Table of Contents
Why This Page Exists
This site covers immigration, tax and company formation. People make consequential decisions on this kind of information: whether a job offer clears a salary threshold, whether a company structure works, how much to show at a consulate.
Getting those wrong is expensive. A refused application and a non-refundable fee. A tax position discovered three years late.
So it is reasonable to ask where the numbers come from, what happens when they cannot be found, and who pays for the site. This page answers all three, and it is the page to hold us to.
Where the Figures Come From
Every factual figure on this site should be traceable to a primary source — the body that sets the rule, not a summary of it.
| Topic | Primary source |
|---|---|
| Income tax, social tax, VAT, corporate tax | Tax and Customs Board (Maksu- ja Tolliamet) |
| Residence permits, quota, salary thresholds | Police and Border Guard Board (Politsei- ja Piirivalveamet) |
| Visas, including the digital nomad visa | Ministry of Foreign Affairs |
| Health insurance | Tervisekassa (Estonian Health Insurance Fund) |
| Wages, population, citizenship shares | Statistics Estonia (Statistikaamet) |
| Company registration and fees | e-Business Register |
| e-Residency | The e-Residency programme's own knowledge base |
| Statute | Riigi Teataja, the official gazette |
Every number on the site is held in one file, config/figures.ts, with a note on where it came from and when it was checked. Pages read from that file rather than restating numbers in prose. That is not a stylistic preference: it is what makes it impossible for the English page and its Russian twin to quote different figures.
What We Do When We Cannot Find Out
We say so, in a box, on the page, and we name what we looked at.
This is the part most sites skip, and it is often the most useful thing on the page. "The Police and Border Guard Board does not publish a 2026 quota utilisation figure; the most recent published number is 803 as at 1 September 2025" is a researched answer. It tells you the pattern, tells you the limit of what is known, and tells you to ask the PPA rather than trusting an inference.
Not printing a figure is a publishable answer
Three examples currently on the site. The CEFR language level for naturalisation: every secondary source says B1, no primary source states it, so no level is given here. The 2026 immigration quota utilisation: not published, so this page gives the 2025 figure and its date. The startup visa income requirement in euros: the law says four times the subsistence level, Startup Estonia still publishes a figure based on the old level, so we state the rule rather than either their stale number or our own arithmetic dressed up as a source.
What We Do When Sources Disagree
We publish the disagreement rather than quietly picking a side.
The digital nomad visa income requirement is the clearest case on this site. Two Estonian embassies say €4,500 gross. The e-Residency programme says €4,500 net. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, elsewhere, lists €132 per day — about €3,960 a month, which reconciles with neither. All three are Estonian government sources.
Silently choosing one would look authoritative and would be a coin flip with someone's application fee. So the page prints all three, says which body actually issues the visa, recommends budgeting on the strictest reading, and tells you to write to your consulate if you are near the line.
What We Do About Stale Figures
Estonia changed a lot of numbers in eighteen months, and a great deal of published guidance has not caught up. Where a wrong figure is still widely circulated, we name it rather than only printing the right one — because a reader who has already seen the wrong number needs to know which of the two to discard.
Income tax is not 24%
The rise was legislated in June 2025 and repealed that December, before it took effect. Several major advisories published 24% and have not corrected it.
There is no €2,500 share capital
Abolished 1 February 2023. It survives only as a liability threshold, which is a different mechanism.
The 14/86 corporate rate is gone
Abolished 1 January 2025, along with the 7% withholding on dividends to natural persons.
The basic exemption no longer tapers
The maksuküür ended on 31 December 2025. Guidance describing an allowance that shrinks with income describes the old system.
How This Site Makes Money
Today
As of August 2026:
- Nothing. There is no affiliate agreement in place, so no outbound link on this site earns anything.
- No advertising network, and no plans for one
- No sponsored posts, and no paid placement in any comparison
- No mailing list to sell — there is no mailing list
What would change if that changes
The commitments that hold either way:
- Any commissioned link is disclosed on the page carrying it, not only here
- A commission never decides what a page recommends, or the order of a table
- Referral fees do not buy editorial coverage or a better write-up
- A provider that pays us nothing can still be the one we recommend
Outbound links to providers run through a redirect on this domain (/go/…) so that clicks can be counted without a third party setting anything on your device. That is a measurement mechanism, not a commercial one — see the privacy policy.
Corrections
If a figure here is wrong, we would rather hear it from you than leave it up.
Write to hello@howtoestonia.com with the page and, if you have it, the source. We will check it against the primary source, and where we are wrong we will fix the figure and change the "last updated" date on the page.
Every page carries the month it was last reviewed. That date means a human looked at the figures on that page in that month — not that the page was published then.
What We Are Not
An information publisher, and nothing else
HowToEstonia.com is not a law firm, immigration adviser, tax adviser, accountant or financial adviser. Nothing on this site is legal, tax or financial advice. It is general information written for a broad audience, and your position depends on facts specific to you — where you live, what treaty applies, what your own country does with an Estonian company.
Where a decision matters, take advice from someone regulated to give it, or confirm it directly with the Estonian body that decides. Several pages here say exactly that, at the specific point where it becomes true.