Who creates the citizenship test?

Someone has to actually write the questions. A citizenship test needs a question bank, a pass threshold, translated materials, and a system to deliver it, and none of that gets put together by the Ministry of the Interior itself. Working out who does that job turned out to be one of the quieter but more consequential threads in Finland's citizenship-test reform.

Migri administers, someone else designs

The government's April 2026 bill settled the basic division of labor. The Finnish Immigration Service, Migri, would take on the new administrative duties: registering applicants, running test sessions, handling results. But writing the actual content, questions on Finnish society, history, legislation, and rights, was a different kind of work, and the bill explicitly left room for Migri to commission an outside organisation to do it. A university was the option officials pointed to from early on. Migri's own staff had said as much back in December 2025, when the draft legislation first went out for public comment.

That division makes sense. Migri knows how to run a government service at scale. It doesn't have in-house expertise in psychometrics, question design, or how to write a fair, legally defensible civics exam. Universities do.

The University of Helsinki wins the tender

In August 2026, the University of Helsinki won the competitive tender to design the exam. The ministry allocated roughly 800,000 euros to the project, covering both the test itself and the study material meant to accompany it. That budget has to stretch across a genuinely large task: writing enough questions to cover eight subject areas, in two languages, with enough variation that the test can't just be memorized from leaked question banks.

Public drafts of the format point to a test of 20 to 40 multiple-choice and true/false questions, with roughly 70 percent needed to pass. Those numbers came out of legislative drafting rather than any announcement from the university itself, so treat them as the design brief rather than a locked-in final spec.

Why the study material matters as much as the test

Every official announcement about the test, going back to the December 2025 consultation draft, has repeated the same commitment: the questions would be based on material published in advance, not a hidden bank of trivia. That's partly a fairness argument and partly a legal one. A citizenship test that's genuinely learnable holds up against a discrimination challenge in a way that a test designed to trip people up doesn't.

Migri is expected to publish that preparation material, based on the University of Helsinki's work, sometime in autumn 2026. Applicants will have a few months to study it before the test requirement actually starts applying to new applications on 1 March 2027.

What's still unknown

A tender result and a budget don't answer everything. It isn't yet public how the test will actually be delivered, at Migri offices, dedicated testing centres, or online, how often sessions will run, or what a retake looks like if someone fails on their first attempt. Those operational details are exactly what Migri's autumn 2026 guidance is supposed to cover. Until then, the honest answer to "how do I prepare" is: wait for the university's material, not for rumors about what might be on it. For where this fits in the bigger picture, see the timeline.