If you’re weighing a move to the Netherlands on a Highly Skilled Migrant visa or EU Blue Card, the 30% ruling is probably the single biggest number you haven’t fully priced in yet. It’s a Dutch tax facility — officially now called the expat scheme (expatregeling), though almost everyone still calls it the 30% ruling — that lets an eligible employer pay up to 30% of your salary completely tax-free. On a €70,000 salary, that can be worth several thousand euros a year in extra take-home pay. It is also genuinely changing shape for people starting in 2026 and 2027, so the number you see on a 2023 blog post is probably not the number that applies to you.
This is tax-preparation guidance to help you ask the right questions — not tax or legal advice. Confirm your specific numbers and cohort with the Dutch Tax Administration (Belastingdienst) or a Dutch tax adviser before making a decision.
What the 30% ruling actually does
Instead of taxing your full salary, your employer can designate up to 30% of it as a tax-free allowance intended to cover the “extraterritorial costs” of working abroad — higher cost of living, double housing, flights home, and so on — without you having to itemise or prove those costs individually. The other 70% of your salary is taxed normally under Dutch income tax. The maximum duration is 5 years, and your employer has to re-elect how it’s applied (percentage allowance vs. actual cost reimbursement) at the start of each year.
Who actually qualifies (the 2026 conditions)
Per the Dutch government’s own summary of the scheme, five conditions must all be met:
- You’re a salaried employee of a Dutch employer (or a foreign employer that withholds Dutch payroll tax).
- You have expertise that’s scarce in the Dutch labour market. In practice this test is satisfied via the salary threshold below, not a separate skills review — except for a narrow exempt group.
- You meet the minimum taxable salary threshold (the toetsloon), annually indexed. For 2026, that’s a taxable salary (after the 30% carve-out) of €48,013/year for standard applicants, or €36,497/year for employees under 30 who hold a qualifying master’s degree. Below that, the allowance is reduced rather than denied outright. Scientific researchers at designated research institutions and doctors training as medical specialists are exempt from the salary test entirely.
- You were recruited from abroad or transferred within a multinational, and lived more than 150km from the Dutch border for more than 16 of the 24 months before your first working day in the Netherlands. This is the rule that catches people who moved to a Dutch border region (parts of Belgium or Germany near the Netherlands) before taking the job — they fail the distance test even though they’re relocating internationally.
- The Belastingdienst has formally approved your (or rather, your employer’s joint) application.
Source: Netherlands Chamber of Commerce / business.gov.nl — “The 30 percent ruling”, and 2026 threshold figures confirmed by Baker Tilly’s 2026 expat/highly-skilled-migrant threshold summary.
A worked example
Say your Dutch employer offers you a gross salary of €75,000/year, and you qualify for the 30% ruling. Up to €22,500 (30%) of that can be paid tax-free, with the remaining €52,500 taxed under normal Dutch income tax bands. Compare that to a colleague on the same €75,000 gross salary without the ruling, whose entire salary is taxed — the difference in net pay is substantial, often several hundred euros a month, which is exactly why the ruling is such a well-known recruiting tool for Dutch employers hiring internationally. The precise net figure depends on your tax bracket and personal circumstances, so run your own numbers with a Dutch payroll calculator or adviser rather than treating this as exact.
The 2027 change: 30% is becoming a flat 27%
This is the part most 2023–2024-era articles get wrong, because the rules changed twice. The original plan was to taper the allowance from 30% to 20% to 10% over 5 years. That tapering plan was scrapped. Instead, under the enacted Tax Plan amendment:
- From 1 January 2027, the maximum tax-free share drops from 30% to a flat 27% for the remainder of the relevant 5-year term — and the minimum salary threshold rises alongside it.
- Transitional treatment depends on your start date:
- If your ruling started before 1 January 2024, you keep the full 30% rate (at the lower, 2023-era indexed threshold) for your entire 5-year term.
- If your ruling started on or after 1 January 2024, you keep 30% through 2026, then move to the capped 27% rate — at a higher salary threshold — from 1 January 2027 onward.
- A separate change, effective 1 January 2025, abolished the option for 30%-ruling holders to elect partial non-resident taxpayer status (which had exempted foreign savings and investment income from Dutch box 2/3 tax). People who already had the 30% ruling applied to their December 2023 payroll kept a transitional right to elect this status through the end of 2026 only — after that, it’s gone for everyone.
Sources: business.gov.nl — “30 percent ruling compensation down to 27 percent” and business.gov.nl’s regulation page, which also confirms the 2025 box 2/3 change. Several accounting-firm summaries describe the transitional cohorts slightly differently from each other on edge cases (e.g. short interruptions between jobs), so if you’re close to a cutoff date, get your specific situation confirmed directly rather than relying on any single guide — including this one.
Does this affect your visa salary threshold? A common point of confusion
A lot of people assume the 30% ruling lets them accept a lower headline salary and still clear the Highly Skilled Migrant or EU Blue Card minimum, because 30% of a smaller number “grossed up” might look close to the threshold on paper. It doesn’t work that way. Following a Council of State ruling that questioned IND’s consistency on this point, IND clarified in March 2025 that the immigration salary threshold is tested against your full gross salary, before the 30% tax-free carve-out is applied — the ruling is irrelevant to whether you clear the visa’s income bar. For 2026, that means you (or your employer) still need to structure an offer that independently meets the Highly Skilled Migrant thresholds of €5,942/month (30 and over) or €4,357/month (under 30) — the 30% ruling is a tax benefit on top of a qualifying salary, not a way to qualify for a smaller one.
Source: EY Global Tax Alert — “Netherlands clarifies immigration salary threshold for highly skilled foreign nationals in relation to the 30 percent ruling” (21 March 2025 IND clarification).
How to actually apply
The 30% ruling is not something you request as an individual from outside the country — it’s a joint application you and your employer file together with the Belastingdienst, after your employment has started:
- Your employer collects supporting documents (employment contract, proof of your prior residence abroad, qualifications/salary evidence).
- Your employer submits the joint request to the Belastingdienst.
- File within 4 months of your first working day to have the ruling applied retroactively back to your start date. Miss that window and you risk losing retroactive coverage for the early months, even if the request is otherwise approved.
- The Belastingdienst typically decides within about 8 weeks, issuing a formal decision (beschikking) that states your approval period and expiry date.
The ruling does not transfer automatically if you change jobs — your new employer has to file a new joint request, and continuity generally depends on the gap between jobs being short (commonly cited as up to 3 months) and your original 5-year term not having expired.
The practical takeaway
Before you factor the 30% ruling into a Netherlands offer: confirm (a) your prior address genuinely sits more than 150km from the Dutch border for most of the last two years, (b) your gross salary — independent of any tax benefit — clears both the visa threshold and the separate, lower tax-ruling salary test, and (c) which transitional cohort you fall into for the 2027 rate change. None of these are guesswork items; they’re worth a direct question to your employer’s HR/immigration team or a Dutch tax adviser before you sign.
If you’re still mapping out the visa side of a Dutch move, see our guides to the Highly Skilled Migrant visa, the orientation year (zoekjaar) permit if you’re a recent graduate without a job offer yet, and the full 2026 IND fee breakdown for what the visa itself costs on top of any tax planning. And if you want VisaMet’s AI eligibility checks and document screening in your corner once you’re ready to apply, join the waitlist.