The 30% ruling in the Netherlands, and the 27% that follows

It is a gerichte vrijstelling, a targeted exemption inside payroll tax, and it benefits the employee. Up to 30% of the salary can be designated in 2026 as tax free, so the employee pays loonbelasting on the remaining share instead of on the whole. The salary the employer commits to does not change.

Why it is worth so much to the person receiving it is visible in the 2026 brackets. Below state pension age, the combined loonbelasting and premie volksverzekeringen rate is 35,75% on income up to € 38.883, then 37,56% up to € 78.426, then 49,50% above that. An exemption applied to the top slice of a well-paid salary removes income that would otherwise have been taxed at the highest rate the employee faces. Our post on Dutch payroll sets out how those brackets sit inside the loonheffingen.

The employer’s role is administrative and continuing. The exemption is applied through the payroll, month by month, which means the employer has to designate the right amount, keep the conditions under review and correct the position if the facts change. It is a payroll facility an employer operates on an employee’s behalf rather than a discount an employer receives.

That distinction is worth holding on to, because it is where most of the confusion starts. A candidate who has been told about the ruling is asking about their own take-home. An employer budgeting a hire is looking at a different number entirely, and the two conversations should not be run together.

It also explains why the ruling is a poor thing to promise. An employer can apply an exemption correctly and still find that the employee does not qualify, because qualification turns on facts about the employee and on a salary figure tested each year. Promising an outcome that depends on a test is how an offer letter becomes a complaint in month four.

The rate falls from 30% to 27% on 1 January 2027, and this is not a proposal. The change is in the consolidated text of the Wet op de loonbelasting 1964 in the version in force from that date. Article 31a(8) reads that the designation may be made up to at most 27% of the relevant part of the pay, and article 31a(9) says the same for outbound postings.

The entry on the statute site carries the marker for an amendment taking effect on 1 January 2027, which is what an enacted but not yet commenced change looks like in Dutch consolidated law. There is no further parliamentary step for it to clear. Anything published in the register of an announcement, a plan or an intention is describing the same change at an earlier stage of its life, and should not be read as leaving the outcome open.

The three points of difference are small in isolation and compound quickly on a large package. On a salary at the bottom of the qualifying range, moving from 30% to 27% takes roughly a tenth off the exempt amount, and every euro that moves out of the exemption is taxed at the employee’s marginal rate rather than at an average one.

For anyone drafting an offer or a budget that spans the year end, the practical effect is simple. The same gross salary yields a smaller exempt amount from January 2027, and a larger taxable one. For an employee near the bottom of the range that is more than a change in take-home: it is what decides whether the ruling can be applied at all, because the test is run on the taxable salary that is left after the exemption.

The condition is expressed as a floor on what remains taxable. For 2026, the taxable salary after the exemption must be at least € 48.013 for an employee with specific expertise, or € 36.497 for an employee under 30 holding a qualifying master’s degree. Both figures come from the Belastingdienst figures annex for 2026.

Turn that into the number an employer actually needs, and it is a division. If 30% is exempt, 70% is taxable, so the minimum total gross required to clear the standard norm in 2026 is € 48.013 divided by 0,70, which is € 68.590. Below that gross, applying the full 30% would leave a taxable salary under the norm, and the ruling is not available.

This is where most published claims about the ruling fall apart. Take the modal Dutch salary used in our worked example on the cost of hiring: a base of € 48.000 plus 8% vakantiegeld gives total gross pay of € 51.840,00. Apply 30% to that and € 36.288 is left taxable, comfortably below the € 48.013 norm. A provider that offers the ruling as a standard feature next to a salary of that size is offering something the arithmetic does not support.

From 2027 the divisor changes with the rate: 27% exempt leaves 73% taxable, so the same calculation runs on 0,73. What cannot be done yet is to finish it, because the 2027 norms have not been published. They will appear in the Belastingdienst figures annex for 2027, expected in mid-December 2026, and no 2027 figure should be written into an offer before then.

An employee arriving from outside the EU often has two salary conditions to satisfy at once, and they use different numbers, different periods and different bases. Confusing them is the second most common error in this area after the norm arithmetic.

The immigration test comes from the IND. For 2026, a highly skilled migrant aged 30 or over must be paid at least € 5.942,00 gross a month, or € 4.357,00 if under 30, with a reduced criterion of € 3.122,00 for a graduate applying within three years of graduating in the Netherlands or of a research permit expiring. The IND states all of those amounts excluding the 8% vakantiegeld, and they applied throughout 2026 without changing on 1 July.

The tax test is the one in this post: a taxable salary after the exemption of at least € 48.013 for 2026, expressed annually. A hire can clear the IND monthly figure and still fall short of the tax norm, or the other way round for a young graduate. The only safe method is to run both calculations on the actual offer, in writing, before the candidate is told anything.

Because the IND figures are stated excluding vakantiegeld and the tax figures are annual, the 8% has to be handled explicitly in the offer as well. Our post on vakantiegeld covers why that clause matters for far more than the May payslip.

The exemption is capped at the top as well as floored at the bottom. Aftopping applies at the WNT norm, which is € 262.000 for 2026: salary above that level cannot be designated, so the benefit stops growing however large the package becomes.

The maximum duration is five years. That is a hard limit on the facility rather than a target, and it means a five-year Dutch assignment planned around a net figure will end on a different net figure from the one it started with, before anything else changes.

Two things deliberately do not appear in this post. There is no 2027 salary norm here, because none has been published by the Belastingdienst and the figures circulating are un-indexed base amounts from earlier legislation that do not match what is applied in 2026. And there is no rate here for anyone other than an employee whose entitlement runs under the current rules, because the position of employees who started under earlier versions of the ruling is a question for their own payroll adviser and not one to answer from a summary.

Neither omission is caution for its own sake. An employer that writes an unpublished figure into an offer letter is committing to a number it cannot yet verify, and the correction is a payroll problem rather than an email. The general rule this follows is worth borrowing: an announcement page describes what a government intends, and a consolidated statute describes what will apply. The 27% rate has cleared that line and the 2027 norms have not.

The ruling is a condition-based facility applied through payroll, so the checking is continuous rather than a one-off at onboarding. Four things are worth a diary entry.

• The norm is annual and is republished each year in the Belastingdienst figures annex, so an offer built on one year’s figure has to be re-tested against the next.
• Anything that lowers the salary lowers the taxable salary after the exemption, so a move to part-time hours, an unpaid period or a reduction in pay can push an employee below the norm.
• The rate change on 1 January 2027 moves the taxable share from 70% to 73% of salary, which changes both the employee’s net and, at the margin, whether the test is still met.
• The five-year maximum and the € 262.000 cap both have dates and numbers attached, and neither is the employee’s responsibility to track.

What none of this changes is the employer’s own cost. The gross salary is what the employer agreed to pay, and the exemption sits inside the employee’s tax position rather than reducing the commitment. An employer hiring into the Netherlands for the first time should price the role without the ruling and treat it as a candidate benefit if it applies, which is also the safest thing to put in an offer letter. Our post on hiring in the Netherlands from the UK covers the rest of the cross-border position for a company hiring from outside the country.

Employer of Record Netherlands runs the Dutch payroll for people you have already chosen, which includes designating the exemption correctly where an employee qualifies and saying so plainly where they do not.