Finland’s 2026 Minimum Tax Amendments: Implementation of the OECD’s 2024, 2025 and 2026 Administrative Guidance

On March 24, 2025, Finland’s Amending act, Act 187/2026 was published in the Official Gazette, and it enters into force on March 31, 2026. The act amends Finland’s Minimum Tax Act 1308/2023.

As a rule, it applies to fiscal years beginning on or after January 1, 2024; however, the new anti-avoidance rule in Chapter 8, section 31 applies only from fiscal years beginning on or after January 1, 2027, while the new safe-harbour provisions in Chapter 9, sections 12–15 and the related changes to Chapter 10, section 6 apply from fiscal years beginning on or after January 1, 2026. 

The Finnish government’s explanation of the main amendment package was that the law would modify the existing law to reflect OECD guidance published in 2024 and 2025, while leaving unchanged the law’s existing principles, scope, computational bases and minimum tax rate. The supplementary proposal then added a second layer: rules on the Side-by-Side safe harbour, the UPE safe harbour, the substance-based tax incentive safe harbour and the one-year extension of the Transitional CbCR Safe Harbour, expressly by reference to the OECD’s January 2026 Side-by-Side package.

Members can also download our article-by-article analysis of Law 187/2026, which has an article-by-article break down of the new and old sections, OECD guidance tie in and practical implications.

The June 2024 OECD guidance on hybrids, securitisation, tax allocation and DTL recapture

The OECD’s June 2024 Administrative Guidance dealt, among other topics, with DTL recapture, taxes paid by a constituent-entity owner with respect to reverse hybrid income, and the treatment of securitisation vehicles. OECD guidance also explained that the June 2024 package introduced a simplified methodology for allocating current and deferred taxes arising under CFC regimes and analogous cross-border tax settings. Finland’s 2026 act is a domestic codification of that June 2024 material.

That codification begins with entity classification. New Chapter 1, section 47(2) expands the hybrid-entity concept so that an entity in a jurisdiction with no income tax can still be treated as a hybrid if its direct or indirect owner’s jurisdiction treats it as fiscally transparent. New Chapter 2, section 15(3)–(5) adds the securitisation-entity carve-out and defines “securitisation entity” in detailed statutory terms. The drafting is recognisably OECD-derived: Finland is not leaving hybrid classification or securitisation treatment to commentary alone, but is hard-wiring them into the domestic statute.

A more technical 2024 change is new Chapter 2, section 17(3), which deals with the domestic top-up tax treatment of hybrid and reverse hybrid entities. Finland now allows owner-level tax recorded in the owner’s books to be taken into account in the domestic top-up tax only where the tax is allocated under Chapter 4, section 18, imposed in Finland, and imposed on the hybrid or reverse hybrid income. That rule is narrower than an ordinary GloBE push-down rule and is a QDMTT-integrity measure. The OECD’s QDMTT commentary makes clear that a regime which takes into account inappropriate cross-border taxes is not a QDMTT, so Finland’s statutory insistence on Finnish-imposed tax is a required constraint.

Finland’s most substantial June 2024 transposition is the deferred-tax and tax-allocation package in Chapters 3 and 4. New Chapter 3, section 13a deals with write-downs where GloBE values diverge from accounting carrying values. Amended Chapter 4, section 9(4) extends the substitute-loss/DTA logic to PEs, hybrids and reverse hybrids. Amended Chapter 4, section 13 and new sections 13a–13c then replace a relatively simple DTL recapture rule with a far more granular system of ledger-level or grouped tracking, restrictions on what can be grouped, proof requirements, and explicit FIFO/LIFO assumptions, together with a simplification for short-term DTLs. In functional terms, Finland has translated the OECD’s June 2024 recapture guidance into a detailed domestic tracking regime.

The same applies to the new Chapter 4, sections 19a and 19b. Section 19a sets out a current-tax allocation methodology for cases where the main entity or owner jurisdiction uses a foreign tax credit system that permits cross-crediting. Section 19b does the same for deferred taxes, classifying the allocated income into three categories and providing a five-year election not to allocate deferred taxes in the sections 16–19 scenarios. This is close in function to the OECD’s June 2024 allocation guidance: Finland has legislated the mechanics for current tax, deferred tax, CFC/hybrid allocations and cross-crediting rather than leaving them to administrative guidance alone.

The January 2025 OECD Administrative Guidance: Article 9.1, governmental arrangements and the grace period