The Finnish government has made some changes to residence permits for employed migrants in the country in a bid to regulate labor migration to the country and fill areas suffering from labor shortages. They are in line with an EU directive that will be applied in all member states by May 2026.

The changes coming into force on June 11 could affect as many as 51,149 holders of employment residence permits, according to data supplied by the Finnish government in September 2024. However, a spokesperson for the Finnish Ministry of Employment told InfoMigrants in an email that the exact number is hard to give since economic cycles would dictate how great an impact the changes could have and the numbers involved.

According to a survey by the VATT Institute for Economic Research, looking at periods of unemployment between 2017 and 2021 in Finland, the ministry told InfoMigrants, the government estimates that there will be approximately 2,750 notifications of termination of contract annually.

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New rules

According to the ministry, the new rules are intended to "broaden the scope of the right to work under a residence permit for an employed person… and to facilitate the re-employment of migrants." The government adde it wants to make sure that "unemployment in itself shall not constitute a reason for withdrawing a single permit provided that the total period of unemployment does not exceed three months during the period of validity of a single permit, or six months if the third country national has been a holder of the single permit for more than two years."

The Finnish government clarified by email, in answer to a question from InfoMigrants, that prior to April 2023, there was no legislation governing how long a person had to be unemployed before their permit could be withdrawn. After April 2023, the Finnish government had a practice of extending a three-month grace period to candidates who became unemployed before withdrawing their employment-related residence permit. The new legislative amendment thus "clarifies" the position for residence permit holders, confirmed a spokesperson for the Finnish Migration Service.

According to a press release from the Finnish migration service, the changes include the extension of the so-called "protection period" in which someone can seek new employment. The protection periods have been extended from three months to six months for holders of EU Blue Cards and specialists and those who have had a work-based residence permit for longer than two years, as well as senior and middle enterprise managers. A period of three months has been granted to other holders of work-based residence permits

Those who have a normal residence permit for an employed person, as well as those who have been completing research in Finland, or have just completed a degree, or have a residence permit as an athlete, will now have three months to find a new job if their current employment contract ends.

The press release underlines that before this legislative change, a residence permit for an employed person only granted the right to work in the specific sectors for which the residence permit was issued.

Now however, you can also use the three-month protection period to apply for work in fields defined as sectors affected by the national labor shortage.

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Jobs facing labor shortages

According to the Finnish labor force barometer page, which you can find if you type in tyovoimabarometri.fi into an internet search engine, the greatest labor shortages are currently in the nursing and health care sectors, followed by generalist medical practitioners, early childhood educators, software developers, welders and flame cutters, security guards, psychologists, earthmoving and related plant operators and social work and counselling professionals.

Finnish Lapland has the greatest vacancy rate at 4.6 percent and 3,326 open jobs as of April 2025. The region of Ahvenanmaa has just 441 open jobs but a vacancy rate of 3.2 percent. You will also find on this barometer website a list of the professions that are open in each region, so that you can target your employment applications to the region where your skills are being asked for.

There is a specific form on the Finland Migration Service website to apply for a residence permit if you are coming to Finland to work for a Finnish employer, or an employer operating in Finland. You must have confirmed employment before you apply for this permit.

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Hiring foreign workers

The Finnish migration service warns that residence permits for employed people may be subject to labor market testing. That means, states the website, that the authorities must establish that there is no available labor force within Finland or the EU for the work in question, before bringing in a person from outside the country or the EU / EEA.

Once your employer has obtained a permit to employ you, you can apply for a D visa as well as a residence permit. The D visa, states the website, allows you to travel to Finland immediately after you have been issued with a residence permit.

A first permit will cost an applicant 590 euros and an extension of an application online will cost 170 euros. For paper applications, a first permit costs 750 euros and an extension of that permit costs 430 euros.

You cannot start working in Finland without a residence permit for an employed person. There is currently a slight backlog operating on the system. On June 1, the Finnish migration service reported that there were 4,436 applications for a residence permit for an employed person being processed or waiting for processing.

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Backlog in processing

Since the beginning of 2025, a total of 2,395 applications for a first residence permit have been submitted. The Finnish migration service has made a decision on 1,972 applications, 1,187 of which have been positive.

Almost a quarter of the decisions taken between May 19 and June 1 were taken within 14 days or less. 13.8 percent were taken between two weeks and a month and 61.6 percent were taken within 30 or more days.

The latest published migration data from the OECD for Finland is for 2022, although it was published at the end of 2024. According to the OECD, Finland received 40,000 new immigrants in 2022 on a long-term or permanent basis. This includes 19 percent of migrants from within the EU, 32 percent labor migrants and 41 percent family members, including accompanying family and 8 percent humanitarian migrants (either those who have been granted some form of special protection status, or those who are seeking to obtain it).

In that year, around 8,100 permits were issued to temporary and seasonal labor migrants. Russia, the Philippines and India were the top three nationalities of newcomers in 2022, stated the OECD.

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New laws could create more instability for migrants

The Finnish government believes that the changes to its laws will improve the conditions and clarity for migrants working in Finland. However, critics say that the protection period attached to residence permits is far too short to feasibly be able to find a new job in Finland, and that the new laws will just make migrants' lives more unstable.

In October 2024, InfoMigrants reported from a job fair where international job seekers said that the high level language requirements, even for low-paying and relatively unskilled jobs made finding work in Finland very hard.

One Moroccan applicant at a job fair in Finland’s central city Oulu said that he had applied for 250 jobs over the past two years and found that you really needed to speak fluent Finnish in order to find work.

Erna Bodström, a researcher at the Migration Institute of Finland told InfoMigrants in 2024, "The government is making these changes [to migration law] in small little packages, most of which may not seem very consequential individually. But when you look at the whole picture, you can see that together they make it much harder to both establish a stable life here in Finland and come to Finland in the first place."

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Even Finns might need six months or more to find a new job

Another recruitment expert, Anna-Maija Västilä, who helps Finnish companies recruit talent, told InfoMigrants that a long-standing problem for the private sector is the lengthy process of getting work permits for their international hires, which is the responsibility of the Finnish Immigration Service, known as Migri.

Västilä thought that companies might be "less willing to hire foreigners as a result.”

"The hiring process in Finland takes a long time," Västilä says. "Companies can have up to five interview rounds. So, it's really not possible to find work fast, especially in your own field."

Anecdotally, many Finns seem to agree that they need more than six months to find a new job. One Ghanaian-born national, Lukumanu Iddrisu, who has been living and working in Finland for the last ten years and now has Finnish citizenship, said he believed migrants have to “go the extra mile” if they want to make it in Finland. "The job market is not as easy to penetrate for them," Iddrisu told InfoMigrants. "You have to be ambitious, humble and motivated to start somewhere, even if it’s a low-level task or job."

Another hurdle facing candidates with non-Finnish names are reported instances of institutional racism. A 2022 study by the University of Helsinki found that employers tended to prefer Finnish applicants over ethnic candidates.

"If you had a foreign name, especially one that sounds non-European, you typically wouldn't be called back for an interview," French researcher Gwenaëlle Bauvois told InfoMigrants. "The study clearly showed that discrimination against immigrant job seekers is a widespread phenomena in Finland."

In an email to InfoMigrants, the Finnish government said that in short, it believed the amended legislation "aims to keep third country national workers in Finland and give them the possibility of finding a new job in case the previous ends unexpectedly or without prior knowledge."