Finnish police do not simply look up a fixed speeding fine: for speeds more than 20 km/h over the limit, they calculate it from your income — roughly half your daily disposable income multiplied by a set number of days — and the biggest bills have run past 100,000 euros

Picture two drivers pulled over on the same stretch of Finnish road, both caught going the same speed more than 20 km/h over the limit. One walks away owing a couple hundred euros. The other gets a bill for five figures.

Same offence, same officer, same radar reading. The difference is not luck, and it is not corruption. It is the driver’s income.

Finland does use fixed penalties for minor speeding, with traffic penalty fees ranging up to 200 euros. But exceeding the speed limit by more than 20 km/h is a traffic crime punishable with day-fines tied to income. And for the country’s richest drivers, that has produced some of the largest speeding fines on record.

How can the same speeding offence cost 200 euros or 100,000?

Finland runs what it calls a day-fine system, or päiväsakko, for speeding more than 20 km/h over the limit and for many other offences.

The World Economic Forum describes it as a system calculated on the basis of an offender’s daily disposable income. The basic idea is simple: the severity of the offence determines how many day-fines are imposed, while income determines the value of each day-fine.

That means two drivers committing the same speeding offence can face the same number of day-fines but radically different totals. A low earner may end up near the minimum. A multimillionaire can owe tens of thousands of euros.

What a day-fine actually is, and how the math works

The Finnish Police say one day-fine is calculated by taking net monthly income, subtracting a basic consumption allowance of 255 euros, and dividing the remainder by 60. Maintenance obligations can also reduce the amount. In effect, one day-fine works out at roughly half a day’s disposable income.

That gives you the price of one day-fine. The other variable is how many day-fines you owe, and that rises with the seriousness of the offence. A single offence can carry up to 120 day-fines, while combined offences can reach 240. Multiply the count by the value of each day-fine, and you have the total.

There is a floor built in. The lowest single day-fine is six euros, and the minimum speeding fine for drivers of motor vehicles other than mopeds is 200 euros. There is no comparable upper ceiling on the euro value of a day-fine, which is why very high incomes can produce enormous totals.

Why tie the punishment to income at all

The logic is about equal sting rather than equal price. A 200-euro penalty can be a serious setback for someone on a low income and barely noticeable to someone earning millions. If the point of a fine is to deter, a flat amount does not impose the same burden on both drivers. Scaling the penalty to income tries to make the punishment more comparable.

There is some evidence that larger fines affect behaviour, at least for a while. Economist Martti Kaila examined the sharp jump in fine size once a Finnish driver exceeds the speed limit by more than 20 km/h. His research reports that fines around 200 euros larger cut repeat offending by roughly 15 percent over the following six months, but the effect disappears after 12 months. Drivers also did not cluster just below the threshold to avoid the larger income-based penalty.

The record bills

In 2023, businessman Anders Wiklöf was fined 121,000 euros after being caught driving 82 km/h in a 50 zone on the Åland Islands. It was not his first huge speeding penalty: he had previously been fined 95,000 euros in 2013 and 63,680 euros in 2018.

Former Nokia executive Anssi Vanjoki was hit with a 116,000-euro fine after being caught riding his motorcycle at 75 km/h in a 50 zone, though it was later cut by about 95 percent after evidence showed his income had fallen.

Then there was Jussi Salonoja, heir to a sausage fortune, who at 27 was initially fined 170,000 euros in 2004 for driving 80 km/h in a 40 zone in central Helsinki.

Where the idea came from, and what it says about flat fines

This is not a recent experiment. Finland introduced the day-fine system in 1921, becoming the first Nordic country to build it into its criminal sanctions. The stated aim was to make fines have a more equal impact on people with different financial means, and variations of the idea later spread to other European countries.

What stands out about the day-fine is that it exposes something most fine systems keep hidden. A flat fine feels neutral, like a fact of nature. It isn’t. When a country sets a single number for everyone, it has quietly decided that the same amount of money should count as the same amount of punishment. That is only true if everyone has roughly the same amount of money, and they don’t.

Finland’s system has real costs. Six-figure tickets spark outrage, the totals can look extreme at the top end. We would not pretend it is a clean fix. But the system refuses to pretend that 200 euros means the same thing to a millionaire and to someone scraping by.

Whichever way a country prices a fine, it is making a choice about that. Finland simply makes the choice visible.