Studying abroad

You cannot be paid student financial aid for your studies abroad in the following situations:

• Your study programme can be fully completed online.
• You are attending a programme preparing you for university study.
• You are completing an individual course.
• You participate in a language course.
• You have not been granted the right to study towards a degree by your educational institution.
• The educational institution you are enrolled in is an officially registered company and not a government-regulated educational institution.
• You get financial aid from abroad.

However, you can get student financial aid if you meet one of the following conditions:

• You have the right of permanent residence in Finland as an EU citizen (migri.fi).
• You have the right of permanent residence in Finland under the withdrawal agreement between the UK and the EU (migri.fi).
• You are a worker defined in EU law (migri.fi) or in the withdrawal agreement between the EU and the UK (migri.fi) or the child of such a worker.

You must also always meet at least one of the following conditions:

• You have had a municipality of residence in Finland for at least 2 years out of the 5 years preceding the beginning of your studies.
• You have close ties to Finland otherwise. We will take into account periods of residence in Finland and family ties as well as factors related to your income, work and other corresponding circumstances. Kela will assess your case based on an overall evaluation of your circumstances.

If you are a worker defined in EU law or in the withdrawal agreement between the EU and the UK or the child of such a worker, you must also meet at least one of the following conditions:

• You work in Finland for at least 4 months and for an average of 10 hours per week or you have taken out a compulsory earnings-related pension insurance policy for self-employed persons. You can be paid student financial aid only while you are working in Finland.
• You are the child of a citizen of an EU or EEA country, Switzerland or the United Kingdom who is working in Finland. You can be paid student financial aid only while your parent is working in Finland.
• You have kept your status as an EU worker in Finland even though you have stopped working in Finland and started a course of study abroad. Your studies must be closely related to your work in Finland.
• You have kept your status as an EU worker in Finland even though your employment in Finland ended through no fault of your own and you have since started a course of study abroad. If this is the case, your studies do not have to relate to your work in Finland.

We will pay your student financial aid to your Finnish bank account. It is paid on the 1st day of each month or on the closest following business day.

If you would like the payments to be made into a foreign bank account, write down the name, BIC code and address of the bank and your IBAN account number on your application for student financial aid. You must cover any additional costs of having financial aid paid abroad.

Finnish citizens who have lived abroad for 3 years become non-resident for tax purposes (vero.fi) and have limited liability to pay tax in Finland. This means that they pay tax to Finland only for their Finnish income. Foreign nationals who move out of Finland to another country have limited tax liability immediately after they have moved.

If you have limited tax liability, submit a tax-at-source card or a non-resident’s tax card to us. The income type on the tax card must be the study grant. If you do not submit a tax card, a tax-at-source of 35% will be deducted from your study grant.

You can ask the Tax Administration to send the tax card directly to us. You can also use the Lähetä liite (Send supporting documents) function in the OmaKela e-service (available in Finnish and Swedish) to send the tax card to us. If you want to send the tax card to us by post, please send it to Kela, PL 10, 00056 KELA.

The maximum aid period for your studies depends on the type of study programme you pursue in the same way as it does for upper secondary education pursued in Finland.

In the annual income check, financial aid months mean the months for which you are paid either the study grant or the housing supplement for students or both.

The maximum aid period for your studies depends on the scope of your degree programme in the same way as it does for higher education studies completed in Finland. This means that your maximum aid period depends both on the scope of the degree programme and when you began your first course of study in higher education.

If the scope of the degree programme is not specified in accordance with the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS), the maximum aid period is determined based on the regular completion time of your studies.

In the annual income check and in the monitoring of your study progress, financial aid months mean the months for which you are paid either the study grant or the housing supplement for students or both.

You must send us a certificate of enrolment issued by your place of study once per academic year. The certificate must show that you are a full-time student and that you are enrolled in the programme for which you are paid student financial aid. Send us the first certificate of enrolment after you have registered as attending at your place of study.

After that, send us a new certificate of enrolment every time the previous one expires or a new academic year or academic term begins.

Once per academic year, you must also send us a transcript of records issued by your place of study. The transcript must show the credits you earned in the previous academic year.

Take photos of the documents and use the Lähetä liite (Send supporting documents) function in the OmaKela e-service (available in Finnish and Swedish) to send them to us. The supporting documents must be in Finnish, Swedish or English. If the documents issued by your place of study are written in some other language, they must be translated into one of these three languages before you can submit them to Kela. We accept translations that you have done yourself.

If you are a first-year student, send us also the following supporting documents with your application for student financial aid:

• Certificate of admission to the educational institution. The certificate must state the degree you are studying for, the regular completion time for the degree and that you are a full-time student.
• Certificate showing the start and end dates of the academic year.
• Certificate of attendance issued by the educational institution. You can send in the certificate later once you have registered as attending.
• Certificate showing that the educational institution is regulated by the government.
• Your personal study plan and a notice of admission from your place of study for courses of 30 credits (högskolepoäng/ETCS) or more if you are completing a degree in Sweden that consists of individual courses (fristående kurser). The study plan must show the degree being completed and its regular completion time in addition to the number of credits and the courses the degree consists of.
• A copy of the I-20 form issued by your educational institution if you are studying in the United States.
• Certificate showing grants or scholarships as well as any financial assistance provided by the educational institution. The certificate must show the purpose of the grant, scholarship or financial assistance, the time for which it is awarded, its amount, its source, and the date of payment.
• Statement declaring any income you get from abroad.
• Proof of a material change in your parents’ income and of any income your parents get from abroad if your parents’ income affects your study grant or student loan guarantee.
• A completed version of the form Appendix to application for student financial aid filed by foreign resident OT 10e (PDF) if you are a foreign citizen.

If you are applying for financial aid for the summer months, submit a notification of changes where you provide details about your study plan for the summer.

Apply for financial aid as soon as your place of study has notified you of your admission. The earliest you can be paid student financial aid is from the beginning of the month in which your application arrives at Kela.

Submit your application as soon as possible even if you do not have all the supporting documents required for it. You can send additional supporting documents to us later.

Kela can issue you a certificate that shows the amount of student financial aid you are being paid by Kela if you need one, for example, to satisfy a residence permit requirement. The certificate can be issued in Swedish, English, German or French. Kela can issue the certificate before you have been given a decision on student financial aid, but it does not guarantee that you will actually be granted financial aid.

Please remember to inform us about any changes in your life situation, so that you are paid the correct amount of student financial aid. You can report changes via our e-service OmaKela or by phone.

Educational institutions in Sweden are supervised by the Ministry of Education and Research. Contact the Swedish financial aid authority CSN (csn.se) for information about which educational institutions and study programmes are covered by the financial aid system. If CSN pays student financial aid to students enrolled in a specific study programme, the educational institution that offers the study programme is government-regulated. The studies offered by the educational institution you choose must also meet the other criteria set out in the Finnish Act on Student Financial Aid.

You can apply to Swedish institutions of higher education on the website of the Swedish Council for Higher Education (Universitets- och högskolerådet, URH). The application website is available in both Swedish (antagning.se) and English (universityadmissions.se).

What studies qualify you for student financial aid?

If you are enrolled in an institution of higher education, you can get student financial aid for both a degree programme and for completing a degree that consists of individual courses (fristående kurser).

You cannot get financial aid for the following courses:

• Courses called Svenska som främmande språk and Behörighetsgivande kurs i svenska do not qualify you for student financial aid because they cannot be included in a higher education degree.
• Basår studies are preparatory studies offered at an upper secondary school level. Preparatory studies do not qualify you for student financial aid.
• Studies offered as kompletterande utbildningar are usually studies that relate to art and culture (konst- och kulturutbildningar). They do not correspond to any studies that can qualify you for student financial aid in Finland.

Visit the website of the Department for Business Innovation & Skills (BIS) (gov.uk) for information on institutions of higher education that are regulated by the government. Accredited institutions of higher education are listed under the Office for Students (OfS) Register. These educational institutions have the right to grant degrees that are recognised in the United Kingdom.

All degree studies that you can apply for via the UCAS joint admissions process (ucas.com) are regulated by the government.

When are vocational or private educational institutions considered government-regulated?

Vocational schools and upper secondary schools in the United Kingdom are considered government-regulated if their degrees are granted by such bodies as City and Guilds, Edexcel, AQA, CCEA, OCR or WJEC.

Financial aid is not available for Access, Foundation and Bridging courses preparing course participants for university admission. An exception to this rule are Foundation courses that are included in the actual degree programme. This kind of Foundation course counts as year 0 in a standard 3-year degree programme, which means that the total duration of the degree programme is 4 years. This kind of course qualifies you for student financial aid.

The U.S. Department of Education does not regulate educational institutions in the same way as, for example, the authorities do in Finland. Instead, the quality of education providers is monitored and evaluated via a separate accreditation system.

You can find more information on the official accreditation organisations on the websites of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA, chea.org) and the U.S. Department of Education (ope.ed.gov).

You should also check out these search engines for accredited educational institutions:

• CHEA’s search engine (chea.org)
• The search engine of the U.S. Department of Education (ope.ed.gov)

If you have any questions about accreditation, please contact the Fulbright Center (fulbright.fi).

If you live abroad and you do not have Finnish online banking credentials or a mobile ID or you cannot use eIDAS identification, you can contact Kela in all matters related to student financial aid by sending us a secure email.

Send email to Kela over a secure connection. For reasons related to information security, we only respond to emails that are sent via a secure connection.

Write your email address in the Lähettäjä (Sender) field that you will see after you click on the link. You will get an email message that contains a link you can use to send us email over a secure connection. The link is active for 30 days. Write [email protected] as the recipient of your email in the secure email interface.

Instructions for sending secure email to Kela (PDF).