Investment Calculator

There isn't one. Estonia has no separate capital gains tax for a resident individual — investment gains are income and are taxed at the ordinary income tax rate of 22%. The same goes for dividends received by a resident individual and for interest. If a source quotes you 15% or 20% for Estonia, it is describing a different country. The rate that matters more than the headline number is the deferral: gains inside a declared investment account are not taxed until money leaves the account.

No, it defers it, and deferral is where the value is. Inside an investeerimiskonto you are taxed only when withdrawals exceed contributions, so tax is not taken out each year and the money that would have gone to it keeps compounding. On a standard example — €1,000 initial, €200 a month, 20 years, 7% — that is worth about €4,691 against an ordinary account where gains are realised and taxed annually.

The opposite, and this catches people out. Because the benefit is deferral rather than a reduced rate, a larger deferred tax compounds into a larger advantage. Estonia's 22% makes the account worth more than a 15% rate would, not less. That is why getting the rate right in the model matters in both directions: too low a rate understates the case for the account.

7% nominal is a common convention for long-run global equities and it is what this calculator defaults to. It is a convention, not a forecast: real returns arrive in a sequence rather than evenly, and the order matters a great deal when you are contributing monthly. The most useful thing to do with the field is change it — seeing how far the answer moves between 5% and 8% tells you more about the uncertainty than any single projection does.

Yes, more than most people expect, because a fee compounds against you for the whole period. Broad index ETFs commonly charge somewhere around 0.05% to 0.25% a year. Put a realistic fee into the advanced fields and compare against zero — on a twenty-year plan the difference is usually a larger number than the fee percentage makes it sound.

The account is not a product a bank sells you — what makes an ordinary cash account an investeerimiskonto is the declaration you make in table 6.5 of your own tax return, naming the account number, the institution and the opening date. Where it sits decides only how much of the bookkeeping falls on you. Four institutions supervised in Estonia both hold one and produce the report that fills table 6.5: LHV, Swedbank and SEB as credit institutions, and Lightyear as an investment firm. At LHV and Swedbank you generate that report in the internet bank and send it before you submit the return, SEB offers a declaration helper at filing time, and Lightyear's reaches the Tax Board automatically. Foreign platforms such as Interactive Brokers, Trading 212, Revolut and XTB are eligible in principle, since the definition covers an account anywhere in the EEA or the OECD, but none of them produces an Estonian report — table 6.5 becomes yours to reconstruct date by date from activity statements.

The deferral ends, and that is the assumption in this model most likely to break. Only an Estonian tax resident may use an investment account: become resident of another state and you must declare the account's closing date in your return and pay the whole deferred income tax liability here, in the year you leave. A projection that assumes tax is paid once at the end of twenty years is therefore assuming twenty years of Estonian residency. If your stay here is open-ended, that is worth weighing before the fee field or the return field, because it changes which account type the arithmetic favours rather than merely changing a number inside it.

Only partly, and the gap is worth understanding. The model applies one Estonian rate once, at the end, on the gain — 22%. Estonia taxes no unrealised gains and has no deemed-distribution regime, so an accumulating fund really does produce no Estonian taxable event until you sell. A distributing fund held outside an investment account is different: where no foreign tax was withheld, the distribution goes in table 8.1 and is taxed at 22% in the year it is received, and you cannot offset a capital loss against it. Inside a declared investment account the same distribution is not a payment out and bears nothing until you withdraw. What no Estonian rate touches at all is withholding at source abroad: US dividends are withheld at 30% by default and 15% under the treaty, and what moves that is the US tax residency form filed with your broker, not the account type.

No to all three. The investment account holds a closed list of financial assets — publicly offered securities, debt securities, fund units other than a small fund with no activity licence, bank deposits, unit-linked life insurance, derivatives, loans through a licensed crowdfunding provider, and since 1 January 2025 crypto bought through a MiCA-authorised provider. Direct property, physical metal, shares in your own OÜ or any unlisted company, unlicensed peer-to-peer lending and crypto from an unauthorised venue are all outside it, and so is anything bought with money that never passed through the account. A gold ETF unit qualifies; a bar in a vault does not. If a meaningful part of your plan is one of those, an OÜ holds them and the investment account never will.

Two costs, and for a monthly buyer the smaller-looking one usually wins. The fund charge is what most people think of — broad index ETFs commonly run 0.05% to 0.25% a year — but currency conversion recurs on every purchase while a commission often does not. Published margins are 0.35% at Lightyear, 0.15% at Trading 212 and 0.5% at XTB; LHV, Swedbank, SEB and Revolut publish no FX figure for investing at all, so ask yours what it charges before you assume it is small. On a €500 monthly buy that is €1.75 against €2.50, repeating for as long as you invest. Buying euro-denominated instruments avoids it entirely.

Before. The default is 7% nominal, which is the usual convention for long-run global equities, and the calculator handles inflation separately by also showing the result as a today's-money figure. That is the line to read if you are trying to judge whether the end number means anything: a projection quoted in the money of twenty years' time flatters itself. Estonian consumer prices rose 2.2% in the year to July 2026, for a sense of scale, though a single year's reading is not the rate to assume for two decades. The more useful thing to do with both fields is move them — how far the answer travels between 5% and 8% tells you more about the uncertainty than any one projection does.

It is the only Estonian route with relief on the way in, which is a genuinely different shape from what this calculator models. Third pillar contributions are deductible up to 15% of your Estonian taxable income and no more than €6,000 a year — worth up to €1,320 back at the 22% rate, and capped by the tax you actually paid. That cap is separate from the €1,200 ceiling on training expenses, gifts and donations, so you can have both. The trade-off is access and the exit rate: a one-off payment before pension age, or one paid to a successor, is taxed at 22%; a one-off at pension age with 5+ years accumulated is 10%; and long-term periodic payments from pension age, made at least every 3 months, are 0%. Pension age is 55 if you joined before 2021 and 60 if you joined from 2021. The investment account has no size limit and no lock-up at all.