The 30% Ruling in the Netherlands, Explained

The 30%-regeling is the single biggest tax break available to expats working in the Netherlands: up to 30% of your gross salary paid out tax-free instead of taxed at your normal rate. Here's who qualifies, how it's applied, and what's changed in recent reforms.

What the ruling actually does

Normally your full gross salary is taxed under Dutch income tax (box 1). With the 30% ruling, your employer can pay up to 30% of your gross salary as a tax-free allowance, and only the remaining 70% is taxed. The allowance is meant to offset the "extraterritorial costs" of relocating — housing, cost-of-living differences, and so on — but you don't need to prove you actually incurred those costs; it's applied as a flat percentage.

Who qualifies

• Recruited from abroad — you were hired or transferred from outside the Netherlands, and for most of the 24 months before your Dutch employment started, you lived more than 150km from the Dutch border.
• Specific expertise — demonstrated in practice by meeting a minimum taxable salary threshold, set and indexed annually by the Belastingdienst (Dutch tax authority). Reduced thresholds apply for people under 30 with a Dutch master's degree or equivalent.
• Application — your employer applies jointly with you to the Belastingdienst, ideally within 4 months of your start date to have it backdated to day one.

Duration and the tax-free percentage

Both the maximum duration and the tax-free percentage have been revised by Dutch law more than once in recent years — including a reduction from the original 8-year maximum, and adjustments to the flat 30% figure for later years of the ruling. Because these figures are politically live and change with the Dutch budget (Prinsjesdag) most years, treat any specific number you read (including older articles) as provisional and confirm the current rule before relying on it for a job offer or contract negotiation.

This guide deliberately avoids stating a specific current duration or percentage breakdown, since those particular figures are the ones most likely to be out of date by the time you read this. Use the calculator below, which is kept current, or check directly with the Belastingdienst.

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