Linna Leikas. Kuvaaja: Topi Leikas

About Finnish Museums

The Finnish museum sector is broad and varied. There are over 300 professionally maintained museum sites in Finland, as well as several hundred non-professional museums.

The National Gallery, the National Museum of Finland and the Finnish Museum of Natural History LUOMUS are national museums that also participate in the steering of museums that fall under their sphere of operations.

In addition, there are 32 museums with regional responsibility and 17 museums with national responsibility in Finland. The tasks of museums with regional responsibility are divided into three areas: promoting regional museum operations, carrying out cultural environment work and implementing regional art museum tasks. A museum with national responsibility must represent a nationally significant industry, be necessary from the point of view of the industry, take care of a nationally significant collection and perform the duties assigned to a responsible museum by law.

Finland’s local museums include both professionally and non-professionally managed museums. Professionally managed museums have at least two employees who are full-time museum professionals. In addition to these, Finland has hundreds of local museums and collection exhibitions maintained primarily by non-profit organisations and municipalities that are mainly open in the summer.

In accordance with the Museums Act, Finland supports the operations of municipal museums as well as museums maintained by foundations and associations by providing statutory state aid, the amount of which is determined based on the museums’ number of employees in person-years. More information on the operations of professionally managed museums is provided in the annually published Museum Statistics.