30% Ruling Requirements 2026: Do You Qualify? (Full Checklist)

The five core requirements at a glance

The 30% ruling (officially the Expat Scheme, or Expatregeling, since 2025) is the Netherlands' main tax break for incoming international workers. When it applies, your employer can pay up to 30% of your salary as a tax-free reimbursement for the extra costs of working from abroad. It is worth tens of thousands of euros over its term, but it is not automatic, and every condition has to hold at the same time. Here is the short version. The detail follows below.

• Recruited or transferred from abroad. Your employer brought you in from outside the Netherlands.
• The distance test. You lived more than 150 km from the Dutch border for at least 16 of the 24 months before your first working day.
• A real Dutch employment relationship. You work for an employer that withholds Dutch payroll tax (loonheffing).
• The salary norm. Your taxable wage clears €48,013 in 2026, or €36,497 if you are under 30 with a qualifying master's degree.
• A granted decision. You and your employer ask the Belastingdienst for the ruling, and it grants it in a written beschikking.

1. Recruited or transferred from abroad

You have to be hired from abroad. That means your Dutch employer recruited you while you were living outside the Netherlands, or transferred you in from a group company abroad. It does not mean you moved to the Netherlands on your own and then started looking for work here. The Belastingdienst checks who started the hiring. Useful evidence is a dated job offer, written correspondence showing the employer reached out first, and a contract signed before you arrived.

Scrutiny on this point has tightened since the 2025 reforms, so keep the trail. The original job posting, the first outreach message, the dated offer letter, and the signed contract, all timestamped before your move, make this condition easy to defend. Our step-by-step guide to applying for the 30% ruling covers how to present this evidence in the application file.

2. The 150 km / 16-of-24-months rule

You must have lived more than 150 km from the Dutch border, measured in a straight line, for at least 16 of the 24 months before your first Dutch working day. The distance is from the border, not from Amsterdam, which is what trips people up. Large parts of Belgium, Luxembourg, the western strip of Germany, and northern France sit inside the 150 km zone, so residents there often do not qualify even though they live far from the Randstad.

Short visits to the Netherlands during those 24 months (a holiday, a conference, a brief work trip) do not break the rule, but they should be declared on the form. If you have spent time here before, that history can also shorten the maximum duration of the ruling, so it is worth getting the dates right from the start.

3. A real Dutch employment relationship

The ruling is a payroll tax facility, so it needs a payroll. You have to be an employee of an employer that acts as a Dutch withholding agent (inhoudingsplichtige), meaning it withholds and remits Dutch payroll tax on your wage. In practice that is a Dutch company, or the Dutch branch or payroll of a foreign one.

Pure freelancers and the self-employed do not qualify, because there is no employer withholding payroll tax on their behalf. The common workaround is to set up a Dutch BV and become its employee, but then all the other conditions, including the salary norm, still have to be met through that employment.

4. The 2026 salary norm (with figures)

This is the condition most people miscalculate. The salary norm is tested against your taxable wage, which is the part left after the 30% exemption, not your headline gross. So you need a gross salary high enough that 70% of it still clears the norm.

The gross figures are the taxable norm divided by 70%: €48,013 ÷ 0.70 = €68,590, and €36,497 ÷ 0.70 ≈ €52,139. The reduced norm applies only while you are under 30 and hold a master's degree recognised in the Netherlands. The year you turn 30, you move to the standard norm from the next pay period, so a salary that was fine at 29 can fall short at 30.

Meeting the salary norm is also how you prove "specific expertise". There is no separate skills or degree test on the standard route: clearing the wage threshold is the test. One cap to note: for 2026 the exemption only applies to salary up to €262,000 (the so-called Balkenende norm), and any wage above that is taxed normally. If you are near the line, read our breakdown of the 2026 salary threshold before you commit to a number.

5. A granted Belastingdienst decision

The ruling does not start because you meet the conditions. It starts because the Belastingdienst says so in writing. You and your employer file a joint request, and if it is approved you receive a beschikking that states the start date, the end date, the percentage, and any conditions. Only then can your employer apply the tax-free split on your payslips.

This is why the application itself matters as much as your eligibility. A complete, accurate file gets a clean decision. A file with a missing diploma translation, an unsigned employer statement, or thin recruitment evidence gets a request for information that pauses the clock, or in the worst case a rejection you then have to object to within six weeks.

"Erkend referent" is not a 30% ruling requirement

Here is the confusion worth clearing up. The 30% ruling does not require your employer to be a recognised sponsor (erkend referent). The ruling is a payroll tax facility granted by the Belastingdienst. It has nothing to do with the recognised-sponsor register.

Recognised-sponsor status is an immigration concept. It sits with the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (the IND), not the Belastingdienst. An employer needs to be a recognised sponsor to bring someone in on the highly skilled migrant (kennismigrant) residence permit. That is a separate track, with its own salary thresholds set by the IND, which are not the same numbers as the 30% ruling salary norm.

The two get mixed up because many internationals arrive on the highly skilled migrant permit (which does need a recognised-sponsor employer) and then apply for the 30% ruling on top. Two processes, two authorities, two rulebooks. You can hold a 30% ruling without your employer being a recognised sponsor: an EU national who needs no work permit at all is the clearest case. And an employer can be a recognised sponsor while plenty of its staff never qualify for the 30% ruling. Check each requirement against the right authority.

The 4-month application window

Timing decides whether the ruling reaches back to your first day. File the request within four months of your first Dutch working day, and once approved the ruling is backdated to that first day. File later, and it starts from the first day of the month after you submit, going forward only. You do not lose the ruling by being late, you lose the back-months between your start date and your filing.

So a first working day of 1 June 2026 gives you until 1 October 2026 to file for full backdating. If you have already passed the window, our guide on the application process explains what is still worth doing.

30% now, 27% from 2027

The headline rate is 30% through 2026. From 1 January 2027, the exemption drops to 27%. The cut is not retroactive (it only applies from 2027 onward), but it is not a pure grandfather either: the only group that keeps 30% for the full term is people who were already using the ruling before 2024. For everyone whose ruling started in 2024 or later, the rate runs at 30% through 2026 and then switches to 27% from 2027. The rate you start at tracks when your ruling takes effect, which is tied to your start date and timely filing.

That cut-over has a few moving parts (who is grandfathered, what happens to a late-2026 start date, the separate loss of partial non-resident status). We keep all of that in one place rather than repeat it here. See the dedicated post on the 2027 changes to the 30% ruling for the full mechanics.

Worked example: Priya from Bangalore

Do you qualify? Check in two minutes

If all five conditions hold, you are very likely eligible. The fastest way to confirm your own situation is to run it through our 30% ruling eligibility checker, which walks through the distance test, the recruitment condition, and the salary norm in a few questions. To see what the ruling is actually worth at your salary, our salary and savings calculator applies the 2026 figures and shows your estimated monthly net gain.

For the wider picture (documents, the joint form, processing times), the 30% ruling overview and our application guide cover the rest of the process from eligibility to a granted decision.