Scholarships and student finance for internationals

The short version

• Dutch student finance is gated on nationality first. You need Dutch nationality or a residence permit of type II, III, IV or V, or you go through the separate route for EU, EEA, Swiss and UK citizens.
• That separate route runs on work. Paid work in the Netherlands of at least 32 hours a month makes you a migrant worker, which is what opens student finance.
• You have to be younger than 30 on the day your student finance starts. The same age limit closes the tuition fees loan behind it.
• The grant is a performance grant. It becomes a gift only once you obtain your diploma within 10 years. Miss that and you repay it with interest.
• From outside the EEA, expect scholarships instead. The NL Scholarship is €5,000 in your first year, and you apply through your institution rather than through Nuffic.

Two different things get called student finance here, and they barely overlap. Studiefinanciering is the package DUO, the government's education agency, pays out, and who gets it is decided on nationality before anything else. Scholarships are separate money from institutions and from Nuffic, the Dutch organisation for internationalisation in education, and most of them exist for the people DUO turns away.

Which of the two you are in is settled in the first section. From outside the EEA, expect it to be the second.

Who can get Dutch student finance

DUO pays studiefinanciering to students in MBO (secondary vocational education), HBO (universities of applied sciences) and research universities. The first condition is nationality, and DUO words it plainly: you have Dutch nationality, or a residence permit of type II, III, IV or V. A type I permit may also qualify depending on the conditions attached to it, and DUO publishes an assistant that settles which category yours is in.

The second condition is age. You must be younger than 30 on the day your student finance starts. Once it is running it continues past that birthday, but you cannot start it after.

The third is that citizens of an EU or EEA country, Switzerland and the United Kingdom get in through a separate route with its own conditions. That is the next section.

If none of those describes you, and for someone arriving from outside the EEA on a permit issued for study that is the common case, DUO student finance is not your route and neither is the tuition fees loan behind it. What you have is scholarships, and that money comes from your institution rather than from the government.

The working-hours test for EU students

If you hold the nationality of an EU or EEA country, Switzerland or the UK, DUO gives you two ways in. Either you have been living in the Netherlands for 5 or more consecutive years, or you count as a migrant worker.

Migrant worker is where most students land, and it is measured in hours. You need paid work in the Netherlands of at least 32 hours a month, and DUO takes a monthly income of at least 50% of the social security norm in its place.

Below that line it turns conditional. Between 24 and 32 hours a month DUO assesses you rather than answering in advance, and under 24 hours you are not entitled unless you can prove migrant worker status another way. Two things soften it. Where you, your parent or your partner has worked for 6 months or more, an average of 24 hours a month is enough. And on an average of 32 hours you may fail to work for 1 month per calendar year.

A partner or parent who is an EU, EEA, Swiss or UK migrant worker on those same conditions also carries you. British nationals need a Dutch Article 50 TEU residence document, or a parent or partner who holds one.

Miss all of it and one thing stays open: the tuition fees loan (collegegeldkrediet), for students under 30 with the nationality of an EEA country or Switzerland, or British nationality plus the Article 50 document. It borrows your tuition, nothing else, and you repay it with interest.

What DUO student finance pays

Student finance is five parts and you choose which you take: the basic grant, the supplementary grant, the student travel product, an interest-bearing loan, and the tuition fees loan. Clear the conditions above and these are the monthly amounts for HBO and university.

| Component | Living with parents | Living away from home | | --- | --- | --- | | Basic grant | €130.21 | €324.52 | | Supplementary grant, maximum | €491.08 | €491.08 | | Loan, maximum | €315.17 | €315.17 |

Whether you get the supplementary grant, and how much of that maximum, depends on your parents' income, and DUO recalculates it every year. It can shrink between one academic year and the next with nothing changing at your end.

MBO amounts differ and DUO republishes the table for separate parts of the calendar year, so take your own figures from DUO's amounts page. The student travel product is an entitlement to travel rather than a payment. The two loans are debt, repaid with interest whatever happens to your diploma.

Which tuition rate you are charged sits underneath all of this, because it sets what a loan or a scholarship has to cover. A statutory rate and institutional rates run alongside each other. DUO sets out who is charged which, and applying through Studielink covers where the amount for your own programme comes from.

When a grant turns into a debt

The basic grant, the supplementary grant and the student travel product are a prestatiebeurs, a performance grant. DUO advances them and they convert into a gift only once you obtain your diploma within 10 years. If you do not, you repay the lot with interest.

Two things blunt that. The first 5 months of supplementary grant for HBO or university never have to be repaid, and if you withdraw during your first year of student finance you may not have to pay back the grant and the travel product for that year. Your entitlement also has a shelf life: 10 years to use it up, counted from the first month you received anything.

How to apply

You apply in Mijn DUO, using a DigiD or a European digital identity under eIDAS. Most people arriving to study here need the DigiD, which takes time, so start at how to get a DigiD before you need it. Without either login, DUO still takes a paper form.

DUO's own advice is to apply 8 weeks before your student finance is due to start. You can claim months that have already passed, back to the start of that academic year, which is 1 September for HBO and university. One part does not backdate: the student travel product. Every month you wait there is a month of travel you do not get.

Scholarships for non-EEA students

The NL Scholarship, which you will still see called the Holland Scholarship, is the national programme and the one most people mean. It is €5,000, paid in the first year of your studies, and Nuffic is direct that it is not a full tuition scholarship. Your nationality has to be non-EEA, you have to be starting a full-time bachelor's or master's at a participating institution, and you cannot already hold a degree from a Dutch institution.

Three other routes are worth working through. Your institution's own scholarships, which is where the larger amounts usually sit and which vary by programme and sometimes by country of origin. Erasmus+, if part of your study is an exchange. And funding from your own country's education ministry, which plenty of internationals only find out about once they are already here.

Nuffic keeps the list of programmes it runs, and it is worth reading for what is not on it. The Orange Knowledge Programme has ended and has no new application rounds, yet it still surfaces in search results and on university pages nobody has revisited.

Work out which of the two systems you are in before you build a budget on either. If it is DUO, the hours are the thing to watch all year, not only in the month you apply. If it is scholarships, the date that decides it belongs to your institution, and nobody is going to remind you of it.