Socio-economic group

Employees are classified according to socio-economic group into upper-level and lower-level employees and manual workers. Self-employed persons can be grouped into self-employed without employees, self-employed with employees and unpaid family workers. Statistics Finland's Classification of Socio-economic Groups is used in the classification.

The socio-economic group refers to a person's position in society. Formation of a socio-economic group for a person is based on data on the person's main type of activity, occupation, occupational status and industry. Statistics Finland's Classification of Socio-economic Groups valid at each time is used for the classification.
In the employment statistics, persons are classified according to their own activity, apart from persons aged 0 to 15 and the group "others outside the labour force" (mainly home-makers), who have been assigned the same socio-economic group as the reference person in the household. The socio-economic group of students is determined based on their own activity at the end of the year. Students over the age of 18, who have a valid employment relationship at the end of the year, are considered to belong to the employed labour force and thus they are defined as belonging to different socio-economic groups based on their occupation. However, working students under the age of 18 are classified as students (apart from students under the age of 16, who are always assigned the socio-economic group of the reference person in the household).

In the Household Budget Survey and income distribution survey a socio-economic group is formed for household members on the basis of the person's activity in the last 12 months. For determining the socio-economic group, persons are first divided into economically active and inactive. As a rule, all those who have participated in the production activity for at least six months during the survey year are counted as economically active. Economically active are further divided into self-employed and wage and salary earners on the basis of information reported in the interview. Self-employed are also such persons who have been taxed as employees in taxation (typically entrepreneurs working as employees in their own company). Economically inactive are grouped into students, pensioners, unemployed and others. Unemployed are persons who have been unemployed for at least six months during the year.

The socio-economic group of the household is determined by the household's reference person.

The classification is based on the Statistics Finland's classification standard of socio-economic groups from 1989. There account is taken of the person's occupation, status in occupation, nature of work and stage in life (Classification of Socio-economic Group 1989. Helsinki. Statistics Finland, Handbooks, 17).