In this blog, we present to you our ultimate guide to salaries in Finland.
Over the course of the few years we have been publishing this blog, we have written about salaries in Finland several times. Those are normally the blogs that attract the most attention.
Interest in salaries, understandably, is intense. This is visible also in the number of presentations we’ve given about salaries to different organizations.
Due to this interest and in the spirit of making Finnish salary information easier for you to navigate, we decided to write a blog post that works as the Finnwards guide to salaries in Finland.
In this blog post, we give you a tour of our previous blog posts and present some new information on pay differences. Most importantly, however, we tell you about a new free salary resource we have made available to you.
Getting ready to sign your first Finnish employment contract? Be better prepared by taking our online course “Mini-course on Finnish Employment Contracts”. You can find it in our online store.
Our blogs as a guide to salaries in Finland
In our blogs, we’ve approached the topic of salaries in Finland from many angles.
Initially, we started by explaining that there’s no minimum wage legislation in Finland. Base salaries here are to a large extent tied to collective agreements. We also explained what collective agreements are.
In one blog, we introduced you to Finnish salary systems.
We did a two-part series on Finnish salary levels. In the first part, we talked about Finnish salary levels in general. We also talked about the salary levels of generally common professions in Finland. We also talked about the connection between education level and salaries.
In the second part, we discussed salary levels in the professions that are common among the foreign-born population in Finland. In this blog post, we touched on the issue of discrimination.
We do, however, have a separate blog about pay discrimination. In that, we discuss so-called pay surveys. We propose that in addition to using them to battle gender-based pay discrimination they could also be used to battle all kinds of pay discrimination.
Later on, we added to the salary-level series by discussing regional differences in salary levels as well as intra-industry variance in salaries. This blog post also touched upon the pay gap between women and men.
We’ve looked specifically at private-sector salaries and wages in Finland. We’ve also looked at pay differences between the private and municipal sectors in Finland. We’ve also published a blog on management salaries in Finland.
In order to help you determine whether Finnish salaries are high or low in a global context, in one blog we compared Finnish salaries to those elsewhere in Europe.
We’ve also discussed the salary expectations highly-educated Finnish employees have. We also told you what they are actually faced with during their careers. In this blog post, we also talked about pay transparency.
The issue of pay transparency, however, warranted its own blog post in April of 2021. Then, Helsingin Sanomat reported that the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health was planning legislative changes to promote pay transparency in Finland. We’ll get back to this a little later on in this blog.
After we originally published this blog in November 2021, we added other salary-related blogs to our collection. In this one, we discuss management salaries in Finland. And in this one, we discuss the effects of inflation on salary gains in Finland.
Additional blogs mentioning salaries
In addition to the blogs that have salary issues as their main topic, we also have blogs where salaries are mentioned more in passing. These do provide, however, additional interesting information on salaries in Finland. Here are some of them.
For example, in our blog about workers deemed to be critical workers during the pandemic, we discussed their salary levels. We left it for you to decide whether they are compensated properly for being critical workers.
We also have a blog about women’s and men’s income levels in Finland. Income naturally also includes salaries.
In some of our blogs discussing recruitment and labor shortage issues, we’ve also mentioned the role of salaries in at least some recruitment problems. We did so, for example, here.
New information about the gender pay gap in Finland
As we already mentioned, we discussed the Finnish government’s attempts to increase pay transparency already in April of this year.
This issue has been in the news again lately. That’s because the group tasked to prepare the necessary changes to the Act on Equality between Women and Men released its final report on November 15, 2021.
In this blog, we won’t go into the specifics of the proposed changes. These include, for example, the legal requirement to make the pay survey data available to the whole personnel. The changes are obviously interesting as are the opposing statements included in the report.
However, for our purposes today, the report also includes interesting new information about the gender pay gap in Finland. This information is based on the analysis of Statistics Finland. In their analysis, they used their extensive data on Finnish salaries and wages and on the employees who receive those salaries. Statistics Finland hasn’t published this analysis elsewhere as they did it specifically for this report.
The new results
In their analysis, Statistics Finland compared full-time salaries between comparable jobs and comparable employees in comparable locations and sectors.
They found that the average pay difference between men and women in the Finnish labor market was 5.8 %. This difference was in total gross earnings. Gross earnings include, for example, overtime pay. Only taking into account earnings for regular working hours, the difference is 5.2 % in favor of men.
The average difference in total gross earnings between men and women in the same job in the same company was 4.4 %. For the earnings of regular working hours, it was 3.9 %. The differences were slightly smaller when looking within the same operational unit.
The difference in pay between men and women in the same or similar jobs is larger in the private sector than in the public sector.
In the private sector, the difference in pay in the same profession is on average 7.4 % in gross earnings. In earnings from regular working hours, it was 6.8 %.
When men and women are working in the same company in the same profession, the difference in their gross salary is 6 %. It’s 5.4 % in their pay for regular working hours.
Within the same operational unit, the difference in the gross salary of men and women is, on average, 5.6 %. For regular working hours, the difference is about 5 %.
In the public sector, the average difference in gross salaries for men and women in the same profession is 2 %. The difference is 1.5 % for salaries for regular working hours.
The difference gets smaller when looking at salaries for women and men in the same job in the same company. Then, men’s gross earnings are 1.5 % bigger than women’s. Their earnings for regular working hours is 1 %.
For men and women working in the same job in the same operational unit in the public sector, the difference in gross salary is on average 1.3 %. The difference in for regular working hours is less than 1 %.
Our ultimate guide to salaries in Finland: a new free resource!
In all of the talks we’ve given to internationals in Finland about salary and in some of our blogs, we’ve mentioned the Statistics Finland salary database. In some of the talks, we’ve also shown how to use that database.
We have now published a completely FREE short online video course on how to find your salary range in Finland. This online video course is available for free, as we said, in our online store.
In that video course, we compare the Duunitori salary tool and the information openly available Statistics Finland database.
We show you specifically what type of information you can learn from the Statistics Finland database. We show how that is useful in determining your salary range for your job application. You can also use this tool to see where your current salary fits in with others in a similar profession. The database has information about men’s and women’s salaries so at least a cursory examination of salary differences is also possible.
Go to our free online course to learn how to find out this information yourself. This course together with our blogs is the ultimate guide to salaries in Finland!
Make sure you know what you are signing. Enroll in this short and inexpensive online course “Mini-course on Finnish Employment Contracts”. You can find it in our online store.
The mission of Finnwards is to help internationals thrive in their life abroad. We provide coaching, consulting, and training services that help them do just that. Check out our Services for Businesses and Organizations or our Expat Inspiration Catalog for more information! While we serve internationals and their employers all over the world, our specialty is Finland. With our help, internationals can build a uniquely Finnish life for themselves and their family. In addition to the coaching, consulting and training services, we also offer a wide selection of self-guided online courses about Finland. Contact us and let us help you or your employees succeed in their professional and private lives abroad and in Finland.
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