After you graduate
Rules read 17 Aug 2026
What Netherlands's own immigration authority currently publishes. Not a ranking, not a guarantee, and not the same as what any agent or forum will tell you. Whether someone actually obtains residence depends on occupation, points, funds and policy that can change between application and graduation.
Money you must prove before the visa
€1,130.77per month, for a student at a university or hbo (higher professional education) institution — the IND publishes this as a monthly figure and it is stored as one, not multiplied out
Shown as a balance in a bank account. You keep control of it.
Figure published for: valid from 1 January 2026 up to and including 31 December 2026, in the IND's own wording — the table is headed 'Study amounts 2026' and is reissued for each calendar year This amount is revised regularly, so check it again before you transfer anything.
This is the rate for higher professional education (hbo) or university. A student at secondary education or senior secondary vocational education (mbo) level needs less: € 928.58 per month. There is a separate route where someone already in the Netherlands finances the study instead, and then the test is on that person's income rather than the student's savings: for an hbo or university student the financier must have a gross SV (social-security) salary of at least € 3,467.77 per month without holiday allowance (€ 3,654.73 with it) if married, in a registered partnership or cohabiting, or € 2,766.67 without holiday allowance (€ 2,897.54 with it) if single or a single parent — those financier amounts run from 1 July 2026 to 31 December 2026, a different validity window from the student amounts above, so the two halves of this rule change on different dates.
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Work during study
An international student holding a residence permit for study purposes at a Dutch university or institute of higher professional education (HBO) may work, but only if their employer first obtains a work permit (tewerkstellingsvergunning, TWV) for them from the Employee Insurance Agency (UWV) — the right to work is not automatic the way it is for on-campus work in some other countries. Within that TWV, a student may work up to 16 hours per week during the academic year, or full-time in June, July and August. The Dutch Labour Inspectorate checks compliance, and working more than permitted, or without a TWV, can result in a fine for the employer.
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Post-study work visa
Residence permit for the orientation year for highly educated persons (zoekjaar hoogopgeleiden) . Up to 1 year
A residence permit valid for exactly 1 year that lets a recent graduate look for a job (typically as a 'highly skilled migrant') or start a business, applied for within 3 years of graduating. It cannot be extended, and a person can hold it more than once only after completing a further, later study programme or research project. During the orientation year the holder may work freely — their employer does not need a separate work permit (TWV) — or work as a freelancer or self-employed person. Eligibility requires having completed, within the 3 years before applying, an accredited bachelor's or master's degree at a Dutch higher-education institution (no extra test needed), a PhD, an Erasmus Mundus Joint Master's, or a master's/doctoral/post-master's programme at a 'designated foreign educational institution' — defined as one placed in the top 200 of the general or by-subject rankings of at least 2 of 3 named publishers (Times Higher Education, QS World University Rankings, or ShanghaiRanking's Academic Ranking of World Universities) at the time of graduation — in which case an IELTS score of at least 6.0 (or an equivalent recognised English test) is also required unless the programme itself was taught in English or Dutch. All foreign diplomas must additionally be evaluated by Nuffic, the Dutch credential-evaluation body.
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Route to permanent residence
The orientation year permit does not itself lead to settlement, and by IND's own classification it is a 'temporary regular residence permit' (type I) — a category distinct from the 'non-temporary residence purpose' permit that Dutch permanent-residence rules require a holder to have at the time they apply. In practice, a graduate who wants to stay long-term must first move onto a qualifying work route — commonly the national Highly Skilled Migrant scheme, which is gated on a minimum salary set annually (around EUR 5,000/month as of this reading, lower for applicants under 30 or on a reduced-salary criterion) rather than on a specific occupation or shortage list. From there, a person who has held a valid Dutch residence permit for at least 5 consecutive years, kept their main residence in the Netherlands throughout, always renewed on time, met the income requirement, registered in the Dutch population register (BRP), and passed a civic-integration exam at A2 level (or been exempted) may apply for a permanent residence permit — or, on largely the same 5-year qualifying basis, an EU long-term resident's permit. It is not clearly stated on IND's own pages whether time spent under a temporary-purpose permit (such as the orientation year, or study itself) counts towards that 5-year clock the same way time on a non-temporary work permit does, so this dataset does not assert either way.
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Route to citizenship
Naturalisation (naturalisatie) is decided by the King on the Justice and Security Minister's recommendation, but administered day-to-day by IND, the same service that runs residence permits. The standard route requires having lived in the Kingdom of the Netherlands for at least 5 consecutive years with a valid residence permit, always renewed on time, plus passing a civic integration exam at Dutch language level A2 (unless exempt, e.g. already sufficiently fluent). Shorter routes exist — for example 3 years if married to or the registered partner of a Dutch national and living together throughout, or in some cases naturalising while living abroad. Unlike most of the other countries in this dataset, the Netherlands' default rule points the other way on dual nationality: IND's own page states plainly that 'Dutch citizens are usually not allowed to have dual nationality' and that an applicant aged 18 or over 'must renounce' their other nationality or nationalities after naturalising. Exceptions exist and are common in practice — including a spouse/registered partner of a Dutch national at the time the Royal Decree is signed, an asylum residence permit holder, someone born and still living in the Kingdom, or a national of a country (IND names Taiwan and the Palestinian Territories) that the Netherlands does not recognise as a state — and the IND will not require renunciation where the applicant's own country's law simply does not allow it.
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Read 17 August 2026. inDemandOccupations is deliberately left null rather than populated with a weak substitute: the Netherlands' main channel from the orientation year into longer-term work — the national Highly Skilled Migrant scheme — is gated purely on a minimum salary threshold (revised every 1 January) rather than on membership of any occupation or shortage-occupation list, confirmed on IND's own background article on the scheme ('The IND checks whether the salary criterion is met, among other things... This salary must be in conformity with the market'). UWV (the Employee Insurance Agency) does publish its own labour-market shortage analyses, but uwv.nl is not the immigration-granting authority and sits outside this dataset's allowed domains for the Netherlands, so it was not used. Two collection notes: (1) IND's own English-language pages for both the orientation-year permit and the standard student permit are interactive decision trees that return almost no static text to a plain HTTP fetch (a nationality/situation questionnaire must be answered first) — the orientation-year page was captured with the project's browser fallback after answering it, and its plain-HTTP snapshot is a JS-shell stub-turned-empty result that was overwritten by the browser capture; the 5-year permanent-residence figure and the 16-hour work figure were both found on genuinely static IND pages, so no browser fallback was needed for them. (2) The Netherlands does not appear in this dataset's university list yet, so this entry is general country-level context, collected the same way New Zealand's was. citizenshipRoute added 17 August 2026, cited to two ind.nl pages: 'Becoming a Dutch national through naturalisation' (2fc3229d3e3a93a3, for the 5-year/A2 standard route) and 'Dual nationality' (5ce95fd234897070, for the renunciation default and its exceptions) — the latter chosen as the primary provenance quote since renunciation is the single fact this dataset's brief flagged as most likely to differ sharply from other countries, and it needed its own clean citation rather than being folded into the naturalisation page's own brief mention of the same rule. A third page, 'Renouncing your nationality' (c90d9485171361c0), was also archived and supplied the specific exception categories (asylum permit holders, RANOV-based residents, those born in the Kingdom, Taiwan/Palestinian-Territories nationals) described in value above. naturalisationStatus set to 'published-route' on 18 August 2026: the authority already cited under citizenshipRoute publishes criteria a foreign resident could actually follow, which is the only claim this field makes. It is deliberately not a judgement about how attainable that route is in practice. Recorded as a published route even though the Netherlands' default rule requires an adult naturalisation applicant to renounce their existing nationality: a renunciation condition is a term of the route, not the absence of one, and collapsing the two would tell a reader the Netherlands never naturalises foreigners, which is false. citizenshipTerms cites a second, already-archived IND page (ind.nl/en/dutch-citizenship/becoming-a-dutch-national-through-naturalisation, snapshot 2fc3229d3e3a93a3) because it states the 5-year period, which the dual-nationality page cited by citizenshipRoute does not. dualCitizenshipAllowed is false: IND states Dutch citizens are usually not allowed to have dual nationality and that an adult applicant must renounce their other nationality, with the named exceptions listed in citizenshipRoute above. studentVisaFunds added 19 August 2026, from the IND's own consolidated 'Required amounts' table, which is the page the IND itself maintains for every income threshold it applies. The monthly figure is stored as published — the IND states no annual total for students, so none was calculated here. Note the two different validity windows on the same page: the student amounts run for the calendar year 2026, while the amounts for a Netherlands-based financier run only from 1 July 2026, so a reader checking one half of this rule is not automatically current on the other.
Open the immigration authority's own page ↗