How to report the selling of a home, real estate or securities in MyTax
This guide contains instructions for informing the Tax Administration of a sale of residential property, securities, corporate stocks and other assets immediately when you have closed the contract of sale.
When you inform the Tax Administration of these transactions while the current year is still ongoing, you can also submit an application for a revised tax card or request a calculation for tax prepayment. This means that you can pre-pay the taxes that will later be assessed on the capital gains you receive from the sale. You can do so by making a prepayment or by raising the withholding rate on your tax card for wage income.
Although the selling of one’s own home is almost always tax-exempt, you must still submit a report on it.
If you opt for not informing the Tax Administration during the year when you make the sale, you must add the information on the above transactions to your pre-completed tax return next spring. Read more about checking and making corrections to the pre-completed tax return
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FAQ
If you are no longer able to find the contract of sale-and-purchase or other documentation, you should still fill in the year of purchase because the amount of the “deemed acquisition cost” depends on the year when the sold property had been bought.
To fill in the year, enter it into the Acquisition date field as 1 January. For example, you can simply enter 01.01.1998 and leave the other fields blank.
In these circumstances, the Tax Administration will make a calculation in order to assess your capital gains or capital losses based on subtracting a “deemed acquisition cost”. This means that the real purchase price, and any expenses you may have had to pay when you sold the apartment, is replaced in the calculation by the “deemed acquisition cost”.
- If you have owned the property you are selling for a shorter time than 10 years, the deemed acquisition cost is 20% of the selling price of the apartment.
- If you have owned it for 10 years or longer, the deemed acquisition cost is 40% of the selling price.
Example: 28 years ago, Teija bought an apartment as an investment. Unfortunately, she has misplaced the contract and cannot find it anymore.
Teija sells the apartment today for €70,000. Because precise information on purchase price is unavailable, the following calculation must be made:
Price received for selling the apartment €70,000
Deemed acquisition cost (40% × €70,000 =) €28,000
Teija’s capital gain
subject to tax €70,000 – €28,000 = €42,000
The rate of capital income tax is 30% up to €30,000 of income received. For income above that, the rate is 34%.
In this example, the resulting tax would be 30% × €30,000 + 34% × €12,000 = €9,000 + €4,080 = €13,080.
Fill in Yes to answer the question “Did you receive the dwelling as an inheritance or as a gift?” Enter the value that you see on your tax decision regarding inheritance or gift taxation into the Taxable value for purposes of inheritance or gift tax field.
You can inform the Tax Administration of the sales transaction as soon as the contract is finalised. After that, you can take care of the ensuing capital-gains tax in advance, by making a prepayment or by requesting a new tax card to raise the withholding percentage rate on your wage income.
If you choose not to inform the Tax Administration of the sales transaction, you can wait until your pre-completed tax return arrives next spring and check its contents. If it turns out that the pre-completed tax return does not contain information on the apartment you sold, you must add the information to it. The result will be that you end up paying your capital-gains tax in the form of back taxes.