Finland’s fairway dues are the highest in the Baltic Sea region. Furthermore, the allocation of fees is unfair: some ships arriving in our country pay very high fairway dues, while others manage with significantly lower fees regardless of the use of fairway maintenance services. Our neighboring country, Sweden, switched to an environmentally-based fairway dues decades ago, and now Estonia is following.
What are fairway dues?
A ship arriving in a Finnish port pays a fairway dues to the state. The amount of the fee depends on the type of ship (cargo ship or passenger ship), ice class and net tonnage. There is a maximum amount per call for a single fairway dues. A passenger ship pays a fairway dues a maximum of 30 times and a cargo ship a maximum of 10 times during a calendar year.
The level of the fairway dues is determined in relation to the costs incurred by the state for providing services required by coastal merchant shipping, such as fairway maintenance and fairway investments, icebreaking, maritime traffic control and hydrographic surveying. The largest of these costs is icebreaking, which covers approximately 50–60 percent of the total costs.
The fairway dues were halved at the beginning of 2015 as compensation for the estimated harm of the Sulphur Directive. The halving has been continued for a decade, but has been abandoned since the beginning of this year.
Last year, we conducted an analysis for the Estonian Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure of the level of fairway dues in Estonia, Finland, Sweden and Latvia. In summary, Finland and Sweden were the most expensive, followed by Estonia and Latvia. Now that Finland doubled its fairway dues, it is clearly the most expensive.
The injustice of fairway dues
Ten years ago, I read on the blog of then-MP Osmo Soininvaara his views on fairway fees under the title “Fairway fees are a mess of cross-subsidies”. I was delighted that one of our country’s leading politicians had taken the time to explain this complicated fairway fee system. I still believe that he is the only MP who has ever done this (please tell me if there are others). Let us quote Soininvaara (15.6.2013):
“Fairway fees collected from ships should equal approximately the costs of maintaining fairways and icebreaking…. some ships clearly pay too much (fairway fees) so that others can pay far too little. The same can be expressed in another way, that some traffic is secretly taxed and some is secretly subsidized.
… The most blatantly overtaxed is the cruise ship that comes to Helsinki in the summer, because more than half of its fairway dues consist of icebreaking costs and because it only visits Finland once a year and is a passenger ship.”
The situation has not changed in 12 years. Fairway dues are still not paid according to the use of fairways or icebreaking, but for example ships arriving at the Port of Helsinki pay a considerable part of the entire country’s fairway dues, even though icebreakers have not served the Port of Helsinki for years. It can also be stated that ships that visit our country less frequently, the so-called spot traffic, support ships in regular traffic, i.e. liner traffic.
A new basis for fairway dues
Sweden already switched to a model in 1998 where fairway dues are not paid according to ice class and number of visits as in Finland, but based on the environmental friendliness of ships. The differences between the weakest and best categories are large. The best-class ships pay only 10 percent of the fee paid by the worst-class ships. Environmental friendliness is calculated using an index (CSI – Clean Shipping Index), which takes into account sulfur, nitrogen and carbon dioxide emissions as well as chemicals, waste, wastewater and particles.
Estonia announced last autumn that it also intends to introduce environmentally-based fees, with which it will support low-emission ships. The public has not yet been told how this environmental friendliness is calculated.
Is it time for Finland to review the entire basis of fairway fees? The current system is unfair and full of hidden subsidies, because the payers are largely ships that use only a small number of services. One option would be to determine the amount of the fee according to the actual use of the fairway and icebreaking. Another option would be to decide to support the green transition of shipping by following the example of Sweden and Estonia in introducing environmentally-based fees. The decision here is primarily political: do we want to set fees based on usage or encourage the development of zero-emissions? In any case, change is necessary.
The article was previously published in Navigator Magazine, an online magazine for maritime professionals, on February 17, 2025.
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