Who has to take YEL
YEL applies if all of these are true:
- You are between 18 and 67
- Your self-employed activity has continued for more than four months
- The estimated value of your work input exceeds €9,208 per year (2025 threshold, adjusted annually)
If you meet those conditions, YEL is mandatory. It is not a product you can decline in favour of something cheaper.
The four-month rule means genuinely brief activity is outside the system. It does not mean you get four months of full-time work for free and then decide.
Work input, not turnover
The most misunderstood part of YEL is what the threshold measures.
YEL income (YEL-työtulo) is the monetary value of your work input: what it would cost to hire somebody else to do the work you do. It is not your turnover, and it is not your profit.
In practice, for a full-time courier the value of the work input is broadly what a person doing that job would be paid. It can be higher than your profit in a bad year and lower than your turnover in a good one, because it is measuring the work, not the result.
Setting it honestly matters. An unrealistically low YEL income is something insurers and, ultimately, the authorities can challenge and adjust.
The six-month deadline
You must take out YEL within six months of starting business activity.
Missing this is common and expensive. Contributions are still owed from the date the obligation began, so a late arrangement means paying backdated contributions in a lump, and a neglect surcharge can be applied on top.
If you have been trading for more than six months without YEL, the answer is to arrange it now rather than hoping it goes unnoticed. The cost only grows.
What it costs, and the new entrepreneur discount
The contribution is a percentage of your chosen YEL income, with a slightly higher rate from age 53. The percentage is set annually and sits in the mid-twenties.
New entrepreneurs get a 22% discount on contributions for the first four years of self-employment. The discount applies once; splitting a business or restarting does not reset it.
Two things soften the cost more than people expect:
- YEL contributions are deductible. You can deduct them against your business income or your personal income, which reduces the effective cost meaningfully.
- You can pay in instalments through the year rather than in one payment.
Why the income level is not just about pension
Your YEL income is the basis for a lot more than your eventual pension:
- Kela sickness allowance if you cannot work
- Parental leave allowances
- Rehabilitation allowance
- Entitlement within the entrepreneurs' unemployment funds
This is the real argument against declaring the lowest number you can justify. A courier who sets YEL income at the minimum and then breaks an arm discovers that the daily allowance is calculated from that same minimum. The saving on contributions was small; the shortfall when it mattered was not.
Set it at the honest value of your work. That is both the rule and, in this case, the self-interested choice.
Light entrepreneurs are not exempt
Working through an invoicing service (kevytyrittäjä) does not remove the YEL obligation. The service handles invoicing and withholds tax, which leads a lot of people to assume pension cover is included. It generally is not.
If you invoice through a service and your work input passes the threshold, YEL is yours to arrange. Check rather than assume, because this is one of the most frequent gaps we see when people move from an invoicing service to their own toiminimi and the missing years surface.
What happens if you skip it
Unpaid YEL does not quietly disappear. The obligation can be established retroactively, contributions collected for the period concerned, and a neglect surcharge added.
Separately, you accrue no pension and no earnings-related security for the years you were uninsured. That part cannot be bought back later.
If cost is the obstacle, the conversation to have is about setting the right YEL income and payment schedule, not about avoiding the insurance.