Highly skilled migrant visa: the salary threshold and how it works

The short version

• The highly skilled migrant visa turns on one number, and it is the salary your employer agrees to pay you: €5,942 gross a month at 30 or over, €4,357 under 30, and €3,122 on the reduced criterion for recent graduates.
• All three are gross monthly figures with holiday allowance excluded. The IND tests what your contract promises, not what lands in your account.
• The amount that counts is the one in force on the day the application is filed, or the day the contract starts if you are moving to a new employer.
• Turning 30 does not push you onto the higher amount. Changing employers after you turn 30 does.
• Clearing the threshold once is not enough. The salary has to match what people in the same job earn, it has to keep meeting the amount for as long as you hold the permit, and only an employer on the IND's register of recognised sponsors can file for you.

Every other condition on this permit is a document that somebody can produce. The salary threshold is the one that needs an employer to agree to a number, which is why an offer that felt settled can come apart in the week HR sends it to the immigration team.

Here are the three amounts, how the IND, the Dutch immigration service, tests them, which one applies to you, and what happens each January when they move.

The salary thresholds for a highly skilled migrant visa

The Dutch term is kennismigrant, literally knowledge migrant, and the IND publishes the amounts in a single table with three rows for it.

• 30 or over: €5,942 gross per month.
• Under 30: €4,357 gross per month.
• Reduced criterion: €3,122 gross per month, for recent graduates and people on or just past an orientation year permit. The orientation year guide covers exactly who gets it.

The gap between the reduced criterion and the standard under-30 amount is what makes a graduate hire possible at all. It is the difference between a starting salary a Dutch employer can sponsor and one they cannot.

How the IND tests the salary

The test runs on the contract, not on your payslip, and the IND is specific about which parts of your pay it will look at.

Fixed allowances and reimbursements of expenses do count, a thirteenth month being the example the IND gives itself. Three conditions have to hold together: the allowance is written into the contract, it is transferred to a bank account in your own name, and it is transferred every month. An allowance paid as a lump sum once a year fails the third one.

What does not count is the rest of it. Vacation allowance, the value of anything paid in kind, and pay elements the IND calls uncertain and non-regular, which covers overtime allowances, tips, and payments from funds. A bonus you have to earn is not salary for this purpose, however reliably it has been paid before.

Holiday allowance being outside the test is worth understanding rather than just noting. The statutory minimum is 8% of your gross annual pay, set by the Wet minimumloon en minimumvakantiebijslag, the Dutch minimum wage and holiday allowance act, and usually paid out in May. It sits on top of the monthly figure the IND is testing, so the threshold is not the whole of what the job pays.

Then there is a second test that people skip past. The salary has to be in line with the market rate, meaning you earn what people in the same job earn on average, and the IND can ask UWV, the Dutch employee insurance agency, for an opinion on whether it is. A job title stretched to justify a number is the version of this that fails.

Which amount applies to you

Two dates decide it, and neither is your birthday.

For a new application, you have to meet the required amount that applies on the date of the application. For a move to a new employer, it is the amount that applies on the date the new employment contract starts.

Age is where the rule is kinder than people expect. The under-30 amount keeps applying after you turn 30. The condition attached to it is about employers rather than age: if you have changed employers since your first permit was issued, that change has to have happened while you were still under 30.

What happens when the thresholds move

The IND resets all three amounts every year on 1 January. That is the whole cadence: one revision, one date, published as a table for the year it applies to.

Because the test is tied to the date of the application, the reset lands unevenly. An application that reaches the IND in December is tested against that year's amount. The same application two weeks later is tested against the new one. If your start date falls near the turn of the year, the useful question for HR is when they intend to file, not when you intend to fly.

Keeping the salary in line after that is your employer's obligation rather than yours. Business.gov.nl lists paying the required amount among the conditions the IND checks on a sponsor, with fines or the loss of recognition at the end of that. Ask HR directly what happens to your salary each January, and get the answer before you sign.

Further tightening has been announced without a date. Business.gov.nl publishes an intended change aimed at the under-30 criterion and at the rules for recognised sponsors, and says plainly that the effective date is not yet known. That same page describes the plan against a salary figure the IND has already replaced, which is the argument for reading amounts off the IND's own table and treating the rest as a direction of travel.

If the job ends

Your permit is tied to the job, so this is the part worth reading before you need it. The permit runs for the length of your contract, up to a maximum of 5 years.

If the employment ends, you get a search period, and it starts when the contract ends. Normally that is 3 months. It is 6 months if you lost the job on or after 22 May 2026 and had held the permit for 2 years or more. A new employer has to register you inside it. If the period runs out with nobody registered, the IND may revoke your permit.

A new job that pays under the threshold is not automatically the end of your stay. It does mean this permit is no longer the right one for it, and whether another purpose of stay fits your situation is a question for the IND. Ask it while the search period is still running rather than after.

What the threshold does not decide

Three things sit next to this permit and are settled somewhere else entirely.

Whether your employer can file at all. Only an employer on the IND's public register of recognised sponsors can, whatever they are willing to pay, and that gate is checked before anyone looks at your salary. The guide to residence permits and who files them has the order it all happens in.

Your tax. The 30% ruling has its own salary test, and it is not this one: it runs annually on taxable salary rather than monthly on gross. Clearing the IND threshold tells you nothing about clearing that one, and the two are decided by different authorities.

Whether you get the reduced criterion. That runs off your graduation date and your orientation year, not off the job. The orientation year guide sets out the three situations in which the IND applies it.

The threshold itself is one number. Almost everything that goes wrong with it goes wrong over timing, so get the filing date and the contract start date in writing before you agree to anything else.