Finns bank balances vary sharply across the population, with a quarter of adults holding less than EUR 770 in their accounts while the wealthiest 10 percent have more than EUR 60,000 in deposits, according to new figures from Statistics Finland.
The figures show a wide gap in household deposits, with age and gender also playing a significant role in how much money people have in their accounts. The median bank balance was just under EUR 5,000 last year, meaning half of adults had less than that amount and half had more.
The median provides a different picture from the average. While men had, on average, slightly more than EUR 800 more in deposits than women, the median balance was around EUR 1,300 higher for women.
That difference is largely explained by the way money is distributed at the upper end of the scale. A small number of people with very large deposits can push the average upwards, making it less representative of what a typical person has in their account.
“These figures show that deposits are distributed more unevenly among men. At the top end of the distribution, among those with the largest deposits, men outnumber women,” Veli-Matti Tormalehto, a senior researcher at Statistics Finland, said in a press release.
Age was another clear dividing line in the figures. Older Finns generally had substantially more money in their bank accounts than younger adults. Among people aged 85 and over, half had more than EUR 31,460 in deposits.
The situation was very different for those just entering adulthood. Half of Finns aged between 18 and 24 had less than EUR 1,240 in their accounts.
The figures provide a snapshot of how savings accumulate over a lifetime. Younger adults are often at an earlier stage of their working lives, while older generations have had more time to build deposits and accumulate financial assets. The statistics themselves, however, do not establish why individual account balances differ.
The same data also points to growing participation in investments beyond ordinary bank deposits. More than a third of Finns owned funds or shares, an increase of almost 100,000 people compared with the previous year.
Over the past decade, the number of people owning funds or shares has increased by around 680,000.
There are also differences in the types of investments held by men and women. Women were slightly more likely than men to own mutual funds, while men were more likely to own listed shares.
Taken together, the figures show that there is no single picture of the financial position of Finns. A median balance of around EUR 5,000 sits alongside much larger deposits held by a relatively small share of the population, while younger adults remain far more likely to have modest savings.
The growing number of Finns investing in funds and shares also suggests that financial assets are not limited to traditional bank deposits. But the distribution of those assets remains uneven, particularly at the upper end, where the Statistics Finland figures show a stronger concentration of large deposits among men.
