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How to report the selling of a home, real estate or securities in MyTax

This guide contains instructions for informing the Tax Administration of a sale of residential property, securities, corporate stocks and other assets immediately when you have closed the contract of sale.

When you inform the Tax Administration of these transactions while the current year is still ongoing, you can also submit an application for a revised tax card or request a calculation for tax prepayment. This means that you can pre-pay the taxes that will later be assessed on the capital gains you receive from the sale. You can do so by making a prepayment or by raising the withholding rate on your tax card for wage income.

Although the selling of one’s own home is almost always tax-exempt, you must still submit a report on it.

If you opt for not informing the Tax Administration during the year when you make the sale, you must add the information on the above transactions to your pre-completed tax return next spring. Read more about checking and making corrections to the pre-completed tax return

Do this

  • 1. Go to the Individual income tax section, select Tax card and prepayments 2024 and click Tax cards and prepayments. Scroll down to Prepayments.

    Select the tax year concerned.

    Click either the Request tax prepayment or Change the prepayment button, depending on whether the Tax Administration has already prepared a prepayment calculation for you for the year concerned.

  • 2. The request has 6 different stages. You can see them in the breadcrumb trail on top. Please fill in the new or changed information when you proceed through the different stages.

    The first stage is Background information. Your taxpayer details appear.

  • 3. The Pre-completed income and deductions stage: If any other capital gains or capital losses have been reported previously, you can see your previous entries here. This is the stage where you should also enter the new sales or other transfers and dispositions of property.

    This stage also shows the amounts of your other income and deductions. Check them and make corrections if necessary.

  • 4. The Other income stage: If no previously reported capital gains or losses appeared during the previous stage, i.e. you had not entered any information on the selling of your property previously, this is the stage where you must do that.

    First, scroll down to Capital income. Then, select the type of property and assets you have sold.

  1. Select Yes at Profit from selling securities in order to enter information on sales of listed-company stocks, book-entry shares, or investment-fund shares.

    Fill in the fields as appropriate. Note: your purchases and sales of various securities cannot be fully itemised on the MyTax prepayment request. As a result, you must enter the sum totals of the securities’ purchase prices and selling prices. In the same way, enter the sum totals of your capital gains and capital losses. 

    Select Yes to enclose a specification on your securities trading that your bank has sent you. However, even if you enclose the specification, you must fill in the fields for purchase prices, selling prices, capital gains or capital losses.

    Indicate whether you want to pay tax prepayments or have the upcoming taxes to be taken into account in the form of a higher withholding rate on your tax card under Taxation. If you are entering information for the previous year (e.g. the current month is January, and you are entering the amounts relating to a sales transaction you made last November), prepayments will be calculated for you automatically, so the “Taxation” selection does not appear.

  1. If the property you sold was not securities, such as corporate stocks, select Yes at Capital gains or losses. Then click Add new transfer.

  2. First select the type of the property:

    • shares in a housing company or real estate company
    • real estate such as a house or a plot of land
    • virtual currencies (capital gains resulting from using or converting virtual currency)
    • other property including
      • shares based on time-sharing of a vacation home, shares of a golf course company
      • shares in a non-listed company
      • sales of machinery that you have used in a forestry operation.

    Then fill in the details requested.

    Scroll down the bar on the right to see all the sections.

  3. If you had co-owned the sold property together with someone else,

    • You must only enter a selling price that reflects your co-ownership (do not enter the full selling price that was received).
    • In the same way, when you fill in the other fields, enter your portions only, in proportion to the part you had co-owned, of the property’s acquisition cost, and of the property’s selling expenses.
    • If you have sold property together with your spouse, other partner, or someone else, it is important that this other person submits their own report to the Tax Administration to give details on the sale.
    • If you have sold all of the co-owned property’s portion that belonged to you, answer Yes to “Have you sold the entire apartment?”.
    • If you did not sell your personal portion entirely, answer No.  Enter the sold part as a fraction or as a percentage. For example, if you sold half of the part that you co-owned, you can enter 50% or ½.

  4. If the sales transaction is tax-free because it consisted of selling your home,

    • fill in Yes in answer to “Was the transferred apartment your own permanent home?”,
    • then fill in the details requested.
    • After you have submitted the completed request form, the Tax Administration will check that the terms for tax exemption are met. If it is established that the selling of your home is exempt from tax, we will send you a prepayment decision indicating “0” as the amount of tax. 

    Click OK.

  5. Answer Yes when the economic result of the sale is a capital loss not tax-deductible. No tax deduction is given if you sold the property for an “underprice” i.e. less than ¾ of the property’s fair market value at the date when you sold it.

    If you sold property other than the home where you had lived and you received a capital gain which is exempted from tax, answer Yes to “Are you reporting other tax-exempt capital gains?”. Examples of partially and fully tax-exempt gains: you sell property in circumstances linked to a transfer of a farm/company to the next generation; you sell a forest to the State of Finland so it will be converted into an area of national nature conservation.

    MyTax will not display these lines if you are reporting a sale of virtual currency

    Click OK to close.

  • 5. The Other deductions stage: You can submit other information on other deductions, if any.

    The Delivery method stage: You will receive a new prepayment decision in MyTax once your request has been processed. The instalments and their dates of payments are indicated on the decision letter.

  • 6. The Preview and send stage: Please re-check all the information. Click Edit or Previous to make corrections.

    The amounts that you must pre-pay appear under Prepayment as estimates only.  After your request is processed in MyTax, your Prepayment decision will arrive.  The decision letter shows the actual amounts of your prepayments and their due dates.

    You can select Save as unfinished if you want to come back later to complete the request. Your entries are kept saved for 1 month. The Tax Administration will not process the data before you have submitted it.

    When you have made sure that everything is correct, click Submit. After this, you will receive an acknowledgement of receipt.

    If you have activated Suomi.fi messages, you will receive a message once your prepayment decision is available in MyTax. If you have not activated Suomi.fi messages, you will receive the decision by post. How to find letters, tax decisions and tax certificates in MyTax

FAQ

If you are no longer able to find the contract of sale-and-purchase or other documentation, you should still fill in the year of purchase because the amount of the “deemed acquisition cost” depends on the year when the sold property had been bought. 

To fill in the year, enter it into the Acquisition date field as 1 January. For example, you can simply enter 01.01.1998 and leave the other fields blank. 

In these circumstances, the Tax Administration will make a calculation in order to assess your capital gains or capital losses based on subtracting a “deemed acquisition cost”. This means that the real purchase price, and any expenses you may have had to pay when you sold the apartment, is replaced in the calculation by the “deemed acquisition cost”. 

  • If you have owned the property you are selling for a shorter time than 10 years, the deemed acquisition cost is 20% of the selling price of the apartment.
  • If you have owned it for 10 years or longer, the deemed acquisition cost is 40% of the selling price.

Example: 28 years ago, Teija bought an apartment as an investment. Unfortunately, she has misplaced the contract and cannot find it anymore.
Teija sells the apartment today for €70,000.  Because precise information on purchase price is unavailable, the following calculation must be made:  
Price received for selling the apartment                        €70,000
Deemed acquisition cost    (40% × €70,000 =)             €28,000  
Teija’s capital gain
subject to tax                      €70,000 – €28,000 =          €42,000  
 
The rate of capital income tax is 30% up to €30,000 of income received. For income above that, the rate is 34%.

In this example, the resulting tax would be 30% × €30,000 + 34% × €12,000 = €9,000 + €4,080 = €13,080.

Fill in Yes to answer the question “Did you receive the dwelling as an inheritance or as a gift?” Enter the value that you see on your tax decision regarding inheritance or gift taxation into the Taxable value for purposes of inheritance or gift tax field.

You can inform the Tax Administration of the sales transaction as soon as the contract is finalised. After that, you can take care of the ensuing capital-gains tax in advance, by making a prepayment or by requesting a new tax card to raise the withholding percentage rate on your wage income.

If you choose not to inform the Tax Administration of the sales transaction, you can wait until your pre-completed tax return arrives next spring and check its contents. If it turns out that the pre-completed tax return does not contain information on the apartment you sold, you must add the information to it. The result will be that you end up paying your capital-gains tax in the form of back taxes.
Page last updated 1/3/2024