What This Site Is
HowToEstonia.com publishes practical guides for people moving to Estonia, living here, or running an Estonian company from somewhere else. e-Residency, residence permits, tax, healthcare, banking.
It exists because the English-language material on Estonia is unusually unreliable — not badly written, unreliable in a specific way. Estonia changed a lot of numbers between 2024 and 2026, then repealed one of the changes, and a great deal of otherwise reputable guidance froze somewhere in the middle of that. Several major tax advisories still publish an income tax rate that was repealed before it ever took effect.
That is a solvable problem, and solving it is the whole idea: find the primary source, print the figure with its date, and say so plainly when the primary source does not exist.
How It Is Made
Primary sources only
Every figure traces to the body that sets the rule — the Tax and Customs Board, the Police and Border Guard Board, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Statistics Estonia — not to a summary of it.
One file for every number
All figures live in a single configuration file with a provenance note and a date. Pages read from it. That is why the English page and its Russian twin can never quote different numbers.
Gaps are published
Where a figure could not be sourced, the page says what was looked at and what was not found, instead of guessing. That is often the most useful thing on the page.
The full method — sources, disputes, stale figures, corrections, and how the site makes money — is set out in the editorial guidelines.
Every Page in Two Languages
Russian is the mother tongue of 29% of Estonia's population and a further 38% speak it. That is not a footnote here: every guide on this site exists in English and in Russian, and the Russian version is a twin rather than a translation in name.
What twinned means
The two versions share:
- The same sections in the same order
- The same section anchors, so a deep link works in both
- The same components with the same data
- The same figures, read from the same file
- The same questions in the FAQ
What differs
Only what should:
- Number notation — comma decimals, euro sign after the figure
- Estonian legal terms, kept in Estonian because that is what the form says
- Quotations, given in the original with a translation beside them
A build check reads the rendered Russian pages and fails if English prose has leaked into one. That is a real failure mode rather than a hypothetical: shared components default to English, and a leak is otherwise invisible until a reader finds it.
Who Makes It
The site is written and run by Allen Shor, who also runs allenshor.com.
Bio to be written by the site owner. A short paragraph belongs here — why Estonia, what you did before, and what your connection to the subject is. It is left blank rather than filled with plausible-sounding invention: an about page that fabricates its author's background undermines the one thing the rest of the site is selling.
Get in Touch
Corrections are genuinely welcome, and the fastest way to improve the site. If a figure here is wrong, write to hello@howtoestonia.com with the page and, if you have it, the source.
What this site cannot do
It cannot tell you whether your application will succeed, review your documents, or advise on your tax position. It is an information publisher, not a law firm or a tax adviser. Where a decision matters, take advice from someone regulated to give it — the editorial guidelines set out where that line sits.