What a courier can deduct in Finland

An expense is deductible if it is a genuine cost of earning your business income. That is the whole principle. Everything else is detail about proportion and timing.

Two consequences follow:

• If something is used for both work and private life, you deduct the business share, not the whole cost.
• If you cannot evidence it, you cannot claim it. No receipt, no deduction.

Vero does not need to prove an expense was private. If it is challenged, you need to be able to show it was business.

The common list, most to least significant:

• Fuel or charging electricity for the vehicle you deliver with
• Vehicle maintenance, servicing and repairs, in proportion to business use
• A bicycle, e-bike or scooter used for deliveries
• Thermal or courier bags and carrying equipment
• Your phone, and the business share of your phone subscription
• Phone accessories that are genuinely for work: mounts, power banks, weatherproof cases
• Protective and high-visibility clothing specific to the work
• YEL contributions
• Business insurance
• Bookkeeping and accounting fees
• Bank charges on a business account

Bookkeeping fees are worth a particular mention because people forget them: they support the business entirely, there is no private-use split, and if you are VAT-registered the VAT on the invoice is fully reclaimable.

Equipment with a VAT-exclusive purchase price of €1,200 or less counts as a small acquisition (pienhankinta) and can be deducted in full in the year you buy it, provided it is mainly used for business.

Above that, or for items with a long useful life, the cost is depreciated over several years rather than deducted at once.

For a phone specifically: if business use is under 50%, only half the purchase price is deductible. If you are VAT-registered, the VAT is reclaimable in the same proportion as the business-use share.

A practical consequence: buying a €1,100 phone and a €900 e-bike in the same year gives you two full deductions in that year. The same purchases split as one €2,400 item would not.

This one costs couriers real money because the rule is counterintuitive.

For passenger cars, Finnish VAT rules are strict to the point of being absolute: any private use at all, including ordinary commuting, removes the entire right to deduct VAT on the car's purchase and running costs. Not proportionally. Entirely.

The only exceptions are cars used for taxi work, driving instruction, or resale and rental.

So if you use your own car for deliveries and also to visit friends, you cannot reclaim VAT on the car, the fuel, or the repairs.

What you can still do is deduct the business share of running costs for income tax purposes, which is a different and much more forgiving calculation. You are giving up the VAT deduction, not the income tax one.

Bicycles, e-bikes and scooters are not caught by this rule in the same way, which is one reason the economics of delivering by bike look better than they first appear.

To claim vehicle costs you need a driving log (ajopäiväkirja) recording, for each business trip: the date, start and end point, the purpose of the journey, and the kilometres driven.

With that in place you can claim either the actual costs apportioned to business use, or the standard mileage deduction, which was €0.55 per kilometre for 2026. Rates are set annually, so confirm the current one before relying on it.

Without a log, Vero can disallow the vehicle deduction outright. This is the single most commonly lost deduction among couriers, and it is lost to admin rather than to the rules.

Fill it in as you work. Reconstructing a year of trips in February is both miserable and unconvincing.

Things that are regularly claimed and should not be:

• Ordinary clothing, even if you only wear it while working. Protective and branded work-specific gear is fine; jeans and trainers are not.
• Your own everyday meals while working. Being out of the house does not make lunch a business cost.
• Traffic fines and parking tickets. Explicitly non-deductible, however incurred.
• Travel between home and a fixed place of work, treated as commuting rather than business travel.
• The private-use share of anything mixed, which has to be carved out honestly.

Overclaiming is a poor trade. A disallowed deduction can bring a tax increase (veronkorotus) with it, and it invites attention to everything else on the return.

Photograph every receipt the day you get it. Thermal paper fades, often within a few months, and a blank slip is not a record.

Photos need to be sharp with the amounts fully legible. Compressed or blurry images are not valid accounting records.

Records must be kept for six years. If you send receipts to a bookkeeper as you go, that retention is handled for you, but the originals remain your responsibility until they are captured.