Insuring an employee

Your employee may be a freelancer, which means that he or she works for you simultaneously both as a self-employed person and as an employee. For pension purposes, he or she is still considered to be either a self-employed person or an employee. A freelancer is considered to be a self-employed person if he or she works without being in a private or public sector employment relationship. In that case, he or she takes out YEL insurance for him- or herself just like other entrepreneurs. However, if the work carried out by him or her meets the criteria of an employment relationship, i.e. he or she works for another for compensation under their direction and supervision, he or she is your employee. In that case, you must arrange his or her pension cover.

Insure your summer employee and occational employee in the same way as all of your other employees aged between 17 and 67. Follow these steps: 

• If you already have TyEL insurance, report your summer employee’s personal and earnings data to the Incomes Register, using the pension policy number of your TyEL insurance.
• If you do not have TyEL insurance, arrange your summer employee’s pension cover in the Palkka.fi service.
• If you are an accounting firm user, take care of your insurance matters in the online service for accounting firms.

Pension cover is also your responsibility when you hire a foreign employee to come work in Finland. The only situations where you are not responsible for the pension cover of your foreign employee are when your employee comes as a so-called posted worker from an EU or EEA country, Switzerland or a so-called social security agreement country, and if he or she has a certificate of posting, i.e. an A1 certificate, granted by an earnings-related pension authority. If your foreign employee is not a posted employee, insure him or her with TyEL insurance just as you would your Finnish employees. Read more about insurance provision for expatriate employment.

This is how you insure your employee posted to Finland from abroad 

• If you represent a foreign employer and post your employee to work in Finland, take out TyEL insurance for him or her.  
• If you post your employee to Finland from an EU or EEA country, Switzerland or a social security agreement country, take care of your employee’s pension cover in accordance with the practices in place in your country.  
• If you post your employee to Finland from a non-agreement country, i.e. a country with which Finland does not have a social security agreement, only insure him or her if they intend to work in Finland for more than 2 years. 

You may also apply for an exemption from the obligation to insure from the Finnish Centre for Pensions (etk.fi).

In some cases, the pension cover of a person working for you is nobody’s responsibility. This is the case, for example, when the person is an auditor or Board member and you pay him or her a fee. However, you can still take out voluntary TyEL insurance for him or her. This may be the case with, for example, auditors or Board members. However, if the employee is in an employment relationship with you, instead of voluntary TyEL insurance, add the remuneration for the employee’s position of trust to your statutory TyEL insurance.