What is the household deduction?

When ordering renovation or home-care services, you often hear about the household deduction, but what exactly is the household deduction? In this blog, we at PuhdasFix have collected the most common questions about the household deduction and aim to clarify how the household deduction benefits, for example, a person using a cleaning service. Thanks to the household deduction, professional help

What does the household deduction mean?

The household deduction is a personal tax deduction that can be received for maintenance and improvement work in a home or holiday home, as well as care work. Work eligible for the household deduction includes, among other things, cleaning, clothing care, yard maintenance, care of children, elderly people and people with disabilities, renovation, plumbing and cabling work, and painting. A full list of work eligible for the household deduction can be found on the vero.fi website.

It is important to remember that work eligible for the household deduction must take place in your own home, holiday home, or the home of your parents or grandparents. In addition, the household deduction is only available for the work performed, and not, for example, for travel costs, materials or supplies. As long as the work has been ordered from a company that is in the prepayment register, you can apply for the household deduction for the work it has performed.

How much can you save with the household deduction?

For household, care and nursing work as well as improvement and maintenance work ordered from a company, 35% of the price of the work can be deducted in taxation. If you hire an employee yourself, only 13% of the salary paid can be deducted in taxation. The personal deductible for the household deduction is always 150 euros per year, but after that a full deduction can be received for all work performed during the rest of the year up to 1,600 euros. The Tax Administration website has a useful household deduction calculator that can be used to calculate the amount of your household deductions. https://www.vero.fi/henkiloasiakkaat/vahennykset/kotitalousvahennys/kotitalousvahennyslaskuri/

How do I apply for the household deduction?

The household deduction is always claimed for the year in which the invoice for the work was paid, even if the work was carried out entirely or partly during the previous year. The household deduction can be reported in MyTax under Income tax or Applications. You can report the deduction either by ordering a new tax card and filling in the household deduction details in the application, or by reporting only the household deduction details under Household deduction.

When purchasing from a company, all the information needed to apply for the household deduction is:

• the company’s Business ID
• the date the agreement was made or the date when the work was ordered
• the total amount of the invoice received from the company
• the VAT-inclusive share of the work

Household deduction example

As a practical example, we can look at how the household deduction would be claimed for PuhdasFix cleaning services in Oulu. Our customer wants a cleaning service once a month for five months for their 61–80 square metre home located in Oulu.

We make our customer the offer shown above, and if the customer accepts our offer, the cleaning fee for each completed cleaning visit is eligible for the household deduction. In our example, there are no travel costs, which, like the supplies fee, are not eligible for the household deduction.

After all five cleaning visits have been completed, our customer has paid a total of 719.5 euros for the cleaning service during 2026, of which the cleaning fees have been 675 euros. The customer can report the household deduction in MyTax under the Income tax section. After entering PuhdasFix’s company information, the required information about the work performed, the date of the agreement and the 675-euro share of the work, the home cleaning is taken into account in the 2026 taxation.

35% of the paid costs is calculated, meaning 675 * 0.35 = 236.25 euros. The 150-euro deductible is subtracted from the amount, leaving 86.25 euros to be deducted from the 2026 taxation. By ordering home cleaning from a company, our customer therefore saved 86.25 euros on cleaning performed by a professional!

In the example, it is important to note that the deductible is paid only once per year, so it is not charged again for every job. If, during the same year, our customer had also ordered renovation work from a company, they would not have had to pay another 150-euro deductible for the renovation.

Summary of the household deduction

The household deduction may seem complicated and mysterious, but in reality applying for it is very easy, and the applicant only needs to know the share of the work on the invoices. The rest of the information required for the application is usually easy to find, for example from invoices, and thanks to the household deduction, maintaining the home can be cheaper by buying services than by investing your own time and money in cleaning supplies.