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Extra appointments available for booking at the Helsinki service point

Publication date 13.4.2021 10.57 | Published in English on 13.4.2021 at 13.35
Press release

The Finnish Immigration Service makes extra appointments available for booking at the Helsinki service point.

Appointments for April–May will be available every week in our appointment system. Approximately 50 appointments will be added per day. You can follow the situation in our appointment system. Please book only one appointment for yourself in the appointment system, so that as many customers as possible can book their own appointment. 

The service point will also be open on several Saturdays in April–May. The Malmi service point will be open on Saturday 17 April at 9.00–15.00. More information will follow on our opening hours on Saturdays. Follow our customer bulletins. It is not possible to visit the service point with a waiting number on Saturdays. Instead, you must book an appointment to visit the service point on a Saturday.

If you visit a service point with a waiting number you may have to wait outside 

The service point in Helsinki started operating in new premises in Malmi on 6 April 2021. The number of people who have visited the service point with a waiting number has been very large. 

Due to the coronavirus restrictions, we can only let in a small number of people at the same time. For this reason, customers who have visited the service point with a waiting number may have had to wait outside the service point for several hours.

We are very sorry for the inconvenience this is causing our customers. We aim to ease the situation by adding extra appointments. We recruited new employees in March and will be recruiting more staff. 

New appointments will be made available for the summer as well. We are aiming for a one-month waiting time for appointments in Helsinki in July–August.

Pay attention to parking if you come by car

There is no on-site customer parking at the service point. If you come by car, there are parking places (parking free of charge for a limited time) for example along Viljatie and in the multi-storey car parks of Malmintori shopping centre. Do not park in the parking spaces reserved for residents of the properties. See the location of the new office on the map.

Many reasons to submit your application in Enter Finland: 

  •  Your stay in the country is legal when you apply for a residence permit.
    • If you are applying for your first residence permit while already in Finland and submit your application in Enter Finland, your stay in Finland is legal even if you are unable to get an appointment at a service point to prove your identity within three months of submitting the application.

  • The processing time for your application will not be longer even if you cannot prove your identity immediately.

    • When you have proved your identity at a service point, your application is placed in a processing queue according to the date when you have submitted your application in Enter Finland. Applications are always taken up for processing on the basis of the date when the application was submitted. 

    • For example, if you prove your identity at a service point on 1 May 2021 and you have sent your application in Enter Finland on 1 November 2020, your application will be taken up for processing on the basis of the date 1 November 2020.

    • Your application will not expire and you will not lose your money if you cannot prove your identity at a service point within 3 months of submitting the application. The time limit for proving your identity has been extended until 31 August 2021.

  • If you are applying for an extended permit, you may not have to visit a service point to prove your identity.

    • When you start using strong electronic identification in the online service Enter Finland and submit an application for an extended permit, the service will tell you whether you need to visit a service point to prove your identity or not. Read more about strong electronic identification on the page migri.fi/identification

  • If you send an application to renew your residence permit card in Enter Finland, send your application before your card expires. In this case, you can visit a service point later to prove your identity instead of visiting a service point before your current card expires.