About the data and the method
Suomiatlas brings the statistics of Finland's ~3,000 postal code areas onto one map: population, income, education, households, buildings, workplaces, housing sale prices, crime and air quality. Every figure comes from open government data.
What the data covers
The base is Statistics Finland's Paavo dataset: 104 variables for every postal code area, grouped into population, education, income, households, buildings, workplaces and economic activity.
On top of that come realised housing sale prices per square metre, offences recorded by the police, and air quality observations from the Finnish Meteorological Institute.
History goes back to 2010. The newest vintage appears as Statistics Finland publishes it, so the most recent year available is typically a couple of years behind the current one.
How the figures are computed
Paavo variables are shown as published — never rounded, imputed or estimated where a value is missing.
Derived indicators such as the share of higher-educated residents or population density are computed directly from those variables. Composite scores (0–100) rank each component nationally, trim the extremes, and take a weighted mean.
Benchmarks place an area at three levels: the whole country, its municipality, and its region.
What the data cannot tell you
A postal code area is not a neighbourhood. Its boundaries follow postal delivery rather than how residents see the place, and one postal code can contain very different blocks.
Statistics Finland withholds figures for very small areas to protect privacy. A withheld value appears as missing, never as zero. Trend indicators are not computed for areas under 30 inhabitants.
Crime figures are municipal. Police record offences per municipality, so a postal code area shows its municipality's rate, not its own.
Air quality is the nearest measuring station's reading, and the station's distance is always shown alongside it. It is not a measurement taken inside the area. The stations are mostly run by municipal air quality networks — HSY's in the capital region — and the Finnish Meteorological Institute distributes the observations.
Workplace statistics are published about two years behind the rest of Paavo.
Composite scores are unstable for very small and non-residential areas, such as hospital or industrial postal codes.
The figures show co-occurrence, not causation — worth keeping in mind especially when comparing income and crime.
Data sources
Licence and attribution
The statistics shown here are open data, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Figures, tables and charts may be reused freely, including commercially, as long as the source is credited: the original publisher and Suomiatlas. Machine-readable licence details are available at /api/v1/license. Read the licence terms
The nearby places on the map have their own licences. Stops are Digitransit open data (CC BY 4.0). Daycare centres come first from the Suomi.fi service catalogue (CC0 1.0); an OpenStreetMap kindergarten is shown only when no daycare from the catalogue lies within 250 metres. Schools, higher and further education, health and medical centres, pharmacies, supermarkets and libraries come from OpenStreetMap (© OpenStreetMap contributors), and the database built from them, daycare centres included, is available under ODbL 1.0. Places are taken from OpenStreetMap by the tags amenity=kindergarten, school, university, college, clinic, doctors, pharmacy and library, and shop=supermarket. Laboratories and alternative medicine are left out of health centres, folk high schools and adult-education centres out of higher education, mobile libraries out of libraries, and unnamed entries, preschool groups, schools, playparks and family daycare homes out of daycare centres. Every stop and place is assigned to the postal code area whose boundary contains it, and a place mapped as an area to its interior point. Swimming pools and beaches come from LIPAS, the national register of sports facilities (University of Jyväskylä, Lipas Liikuntapaikat.fi, CC BY 4.0), counting sites in use. A beach whose point falls just into the water goes to the postal code LIPAS gives it, when that area is within 500 metres. Coverage varies by municipality, so a missing place does not mean there is none. Read the ODbL licence
For press
The paragraph below is meant to be copied as it stands, and the logos and screenshots may be published without asking. Per-area figures and ready-made charts are available by email — usually the same day.
Ready-to-use paragraph:
Suomiatlas is an open-data service that brings the statistics of Finland's ~3,000 postal code areas onto one map: population, income, education, housing prices per square metre, crime and air quality. The data is open data from Statistics Finland and the Finnish Meteorological Institute, published under CC BY 4.0.Get in touch →
