Finnish national identity card | |
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![]() Front of the card | |
Type | Identity card, optional replacement for passport for travel to EU and EFTA countries. |
Issued by | ![]() |
Purpose | Identification, travel |
Valid in | ![]() ![]() ![]() Rest of Europe (except Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine) 1 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ^1 : If arriving from another EU/EFTA country. |
Eligibility | Finnish citizenship |
Expiration | 5 years |
The Finnish identity card (Finnish: henkilökortti; Swedish: identitetskort) is one of two official identity documents in Finland, the other being the Finnish passport. Any citizen or resident can get an identification card.[2] Finnish citizens will get indication of citizenship on the card. It is available as an electronic ID card (Finnish: sähköinen henkilökortti; Swedish: elektroniskt identitetskort), which enables logging into certain services on the Internet, local computers or adding digital signatures into LibreOffice ODF documents or creating DigiDoc formatted containers that also allows encryption during content transfer. ID card is applied at a police station and it is issued by the police.
Possession of an ID card or any ID document is non-compulsory in Finland, though interactions with officials and companies, like voting, picking up a parcel from Posti offices or buying alcohol when a salesperson suspects buyer to be under 18 or 30 years old, can be difficult or impossible without an ID card, a passport or a driving licence.
Driving licences are also widely used for general identification purposes even though they are not officially recognised as such. Some places, such as the postal service,[3] accept social security cards with the photograph of the bearer but they are not widely used and have not been issued in a long time.
In domestic non-electronic identification the driving licence has remained in a leading position, since most of the population have to have a licence anyway, and a driving licence is valid for almost every situation where non-electronic personal identification is needed.
In some cases, an emergency ID card, valid between 15 days to 3 months, is issued.