Paying your membership fees

There are two ways to pay your membership fees. The easiest way is to authorise your employer to deduct the membership fees direct from your pay. You can also pay the membership fees yourself. The PAM membership fee is 1.5% of the gross salary of all income earned during the membership, even if the payment date is after the end of the membership, and it includes the unemployment fund membership fee. You can deduct membership fees from your taxes.

Pay membership fee for every job

If you work for many employers, you should pay membership fee for the income from all your employment relationships. This is important if you become unemployed: the earnings-related unemployment allowance only applies to the employment relationships for which you have paid the membership fee. Also, if you would need legal assistance, it only covers the employment relationships that you have paid membership fee for.

The month you join is free for new members

The calendar month a new member joins PAM is free (no membership fee) starting 1 July 2022. The free month when joining does not apply to members that have resigned and re-joined within 12 months.

Easy fee: employer collection

Authorise your employer to deduct the membership fee direct from your pay – it’s the easiest way. Therefore, you don’t need monthly to calculate yourself the amount of the membership fee, which is 1,5% of your gross pay. Instead, your employer can take care of this for you. All you have to do is sign a membership fee collection agreement with your employer and check your monthly payslip to make sure that the fee has been deducted correctly. Your employer is required to give you a payslip. You can authorise your employer to collect your fees as follows:

• Fill in an online collection agreement. Choose this method if you would like PAM to submit the agreement to your employer.
• Fill in a printable collection agreement (in Finnish). Choose this method if you prefer to submit the agreement to your employer yourself.

Your employer cannot start collecting membership fees from your pay until you have signed a written agreement on collection of trade union membership fees.

Your employer will only start collecting membership fees as from the month following signature of the collection agreement. If you joined PAM in the middle of a month and would like your membership to become valid immediately on your joining date, rather than from the beginning of the following month, you should pay the membership fee for this partial month yourself. For this purpose, we will send you a bank credit transfer form. Here’s how to figure out the amount of your membership fee payable for a partial month:

First calculate the amount of your membership fee for a full month as follows: valid membership fee rate multiplied by your gross pay for the month of joining divided by 100.
Example using the membership fee rate of 1.5% and gross pay of €1,500: 0,015 x €1500 = 22,50 €.

Based on the result, calculate the amount of membership fee payable for the partial month: membership fee for a full month divided by 21 multiplied by the number of working days from the joining date to the end of month.

Example using 10 working days from the joining date to the end of month: €22.50 ÷ 21 × 10 = €10.70.

How to pay membership fees yourself

The easiest way to keep your membership up to date is to authorise your employer to deduct the fee from your pay automatically and simply check the deduction on your payslip every month.

If employer collection is not possible for some reason, or if you don’t want to use it, the easiest way to pay membership fees is to use e-invoicing, available as from the beginning of 2017.

E-invoicing

You can activate e-invoicing through your online banking service. Once you do so, you will automatically receive a monthly e-invoice to your online banking service with the correct reference number.

The amount payable on each invoice is always the same as the amount of membership fee that you paid the previous month. If necessary, you can change the amount before confirming the invoice in your online banking service, if your pay for the month in question was different from the previous month.

Membership fee calculator.

Create e-invoicing contract

1. Log in to your online bank and create e-invoice.
2. Choose Palvelualojen ammattiliitto PAM from among the list of e-invoicers.
3. Use your personal ID number (henkilötunnus) on your e-invoice request.

Using e-invoicing

1. PAM sends you the membership fee invoice to your online bank on the 25th of every month. The payment date is the 15th of the next month.
2. The invoice will automatically have the sum you paid last month. If your income varies, you need to change the sum for the month yourself.
3. There is a link in the e-invoice to the membership fee calculator that you can use to calculate your fee for the month.

Canceling e-invoicing

If you don't want to receive e-invoices anymore, cancel the e-invocing in your online bank.

Pay in the e-service

If you cannot or do not want to use e-invoices, you can pay the membership fee yourself through the e-service when you receive your pay every month (log in with your online banking codes or mobile ID).

You can pay your membership fees using a reference list with a dedicated reference number for each month, which you will receive when you first join and at the beginning of every subsequent year. If you have lost your list of reference numbers, you can find it in the e-service.

Please note that if you use e-invoicing, you don’t need to deal with reference numbers yourself, as they will automatically be added to your monthly e-invoices.

Calculating the membership fee

Membership fees are payable

• for all taxable earnings, benefits and bonuses paid by your employer;
• for holiday compensation paid by your employer;
• for part-time work, even if the Unemployment Fund collects a membership fee for the adjusted unemployment allowance paid for the same period;
• for any allowances and benefits paid to you by the Unemployment Fund.

Formula for calculating membership fees

Calculate the correct amount of membership fee for each month from your payslip as follows: valid membership fee rate multiplied by your gross pay (= taxable income) divided by 100.

Example using the 2022 membership fee rate of 1.5% and gross pay of €1,500: 1.5 × €1,500 ÷ 100 = €22.50.