read alongside, or the two-month figure becomes a promise the law does not make. First, a longer processing time is possible in exceptional circumstances relating to the complexity of examining the application.

Second, and this is the stronger clause: if the competent authority has to request or obtain further clarification, the clock stops running until the necessary clarifications have been received.

There is also a time limit on the applicant's side that is easily missed: Business Finland's statement must have been issued no more than four months before the application is lodged — so preparing too early fails just as preparing too late does.

Alongside the statutory deadline, the Immigration Service runs a fast-track service for start-up permits: the permit can be granted in two weeks, but only where the applicant proves their identity within five working days of applying in Enter Finland, no further information is needed, and the application meets the permit's requirements.

There is no obligation counted in days, but there is a two-year absence ceiling, and what deserves recording more than the ceiling is that the law lets a person apply in advance for it not to fall.

Start with the class of permit, because everything follows from it: section 33 divides residence permits into fixed-term and permanent, and the fixed-term kind divides again into temporary and continuous.

Section 80 places the growth entrepreneur in the continuous class — the branch that leads to long-term residence, not the temporary-stay branch. Section 53 allows a first permit under section 80 to be granted for two years, and the Immigration Service grants two years only where the applicant has enough to cover living costs for two years; section 55 caps an extended permit at four years.

Section 58 sets two doors to loss and both are measured by leaving the country: a fixed-term or permanent permit is cancelled when the foreigner has moved permanently away, or when they have stayed continuously two years outside the country with a permanent intention.

Those last words repay close reading: the two years are not a day-counting trap but attach to the character of the absence.

And the law leaves an active route out: before those periods have elapsed, the foreigner may apply for the permit not to be cancelled.

If the application is granted, the decision itself must state the period during which the permit will not be cancelled, and it may be granted where the stay outside Finland or outside the Union was due to a special or exceptional reason.

On the business side, the maintenance condition sits in section 80 b: a new fixed-term permit is granted to a growth entrepreneur who already holds a section 80 permit, for continuing the same or a similar business, if that business is profitable, or if the company's business model still meets Business Finland's funding conditions.

Those two limbs are separate routes: profitability removes the need to re-assess the model, and a business not yet profitable still has a way through if the model holds.

The dependants provision on this route is a single sentence, but that sentence is stronger than on most routes in this table: section 80 provides that a family member of a qualifying growth entrepreneur is also granted a continuous residence permit, whether applied for in Finland or abroad.

Two things in that one sentence deserve notice. First, the family member receives the same class of permit as the principal rather than a lesser one.

Second, allowing the application to be made from inside the country means the family need not split up and wait abroad. Who counts as a family member is defined by section 37, and that definition reaches wider than the ordinary reading in three places.

The core group is the spouse of a person living in Finland, together with an unmarried child under 18 whose guardian is that person or that person's spouse; and where the person living in Finland is themselves a minor child, the family member is their guardian.

First extension: a person of the same sex also counts where the partnership has been registered nationally.

Second extension: people living continuously in a shared household in marriage-like circumstances are equated with spouses, regardless of sex, on condition that they have lived together for at least two years — and that two-year period is not required where they have a child in joint custody or where there is another weighty reason.

Third extension, narrow and tightly conditioned. A foster child under 18 and unmarried, who is in the guardian's actual care and in need of that care on the date the application is decided, but for whose guardianship no official documentation can be obtained, is equated with a child.

This applies only where there is reliable evidence that the child's earlier guardians are demonstrably dead or missing, and that the actual care relationship existed before the sponsor came to Finland.

The status this programme grants, whether a visa or a residence permit, does not replace the holder's passport. The holder still travels on the passport of their own country, so the figure below belongs to the Finland passport and becomes the holder's only once they are issued a Finland passport.

According to the Passport Index of Prosperous Intelligence, on data dated 30 September 2026, the Finland passport reaches 203 destinations without applying for a consular visa in advance. The figure combines three forms of entry and does not count an e-Visa that must be obtained beforehand:

It is therefore a measure of how easily the holder travels, not a count of visa-free countries in the narrow sense.

For comparison, on the same source and the same method of counting, the Vietnamese passport reaches 44 destinations. The two lists of destinations do not nest inside one another, so the difference is an indication rather than a list of places newly opened.

Prosperous Intelligence dates its data and advises checking with the destination’s official authorities before travelling.

The provision creating this category contains no word about tax, and what makes that silence valuable is that it sits next to a provision which is not silent.

The startup residence permit is section 80 of the Aliens Act, together with section 80a on the opinion of the innovation funding agency and section 80b on subsequent permits.

The conditions are full-time activity in a position of responsibility in an enterprise registered in Finland, a business model meeting that agency funding criteria, and secured means of subsistence under section 39.

Read in full, none of the three contains a tax provision. In the 2023 amending Act that inserted them, the only reference to tax lies outside section 80.

It sits in section 79a(1)(4), belonging to the ordinary entrepreneur permit, where the condition is written out: the business activity must not have materially neglected the statutory obligations to pay taxes or other charges.

Within a single chapter, in other words, the legislator did write a tax-compliance condition for one category and did not write it for the other; the text gives no reason for the difference.

On concessions, Finland has a dedicated statute for foreign experts, and its definition excludes this category on the same pattern seen in the Netherlands:

The Act on withholding tax on wage earners arriving from abroad taxes wage income, and section 2 defines the beneficiary as a wage earner arriving from abroad on four cumulative conditions, which in the current consolidated text are: becoming fully liable to tax in Finland when the work begins; monetary wages of at least 5,800 euro a month throughout the employment; work requiring special expertise; and not having been fully liable to tax in Finland in the five calendar years before the year the work began. Act 1144/2025 removed the condition of not being a Finnish citizen for work beginning on or after 1 January 2026.

That statute nowhere mentions entrepreneurs or business activity.

The mechanism is built entirely on a wage-earning employment relationship, so a person who establishes their own enterprise under section 80 falls outside it, unless they pay themselves wages at the threshold and satisfy all four conditions.

Under section 3 of the current consolidated text, the withholding tax is 25% on wages paid from 1 January 2026, collected as a final tax through deduction by the employer when the wages are paid.

On the second tier, the Finnish tax administration gives the residence line: full liability arises where Finland is the permanent home, or where the stay exceeds six continuous months — and the page states expressly that no importance is attached to the reason for presence, so the purpose of residence does not alter the calculation.

A tax resident is taxed on worldwide income, a non-resident only on Finnish-source income; and a stay of exactly six months still leaves a person non-resident.

One joining must be stated: a section 80 permit is granted as a continuous permit, so a holder remaining beyond six months would become fully liable under general law — but no text opened says that; it is inferred from two independent provisions.

Read this cell within its scope: no tax concession attaches to a section 80 permit, no separate tax reporting duty falls on its holder, and no day-count threshold appears anywhere in the Aliens Act

The Act says almost nothing about money and contains no fee schedule: the schedule sits in Ministry of the Interior Decree 1336/2025 on the Immigration Service's fees in 2026, in force from 1 January 2026 to the end of 2026.

Under the decree's annex, a first start-up entrepreneur permit costs 650 euro online and 800 euro on paper; an extended permit 230 euro online and 430 euro on paper; and a long-stay D visa application 95 euro online and 120 euro on paper.

What the Act does impose is four obligations that cost money without carrying a price, and leaving them out of a budget omits a substantial part of it. First and heaviest: Business Finland's statement.

It must accompany the application, it rests on that agency's discretion under section 80 a, and under section 80(2) it must have been issued no more than four months before the residence application is lodged — so the cost of preparing the case for that statement is a separate item, standing ahead of the residence application itself, and may have to be incurred again if the residence application is not lodged within those four months.

Second: personal attendance. Section 84 provides that processing time begins only when the applicant attends the authority in person to give biometric identifiers under section 60 d, so travel and attendance are mandatory rather than optional.

Third: the account of means of support under section 39, which the applicant must themselves prepare and present. Fourth: the residence permit card under section 33 a, issued for the permit's period of validity and in the uniform European Union format, so every renewal means a new card is issued.