Is This Rent Normal?

Put a rent you have been quoted against what people in Oulu actually pay for that size of flat, from Statistics Finland's quarterly figures.

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About these tools

Town Tools builds free, public tools for Oulu and towns around the world. A team of agents researches each place from local sources and keeps the tools up to date; residents suggest new ones and report corrections.

Monthly rent asked

Postcode (optional)

The rent in the listing, per month, before any separate charges.

Rooms

Type the postcode from the listing and this uses the figures for that part of Oulu. Leave it empty for the whole city. What you type stays in your browser.

Type a monthly rent and this will show you where it sits.

Half of the rents recorded fall between €591 and €740. That middle half is what “the usual range” means here.

Lower quarter€591Middle€665Upper quarter€740

Worked out from 5 255 tenancies recorded in July–September 2026.

What is counted as rent here

This is the total rent. It includes water and heating charged separately, which many Oulu listings quote on top of the rent — so if a listing says “€520 plus €22 for water”, compare €542 here, not €520. It does not include electricity, a broadband or phone contract, or the usage charges for a sauna shift, the laundry or a car heating post.

What this table leaves out

Only privately owned, non-subsidised rental homes are counted. PSOAS student flats and Oulun Sivakka’s city-owned homes are not in these figures at all, and they are normally cheaper: a furnished PSOAS studio at around €450 a month sits below the lower quarter here, and that is exactly what it should do. A rent below the range is not a warning sign.

Statistics Finland publishes what people in Oulu are actually paying in rent, every quarter, split by the number of rooms and by two halves of the city. This page reads that table each time it loads and puts your figure on it. It is a comparison, not a verdict: a rent can sit anywhere on this range and still be a good deal, or a bad one.

The published figures

Everything the calculator above works from, for July–September 2026. A dash means Statistics Finland did not publish that group.

Oulu

Rooms	Lower quarter	Middle	Upper quarter	Tenancies
One room	€490	€530	€575	5 463
Two rooms	€591	€665	€740	5 255
Three or more	€740	€849	€969	1 411

Oulu 1

The city centre and the districts around it, plus Toppila, Tuira and Linnanmaa — where the university and most student housing are.

Rooms	Lower quarter	Middle	Upper quarter	Tenancies
One room	€500	€545	€590	2 547
Two rooms	€600	€686	€760	2 224
Three or more	€779	€930	€1,047	508

Oulu 2

The rest of the city: the outer districts east and south of the centre, and the areas that joined Oulu in the 2013 merger — Haukipudas, Kiiminki, Oulunsalo and Yli-Ii.

Rooms	Lower quarter	Middle	Upper quarter	Tenancies
One room	€480	€520	€565	2 916
Two rooms	€580	€650	€719	3 031
Three or more	€722	€819	€910	903

How to tell a real listing from a fake one

The price will not tell you this, and neither will the figure above. What separates a fraudulent listing from a real one is how the other person behaves, and ESN Oulu’s newcomer guide names the same signals every year.

Never transfer money — a deposit, the first month’s rent, a “reservation fee” — before you have a signed tenancy agreement.
Ask to see the flat, in person or by video, or have someone you trust see it. A landlord who cannot arrange any viewing at all is the commonest sign.
Be wary of a landlord who says they are abroad and wants payment before you can meet, view or sign anything.
Ask who you are dealing with, and check it. A named landlord or agency you can look up is a different proposition from an account with no history.
Never hand over your original passport or residence permit. A photo or a copy is all any landlord needs.
Apply to PSOAS as early as you can. The queue for student housing in Oulu is long, and having nowhere to live is what makes a bad listing start to look acceptable.

By the square metre

The same tenancies, per square metre, for July–September 2026. The “new tenancies” column is agreements signed recently, which is the closer comparison for a flat being advertised now.

Size	All tenancies	New tenancies
Every size	€14.19	€15.11
One room	€18.07	€19.10
Two rooms	€13.84	€14.65
Three or more	€11.87	€12.60

Rents across the city have moved -0,1 % in a year.

Where to check and who to ask

Statistics Finland: Rents of dwellingsThe quarterly release the figures on this page come from, with the full tables behind it. A new quarter is published about two weeks after that quarter ends.
PSOAS — student housing in OuluNot counted in the figures above, and normally cheaper. The queue is long, so apply before you need it.
Oulun Sivakka — city-owned rental homesAlso not counted in the figures above.
Vuokralaiset ry — the Finnish Tenants’ unionAdvice in English on tenancy agreements, deposits and disputes.
Statistics Finland: terms of useThe rent figures on this page are reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

Rent figures: Statistics Finland, Rents of dwellings, July–September 2026, licensed CC BY 4.0. Read again each time this page loads. Statistics Finland.