AI-generated architectural illustration, not a real housing project.
Finland recorded 4,579 homeless people living alone in 2025, up 20% in a year. It was the second consecutive increase after more than a decade of falling numbers. The country associated with Housing First is now dealing with a sustained reversal, according to Varke’s national survey.
One pressure is easy to miss in the national housing headlines. In Greater Helsinki, private rents fell in 2025 while state-subsidised rents rose. The cheaper sector became more expensive at the same time that housing allowance covered a smaller share of eligible costs. Finland’s rebound needs to be understood through the tenancies people can afford and maintain, alongside the homes the country has built.
The rebound extends beyond people sleeping outside
Most people in the survey were staying temporarily with friends or relatives: 64% of the single-person total. Another 17%, or 758 people, were sleeping outside, in stairwells or in emergency shelters. Of the single-person total, 1,306 people were classified as long-term homeless. These categories describe different aspects of the same population and should not be added together.
The survey therefore captures a much wider loss of secure housing than a street count. A person moving between other people’s homes needs a stable tenancy even when they are not visible at a shelter entrance. Municipalities reported pressures including social-security changes, unemployment, rent-payment problems and a mismatch between rents and housing costs accepted by Kela. Those reports identify plausible pressures; they do not measure how many additional cases any individual reform caused.
The cheaper rental sector is becoming less cheap
Statistics Finland’s figures for the whole of 2025 show how unevenly rental costs moved:
| Rental sector | Greater Helsinki, 2025 |
|---|---|
| Private, non-subsidised rentals | −0.5% |
| Government-subsidised rentals | +3.9% |
Elsewhere in Finland, subsidised rents rose 3.0% and private rents 0.6% in 2025. The subsidised sector still offers lower rents in many places. Varke’s spring 2026 market review puts its rents 14–24% below market rents across the capital region. But that advantage has been narrowing. A falling private-market average does not describe what happened to a household already renting a state-supported home.
Housing assistance also changed. From April 2024, Kela reduced general housing allowance from 80% to 70% of accepted housing costs after the basic deductible. It increased that deductible, abolished the €300 earned-income disregard and lowered the maximum costs recognised in Helsinki. These are changes to the benefit calculation, not a promise to cover 70% of every tenant’s actual rent.
The combination matters: a subsidised tenant can face a rising bill and a smaller benefit even when market rents nearby are easing. The pressure depends on the household’s income and eligibility, but the policy moves more of the housing bill onto the recipient.
Kela’s 2025 benefits overview, updated in September 2026, records a 14% inflation-adjusted fall in total housing-benefit expenditure. It also shows that general housing-allowance recipient households fell by 37%. That second number includes students moving to a separate housing-supplement scheme and the removal of owner-occupied homes from eligibility. It cannot be read as 37% of recipients losing all housing support. Basic social assistance paid another €460 million towards housing costs in 2025, showing how much housing support also passes through the last-resort benefit.
Vacant apartments still need a route to a tenant
Finland has unused capacity as well as housing need. Varke counted 11,069 state-supported rental dwellings vacant in spring 2026, up by 1,182 from a year earlier. Its vacancy measure concerns homes empty for at least two months. The largest absolute numbers were in Helsinki, Hämeenlinna and Joensuu.
The vacancy snapshot is later than the 2025 count of people. The market review covers ordinary subsidised rental housing; it is not an inventory of available Housing First placements. Those totals cannot be subtracted.
Nor is the problem confined to empty homes in distant towns. Helsinki remained in Varke’s fairly tight market category despite its vacancies. Availability varies by location, rent and the needs of the applicant. The wider geography of access also appears in Poland’s housing crisis, although Finland’s immediate problem includes the support needed to secure and sustain an ordinary rental tenancy.
Housing First needs prevention around it
Housing First changes the order of help: a permanent home provides a base for recovery, with support alongside it. As the Y-Foundation explains, the home is an ordinary rental apartment and support adapts to the resident. Treatment or sobriety is not a preliminary test someone must pass to earn housing. Delivering that model still requires apartments, rent support and accessible social and health services.
There is also a growing task before someone needs a new home. Finland’s enforcement authority reported approximately 5,500 completed evictions in 2024, compared with 3,600 in 2020. It launched a two-year prevention pilot in March 2025 in Jyväskylä, Lahti and Vantaa, bringing local services together to address rent and financial problems. Eviction events are not a count of newly homeless people, but they show the mounting workload involved in preserving existing tenancies.
The institutional arrangement makes that work demanding. Housing is principally a city responsibility, while social and health services sit with wellbeing services counties. In March 2026, the Environment Ministry allocated €4.77 million to city and county projects under the long-term homelessness programme. The projects include outreach, housing advice and cooperation with debt counsellors, landlords and other services. The programme’s 2027 goal concerns long-term homelessness; the allocation is funding for work, not evidence that the goal has been reached.
Read together, these records put the focus on the household’s path through the system. A vacant flat helps when a person can get a tenancy, meet the rent and obtain the support that keeps the tenancy working. Finland’s reversal makes those connections urgent: the rent burden has shifted towards some low-income tenants, eviction prevention faces a larger workload, and housing and support must be delivered across institutional boundaries.
