How To Search Finland Company Registry Data For Free

Finland runs one of the most open company registers in Europe. You can search any company for free, pull an official register extract for free, and download the whole dataset through a free, daily-updated open-data API — no captcha, no account, no per-document toll. Which makes the one thing Finland does lock down all the more telling: beneficial ownership. This is a clear-eyed guide to what the Finnish Trade Register publishes, how much (or how little) it costs, what its financials actually contain, and where the open door quietly closes.

Where Finnish company data is published

Finland splits the work between two bodies that act as one front door. The Finnish Patent and Registration Office (PRH) maintains the Trade Register (Kaupparekisteri), the legally authoritative record of companies. The PRH and the Finnish Tax Administration jointly run the Business Information System (BIS / YTJ) — a single notification channel that registers a company with both authorities at once and issues the all-important Business ID (Y-tunnus) that follows the company everywhere. The Y-tunnus runs seven digits, a hyphen and a check digit (e.g. 1234567-8); the Finnish VAT number is the same digits prefixed with FI and no hyphen (e.g. FI12345678). See our guide to VAT number formats by country.

On top of that sit the access services, and this is where Finland’s openness shows:

• YTJ (ytj.fi) — free search of basic company details (name, Business ID, legal form, line of business, status, LEI).
• Virre (virre.prh.fi) — PRH’s register service, which hands you an electronic Trade Register extract free of charge and lets you check, also free, whether a company has filed its financial statements.
• PRH Open Data (avoindata.prh.fi) — a genuine, free machine interface, updated once a day, covering basic details and digital financial-statement data.
• Register of Beneficial Owners — held by the PRH but, unlike everything above, not openly public.

The principle is written into Finnish law: the register is public, and any person may request information about any registered company without demonstrating a legal interest or giving a reason. That is the opposite of the friction you hit in jurisdictions that gate or meter access — compare it with our guide to Luxembourg, where the register added a captcha to stop bulk access. For the cross-border picture, see our guide to searching company information across the EU.

How many companies are registered — and how many actually trade

As of 9 January 2026, the Finnish Trade Register held 728,137 businesses, up from 666,696 three years earlier — steady growth of roughly 4% a year. But the headline number hides a very Finnish quirk in its composition.

Two categories that aren’t operating businesses in the ordinary sense make up a huge share of the register. Private traders (sole traders) number 275,702, and housing companies and joint-stock property companies together exceed 110,000 — these are the entities through which Finns hold residential and commercial real estate, a structural feature with few parallels elsewhere. Strip those out and the genuine corporate population is dominated by the private limited company (osakeyhtiö, Oy): 309,714, the standard vehicle for startups, SMEs and foreign-owned subsidiaries.

Public limited companies (Oyj): a small, well-defined club

Unlike many registers, Finland publishes a clean per-form count — so the “how many public companies?” question has a real answer: 296 public limited companies (julkinen osakeyhtiö, Oyj) as of January 2026, against 309,714 private Oy. The Oyj is the only form that can offer shares to the public; it carries an €80,000 minimum share capital and a mandatory audit. The private Oy, by contrast, has had no minimum capital requirement since the 2019 reform — which is why many recently formed Oy show nominal or zero share capital on their extract.

Three-year dynamics: a growing register, a record bankruptcy wave

The register keeps expanding — net additions run well ahead of exits — even as Finland works through its worst run of business failures in a generation. Both trends are real, and they are not contradictory: a small, churn-heavy SME base can add new companies and lose old ones at the same time.

The failure side is the harder story. According to Statistics Finland, 3,906 companies went bankrupt in 2025 — the highest figure since 1996, up 12% on 2024. The wave began in 2023 and has averaged about 3,600 a year since, against roughly 2,700 a year through the 2010s. Construction was the epicentre (768 failures in 2025) but peaked in 2023; through 2025 the trend turned upward across almost every other sector, dragged by high interest rates and near-zero growth. Most of the failed companies were SMEs — around 14,300 jobs were affected in 2025.

What is free, what costs money, and how much

Finland is one of the cheapest jurisdictions in Europe to verify a company, because the official answer to most questions is “free.” The paid tier is narrow.

Exactly which data points are free

Without paying anything, you get: company name, Business ID (Y-tunnus), legal form, registered office and contact details, line of business, registration status, the tax registers the company belongs to, its LEI, the board of directors and managing director, persons entitled to sign for the company, the date each entry was registered, and confirmation of whether financial statements have been filed. The free Virre extract is the official, citable snapshot — not a watered-down preview. The open-data interface adds the same basics plus digital financial-statement figures, machine-readable and refreshed daily (note it excludes private traders and never includes email or phone).

The genuinely paid items are narrow: specific underlying documents and certain certificates ordered through Virre, priced on the PRH tariff. The one true gate is beneficial ownership. Where to get each: identity, filings and extracts at ytj.fi and virre.prh.fi; machine-readable data at avoindata.prh.fi; and a single normalised feed of all of it, cross-referenced with 200+ other countries, from a commercial provider.

Financials: who files, and what the accounts contain

Finnish disclosure is broad and the data is openly public. Limited companies (Oy and Oyj), co-operatives, and — under conditions — partnerships and branches of foreign companies must file annual financial statements with the Trade Register. Filing must happen within eight months of the financial year-end, and it is free if filed on time through the ytj.fi online service; miss the deadline and limited companies and co-operatives face a late-submission fee whose size scales with the delay. Registered financial-statement documents are public by law and available through Virre, with the digital (iXBRL) figures also flowing into the open-data API.

Two practical points the headline rules don’t tell you:

• Compliance is high but not universal. The PRH has publicly flagged tens of thousands of companies (around 35,000 in a recent reminder) that had still not filed on time — and persistent non-filers can be removed from the register or ordered into liquidation. So “should have filed” and “has filed” aren’t the same; check the filing status, which Virre shows for free.
• Most small companies aren’t audited. A company must appoint an auditor only if it exceeds at least two of three thresholds — balance sheet €100,000, net turnover €200,000, and an average of 3 employees — in two consecutive years (or if its articles require one). Listed companies and large entities are always audited and report under IFRS; the long tail of micro-Oy file unaudited accounts under Finnish standards.

Shareholders and beneficial owners: the one closed door

Finland is transparent about control and opaque about ownership — which is the reverse of what people assume from such an open register.

• Directors and signatories are public. The Trade Register names the board, the managing director, and everyone entitled to sign for the company, each with the date their authority was registered — exactly what you need to confirm who could bind the company on a given day.
• Limited-company shareholders are not in the public register. An Oy’s board must keep an up-to-date shareholder register (osakasluettelo) under the Limited Liability Companies Act — but that list lives with the company, not in the Trade Register. So you cannot read current ownership of a private Oy from the public record. (Partners of partnerships, by contrast, are disclosed.)
• Ultimate ownership runs through the gated UBO register. Companies must file their beneficial owners — natural persons holding more than 25% of shares or votes, or otherwise in control — with the PRH’s Register of Beneficial Owners, but that register is the one part of the system the public cannot freely browse.

What’s changing in 2026–2027

Two waves of change are tightening the register — one domestic, one EU-wide.

Mandatory e-filing and an annual confirmation duty

Under the reformed Trade Register Act, from 2026 companies must file notifications and applications online (private traders, associations and foundations excepted). From 2027, limited companies and co-operatives must verify their registered details every year — a standing confirmation duty — and from 2028 the PRH can levy a negligence fee (€300, doubled to €600 for an Oyj or European company) on those who don’t. The intended effect is cleaner, fresher data: fewer stale addresses, fewer ghost directors, fewer companies drifting out of contact with the register.

The EU AML Package harmonises UBO access by 2027

Finland’s restricted beneficial-owners register is part of the EU-wide reset that followed the 2022 court ruling. The single AML rulebook — the AMLR (Regulation (EU) 2024/1624) and AMLD6 (Directive (EU) 2024/1640) — fully applies from 10 July 2027, with the new EU Anti-Money-Laundering Authority (AMLA) already operational in Frankfurt since July 2025. It standardises the “legitimate interest” test, keeps full access for authorities and obliged entities, presumes access for journalists and AML-focused NGOs, and interconnects national UBO registers. For compliance teams the read is the same as elsewhere in the EU: build your onboarding for a legitimate-interest world, not an open-register one — and see our explainer on what AMLD6 actually changes.

How to access Finnish data at scale

For a single company, YTJ or Virre is instant and free. The difference from most of Europe is that Finland doesn’t punish you for needing volume: the open-data API is free and refreshed daily, and the PRH explicitly offers bulk transfers to businesses and authorities. There is no captcha wall and no metered per-lookup charge for the basics.

Even with an open API, most cross-border teams still reach for a provider — because the job is rarely “get Finnish data” in isolation. It’s “get Finland in the same schema as the Nordics and 40 other European registers,” joined to financials and ownership. That’s why Finland sits in our directory of official company registries across 44 European countries, alongside our deep-dives on neighbouring Norway and Denmark. For where APIs exist and where they don’t, see our global registry-API map.

What the register won’t tell you

Open is not the same as complete. The honest list of blind spots is what separates a thorough Finnish due-diligence file from a false sense of security.

None of this makes the register weak — it makes it a primary source that still needs structuring and supplementing. The fix is registry-sourced data delivered already resolved, refreshed daily, and joined to the ownership and financial layers the public services keep apart.

Frequently asked questions