Daily allowance, travel and accommodation

Two questions have to be answered separately, and people often mix them. First: does the collective agreement or your employment contract make a payment due at all? Second: can that payment be made free of tax? A tax-free maximum is not an entitlement, and an entitlement is not automatically tax-free.

Getting this the wrong way round is the single most common reason a month turns out smaller than someone expected. An advertisement that adds a daily allowance to an hourly rate and calls the total "pay" is describing a best case for a particular kind of assignment, not a wage. That is why our calculator keeps allowances out of the monthly figure entirely and lists them next to it as "not included".

What the agreements themselves say

The electrical agreement pays a full daily allowance for a work trip over ten hours and a partial one over six, on the condition that the special place of work is at least 40 km from the hiring place and at least 15 km from your home. The amounts follow the Tax Administration decision, so the figures above are the figures used — but the conditions are the agreement's own, and they are where most disputes actually live.

The building-services agreement approaches it from the other end: where the work is in another locality from which you cannot return home for the night, the employer pays the journey between home and the assignment locality, pays local travel, pays travel time at the entry-group hourly rate, and pays a daily allowance at the Tax Administration maximum. Travel time being paid at all — and at which rate — is worth knowing about before you accept a site three hours away.

The three-year rule

A place of work can count as a temporary special place of work for up to three years on the same site. A data-centre build can run that long, and the answer for year four is not the same as for year one. This is one of the things we check for the assignment rather than promise in advance.

There is a sharper edge to the rule that catches people out: if it is known from the start that the stay will be longer than three years, the site is your regular workplace from day one — not tax-free for three years and then taxable. A six-year site is not six years of tax-free allowances, and nobody should imply it is.

Travelling from your accommodation to the site does not by itself create a daily allowance. Where we provide accommodation and transport, that changes what is payable — and we say so in the offer instead of letting you discover it on the payslip.

What accommodation does to the answer

Housing near the site is arranged separately from pay and confirmed in the written offer. Whether an accommodation allowance is payable, and whether it can be paid tax-free, follows the same temporary-workplace rules as the daily allowance. One thing is not negotiable in either direction: the cost of housing is never deducted from the minimum pay the agreement sets. If a rent is charged, it is a separate line with its own figure, and you see it before you travel.

Organised meals on site are the other lever. Where meals are provided, the daily allowance can fall away or be reduced — which is a fair outcome, but only if it is stated in advance. Ask the two questions in the right order for your own case: what does the agreement make due, and what of that is tax-free?

Under the building construction agreement there is a further rule worth knowing for shell-phase trades: temporary accommodation set up for a specific project (majoitustyömaa, section 39) is arranged by the employer free of charge — one person per room, about 10 m², or two persons in about 13 m² on jobs shorter than a month — and where the employer provides it, no accommodation compensation (otherwise up to 57 € a day against an invoice) or overnight allowance is paid. The building-services agreement has no such rule; there, accommodation for a stay away from home is compensated under section 15 (agreement texts checked 26 September 2026).