What you can actually deduct as a Wolt, Bolt, Uber Eats, or Uber driver in Finland

Under Finland’s post-DAC7 regime, the income side of your tax return is largely fixed: Wolt, Bolt, Uber, and Uber Eats already tell Vero what they paid you. The number you control is on the cost side. Every euro of legitimate business expense you can document lowers your taxable profit and your final tax bill — and most platform workers we talk to leave thousands of euros of legal deductions on the table simply because they didn’t keep a receipt.

This article is the deductions playbook we wish someone had handed us. It covers what platform workers can actually deduct as a Finnish toiminimi sole trader, what the rules around evidence look like, and what changed in 2026.

It is general information, not personal tax advice. Big numbers or unusual situations are worth an hour with a kirjanpitäjä.

The two-rule foundation

Almost every deduction question for a toiminimi answers to the same two rules:

1. Business purpose. The expense was incurred to earn business income. A fuel fill on a Wolt shift counts; a fuel fill for a weekend trip to mökki doesn’t.
2. A tosite (voucher/receipt) on file. Under the Finnish Bookkeeping Act, every entry in the books needs a supporting document. No receipt, no deduction. This is unforgiving and there are no good workarounds.

If both are true, you can almost always deduct. If the expense is mixed personal and business, you deduct the business-use share. The hard part is being honest about that share and being able to defend it.

Vehicle costs — the biggest line for most drivers

For couriers and drivers with a car, vehicle costs are usually the largest single deduction category. The mechanics depend on whether the car is privately owned or counts as a business asset.

If the car is >50% private use (most platform workers)

If more than half of the kilometres you drive in a year are private — to the shop, to family, on weekends — the car is treated as your personal vehicle, and you deduct work driving via the per-kilometre rate.

The 2026 rate is €0.55 per kilometre (down from €0.59 in 2025). Conditions:

• You must keep an ajopäiväkirja (driving log) — paper or app — recording date, route, purpose, and kilometres for every business trip throughout the year.
• At year-end you confirm total kilometres driven and the work share.
• The per-km rate is meant to cover all vehicle running costs — fuel, service, insurance, depreciation. You don’t deduct fuel receipts separately on top of the per-km claim.

Worked example: a Wolt courier who drives 12,000 work kilometres in 2026 deducts 12,000 × €0.55 = €6,600 as a vehicle expense, with a properly maintained driving log as the evidence.

If the car is >50% business use

If most of the car’s kilometres are work-related, the car becomes a business asset. You then deduct actual costs — fuel, EV charging, service, insurance, parking, ferries — and depreciate the car’s purchase value (typically 25% per year, declining balance, under EVL rules).

This route can produce a larger deduction, but it brings two complications: you must depreciate the purchase price (a one-off when you bought, not when you started using it for work), and any private use of a business-asset car generates a taxable benefit. For most part-time and full-time platform workers, the per-km route is simpler and the gap to actual costs is small.

Bike, e-bike, scooter

Bike couriers can deduct the full cost of work-only equipment — frame, components, tyres, service, lights, locks. If the bike is also used for personal transport, deduct the business-use share. The same evidence rule applies: receipts for purchases and service, a rough log of work-vs-personal use to defend the share.

E-bike charging at home can be claimed as part of work electricity costs, but the share is usually tiny enough that it’s not worth fighting for separately.

Phone, data plan, and apps

Your phone is the platform — both literally and figuratively. The work-use share of your phone bill, data plan, and any work-required app subscriptions is deductible. A 50% work share is defensible for most active couriers and drivers; full-time drivers can often justify higher with a usage breakdown.

What this looks like in practice:

• Phone purchase: deduct the work-use share, depreciated if the phone cost over a small-asset threshold (rules-bound — see below).
• Monthly phone and data plan: deduct the work-use share.
• App subscriptions used for navigation, fuel cards, or accounting: deduct the full cost if the subscription is exclusively for work.

Required gear and clothing

The platform-worker gear category is small but adds up across a year:

• Delivery bag and insulation — fully deductible.
• Phone holder, charger, charging cable for the work phone or in-car use.
• Helmet, knee/elbow protection for bike couriers.
• Weather gear — high-vis jacket, waterproof trousers, gloves designed for the work — fully deductible. Ordinary clothing is not deductible, even if you wear it on shifts. The line is “branded or work-specific gear, yes; the jeans you also wear out, no.”
• Driver-specific items — phone mounts, dashcams, in-car cleaning supplies for ride drivers.

Keep the receipt for each purchase. A photo on your phone the day of purchase is enough — store the originals if they’re in pdf or email form.

YEL contributions

YEL (yrittäjän eläkevakuutus) contributions are fully deductible from your business income in the year you pay them. This is one of the most overlooked deductions among new platform workers, who tend to think of YEL as personal pension rather than a business expense.

For a full-time courier paying €238–€305/month in YEL contributions (depending on confirmed YEL income and whether the new-entrepreneur discount applies), that’s €2,800–€3,700 per year of deduction. Make sure your bookkeeping captures it — your pension provider will issue an annual certificate you keep as the tosite.

Software, bank fees, and accountant

Three small but routine categories:

• Bookkeeping or accounting software — fully deductible.
• Business bank account fees, payment-card fees, foreign-transaction fees on business spending — fully deductible.
• Kirjanpitäjä (accountant) fees — fully deductible. Whether you book a single year-end review or a continuous arrangement, the cost is a business expense.

Home office in 2026: what changed

If you do part of your work from home — planning routes, doing your books, communicating with platform support — the 2026 rules differ between salaried workers and entrepreneurs.

• For salary income, the flat-rate home-office deduction (työhuonevähennys) can no longer be claimed on the 2026 tax card, and actual-cost deductions for working at home are also gone from 2026.
• For entrepreneurs, Vero says the flat-rate deduction can be claimed in both 2025 and 2026. The 2026 amounts are €980 (home used continuously and full-time for income, with remote work on more than half of working days), €490 (continuous part-time use or regular remote work on up to half of working days) and €245 (occasional use).
• Vero also states that, for non-salary income, actual-cost deductions for home work are not allowed from 2026.

What this means in practice: if admin really happens at home, check which of the three tiers fits and keep a short note of how you use the space. For most platform workers whose work happens on the road, the lower tiers are the realistic ones. Confirm your tier on Vero’s page or with a kirjanpitäjä.

One-off purchases and depreciation

Big one-off purchases — a new phone, a bike, a vehicle accessory — fall into two buckets in Finnish business tax:

• Small acquisitions with a low per-item cost can typically be expensed in full in the year of purchase, up to a cumulative annual ceiling. The exact thresholds are set in the Business Income Tax Act (EVL) and are worth checking against current Vero guidance for the year in question — they’re updated periodically.
• Larger acquisitions are capitalised and depreciated over their useful life. The standard rate for movable assets is 25% per year on the declining balance.

If you’re not sure which side a purchase falls on, the safe move is to ask a kirjanpitäjä before year-end, not after. The decision affects which year you take the deduction in.

The shift log discipline

The single habit that determines whether your year of deductions holds up is keeping a shift log alongside your receipts. For each shift or ride session:

• Date, platform, hours active, kilometres.
• Gross payout (from the platform’s session summary).
• Notes about anything unusual — a long detour, a parking expense, a cancelled order.

Two reasons this matters:

1. It defends your kilometre claim. A driving log is the evidence behind a per-km deduction. Without it, the work share of your driving is hard to prove.
2. It anchors your platform income reconciliation. When DAC7 data shows up at Vero in spring, your shift log is what lets you confirm the platform’s number is right (or correct it).

A weekly habit is enough if daily feels heavy. The point is that the records exist before tax season, not that you reconstruct them under pressure in March.

Common mistakes that cost real money

A short list of patterns we see often:

• Lost fuel and EV-charging receipts — by far the most common. If your platform-worker year is on the larger side, this alone can mean €500–€1,500 of missed deductions.
• Mixed-use phone with no work-share calculation — defaulting to “I’ll skip it because I don’t know the share” rather than picking a defensible 50% and writing down why.
• YEL contributions paid but not entered as a business expense — they show up in the personal tax return as already paid but are missed as a business deduction.
• Bicycle and gear bought before registering the toiminimi — small one-off equipment purchased in the months before you registered is often still deductible if you can show it was bought for the work; check with a kirjanpitäjä.
• No shift log — the per-km deduction collapses without one, often costing €1,000+ for an active courier.

A year-end checklist

Two weeks before you sit down to close the year:

1. Reconcile platform earnings against your bank, week by week. Gaps are easier to fix in December than in March.
2. Sum your kilometres from the shift log. Confirm total annual kilometres driven (work + private), and the work share.
3. Pull all receipts by category — fuel/charging, phone, gear, YEL, software, bank fees. Confirm there’s a tosite for every euro you’ll claim.
4. Check your YEL payments for the year and ask your kirjanpitäjä or pension provider which year each contribution belongs to.
5. Note any one-off purchases above the small-acquisition threshold for separate depreciation handling.
6. Book the kirjanpitäjä hour for January or February. They can review the year before you file — and catch the deduction you forgot.

That’s the whole job. Most of the money isn’t in clever tax planning; it’s in the boring discipline of keeping receipts and a shift log throughout the year.

Sources

• Vero — Deductible expenses (business taxation)
• Vero — What will change in taxation in 2026
• Vero — Travel expense deduction limits (per-km rates)
• Vero — Työhuonevähennys (in Finnish)
• Vero — Kilometrikorvaus ja päiväraha (in Finnish)
• Varma — YEL in 2026
• Verohallinto — Yrittäjän vähennykset (in Finnish)

Read next

• DAC7, in plain English: what Vero now sees from Wolt, Uber Eats, and Uber — the income-side companion to this post.
• Wolt, Uber Eats, and Uber drivers in Finland: a 2026 toiminimi playbook — the broader compliance picture.
• The €20,000 VAT line, explained — when deductions start to interact with VAT input recovery.
• Deduction impact calculator — estimate what documented costs do to your profit.

The shortest version of this article: business purpose plus a receipt equals a deduction. Keep both, every shift, every week, all year. The rest is detail.