National Jealousy Day: the day Finland publishes everyone’s income

National Jealousy Day is the morning the Finnish Tax Administration publishes what every adult in the country earned, and anybody who fancies a look can go and have one.

It is not a holiday and it is not called that by anybody official. It is one day in November when a quirk of Finnish transparency law turns into a national spectator sport, and it is the single hardest thing to explain to visitors who have just worked out that nobody here will ask what you do for a living.

The date almost every English article gets wrong

Search for this and you will be told it happens on 1 November. It does not.

The Tax Administration finishes assessing every individual taxpayer by the end of October, and publishes in the first half of November. For the 2024 tax year the date was 12 November 2025. For the 2025 tax year it is 12 November 2026.

The 1 November version comes from a run of international news coverage in 2018 that has been copied ever since. If you are planning to be anywhere near a Finnish newsroom for it, use the Tax Administration’s own published date rather than the one in the search results.

What is actually published

For every individual taxpayer resident in Finland, the public record contains:

• Name
• Year of birth
• Municipality of residence
• Earned income subject to state taxation
• Capital income subject to state taxation
• Income subject to municipal taxation
• Income tax and municipal tax
• Total imposed taxes and charges
• Back taxes owed, or refund due

That is enough to work out roughly what your neighbour makes, what your boss makes, and whether the man who sold you a sauna stove is doing better out of it than you are.

What is not published

Quite a lot, and this is where most summaries go vague.

The figures are totals rather than itemised. There is no breakdown of where the earned income came from, no employer, no job title, no address beyond the municipality. Most non-taxable income is absent altogether. Someone living on assets structured so that little of it is taxable income in Finland will look considerably poorer on this list than they are.

So it is a good snapshot of taxable income and a poor one of wealth. The two get confused every single November.

You cannot look it up online

This is the part that surprises people who assume it is a searchable website.

It is not. Public income tax data is available at customer terminals in Tax Administration offices, or by telephoning and asking. There is no public database to browse from your sofa. If you want to know what somebody earned you have to physically go somewhere, or ring up and say the name out loud to a civil servant.

That friction is doing a lot of quiet work. The information is completely public and mildly inconvenient to get, which turns out to be a different thing from completely public and one click away.

The law behind it

The governing statute is the Act on the Public Disclosure and Confidentiality of Tax Information, laki verotustietojen julkisuudesta ja salassapidosta 1346/1999, in force since 1 January 2000. The Tax Administration has a general duty of confidentiality over tax data, and this act carves out the categories that are public anyway.

The logic is the ordinary Nordic one. Taxation is an exercise of public power, public power is auditable, and an income distribution nobody can see is one nobody can argue about. It is the same instinct that makes Finnish public bodies publish almost everything by default, applied to the number most countries treat as more private than a medical record.

The journalists, and the court case

Every year the Tax Administration releases the data to news organisations for journalistic purposes, which is why the lists of top earners appear within hours rather than weeks. Reporters have traditionally gathered at the tax office on the morning of publication, and the resulting coverage is the reason anybody outside Finland has heard of this at all.

It has been litigated. In December 2022 the Supreme Administrative Court held that taxpayers have no right to oppose the electronic disclosure of their tax information to the media.

There is one narrow exception, read out of the GDPR. An individual can object to their data being passed to the media on grounds specific to their own situation, such as health, personal safety or the ability to practise their profession. It is worth being precise about what that achieves. It stops the bulk transfer to newsrooms. It does not make the information private. The data stays public, and anyone can still ask the Tax Administration for it.

Where the name came from

No Finnish institution calls it National Jealousy Day. The phrase was popularised by the New York Times, and Finnish media and Finns themselves cheerfully adopted it, in the way a country will when a foreigner comes up with a decent name for something it had never bothered naming.

The Finnish framing is drier. It is simply the day the tax information becomes public, and the mild national embarrassment about enjoying it so much is itself one of the more Finnish things about it.

Also read

For more on how Finland organises itself around money and fairness, read about the Finns who left for America and the celebrities who turned out to be Finnish.