Netherlands-Based Australians: Buying and Refinancing in Australia on a Euro Salary, With the 30% Ruling and Box 3 Explained (2026)

Netherlands-Based Australians: Buying and Refinancing in Australia on a Euro Salary, With the 30% Ruling and Box 3 Explained (2026)

Statistics Netherlands counted 24,309 residents of Australian origin on 1 January 2026, 12,907 of them born in Australia and 3,333 living in Amsterdam. Most are on Dutch payslips, many under the 30% ruling, and a good number own or want to own property more than 16,000 kilometres away. The loan is Australian and is assessed against Australian rules, but everything that feeds the file is Dutch: a salary in euros with vakantiegeld folded in, a jaaropgaaf that sits below the contract figure, a tax ruling with a five-year clock, and a box 3 return that asks for the value of a house in Brisbane every January.

24,309 people of Australian origin, and where in the Netherlands they live

Statistics Netherlands puts the Australian-origin group at 24,309 on 1 January 2026, up from 22,832 in 2022, a rise of 1,477 or 6.5%. Of the 2026 total, 12,907 were born outside the Netherlands, which under the CBS definition means born in Australia, and 11,402 were born in the Netherlands to an Australian-born parent. The first group is who this page is written for: people with Australian tax file numbers who now earn in euros.

Amsterdam holds 3,333 of them, 13.7% of the total, then The Hague with 1,110, Utrecht with 814 and Rotterdam with 712. The four big cities hold 5,969, just under a quarter; the rest live everywhere else, a Randstad story with a long tail.

Source: Statistics Netherlands (CBS) StatLine tables 85384ENG and 85458NED, population by country of origin on 1 January, retrieved 4 September 2026.

The 30% ruling in 2026, the 27% version from 2027, and what an Australian lender does with it

The Belastingdienst calls it the Expat Scheme: “your employer may also pay up to 30% of your salary, including compensation, to you untaxed”. Specific expertise is defined by salary: for 2026, a taxable salary above €48,013, or above €36,497 if you are under 30 with a master’s degree. The allowance is capped: “As of 2026, your maximum untaxed allowance is €78,600”, reached at a salary of €262,000 or more for a full year. Each decision “has a duration of up to 5 years”.

Two changes matter in 2026. First, the partial foreign tax liability option is closing: “As of your tax return 2025, you can no longer opt for partial foreign tax liability. If you used the Expat Scheme before 2024, you can still use the partial foreign tax liability until your tax return 2026 due to transitional law.” Its removal is why box 3 has its own section below. Second, the percentage steps down. The 2025 Tax Plan replaced the earlier 30%, 20%, 10% scale: “a 27% deduction will be allowed for a period of five years”, with the qualifying salary raised “from €46,107 to €50,436”, and the Dutch Senate adopted the package on 17 December 2024. Business.gov.nl: a ruling that began before 1 January 2024 keeps “a maximum of 30% of their wages tax-free for 5 years”; one that began later keeps 30% through 2026, then “from 1 January 2027 you may pay your employee a maximum of 27% of their wages tax-free”; the under-30 standard rises to €38,388.

Now the Australian reading. A lender starts from gross income on the contract and payslips, converts it and applies its own foreign income policy. The ruling does not change that gross figure; it changes your net pay, and whether a lender notices depends on how it models tax. One that applies Australian tax scales to your euro salary, a common convention, will not see the ruling at all; one that works from actual net pay will, and the gap between the two can be large.

In short: the 30% ruling is worth up to €78,600 a year untaxed in 2026, for at most five years, and becomes 27% from 2027 for anyone who started in 2024 or later; an Australian lender reads your gross euro salary through its own tax model, not the ruling, so the ruling’s real lending value is the deposit it lets you save while it lasts.

Have your euro salary read the way a lender reads it, by a former banker, free

Vakantiegeld, a 13th month and pension: reading a Dutch payslip and jaaropgaaf the way a credit assessor does

Holiday allowance. Business.gov.nl: “Your employee is entitled to at least 8% holiday allowance on their gross annual salary for the past year”, and “Most employers pay holiday allowance once a year, in May or June.” It is a statutory entitlement, not a bonus, so it is generally read as part of base salary; check whether your contract figure already includes it. Where an employee earns “more than 3 times the statutory minimum wage” the parties can agree a lower allowance or none.

Thirteenth month. “A year-end bonus or 13th month is not compulsory and not regulated by law.” Where it exists it comes from a collective labour agreement or the contract, and “Most employees receive their bonus in December.” An Australian lender files it with bonus income, often only in part and only with a history, so bring the clause and the last two December payslips.

Pension. Beyond the AOW state pension, a supplementary scheme is compulsory under many collective agreements and sectoral funds, and “The employee also pays part of the contribution.” Your share is a deduction from gross, not a reduction of assessable income, but it explains a lower net than an assessor expects.

The jaaropgaaf. The Belastingdienst requires an employer to “issue an employee an annual income statement after the end of the calendar year, even when your employee does not ask for a statement”. Under the ruling the untaxed allowance is not taxable wage, so the jaaropgaaf sits below the gross salary on your contract, sometimes well below. Send the ruling decision with it and the query never arrives. Dutch-language documents need a NAATI-certified translation, so build that into the timeline.

The right-hand column is common practice across the lender market, not any one lender’s policy.

Euros into Australian dollars: five Augusts of the rate, why lenders shade, and an estimator

Deposit and LVR on a Dutch salary. One major bank’s published broker policy lists the euro in its top tier: 80 per cent of the gross salary, before the 30 per cent ruling changes the net figure, is counted after a 20 per cent deduction and converted at the XE rate, and an Australian citizen living in the Netherlands can borrow to 95 per cent of the property value with lenders mortgage insurance. A permanent resident living overseas stops at 80 per cent on any currency, and a file that settles at 80 per cent by choice avoids LMI and keeps the widest lender choice.

The Reserve Bank’s monthly indicative rate for the euro read, on the last trading day of August, 0.6201 euros per Australian dollar in 2021, 0.6875 in 2022, 0.5940 in 2023, 0.6144 in 2024, 0.5602 in 2025 and 0.6182 in 2026; the daily rate on 3 September 2026 was 0.6175. A €100,000 deposit moved at the August 2022 rate became A$145,455; at the August 2025 rate, A$178,508, which is A$33,053 more for waiting three years. Nobody times that reliably, so move the deposit in tranches and never leave the last leg to settlement week.

Lenders read the same chart their own way: a loan repaid in Australian dollars for up to 30 years from euro income carries currency risk, so most lenders discount foreign income before assessing it. Our guide to Australian expat home loans describes most lenders as counting around 70% of converted overseas income and up to around 80% for preferred currencies; the estimator lets you test 0% to 30% because the figure is a lender-by-lender choice. The rate gap runs the same direction: the European Central Bank’s deposit facility rate has been 2.25% since 17 June 2026 against an RBA cash rate of 4.35% since May 2026, and an Australian loan is serviced at Australian rates plus a buffer.

Source: Reserve Bank of Australia table F11, publication date 31 August 2026. Conversions are arithmetic, not a forecast.

Estimator: what your euro salary is worth to an Australian lender

Enter your gross annual salary in euros, the EUR to AUD rate you can see today from any bank or currency site (we deliberately do not supply one), a shading percentage and a multiple. The multiple is a rough rule of thumb, not lender policy.

A check on the arithmetic: a €95,000 salary at 1.62 is A$153,900 before shading; shaded by 20% it reads as A$123,120, and a multiple of five gives A$492,480 to A$615,600.

The price gap: €479,527 in the Netherlands against the Australian capitals

Statistics Netherlands puts the 2025 average purchase price of an existing owner-occupied home at €479,527 nationally, €630,621 in Amsterdam, €549,113 in Utrecht, €469,870 in Eindhoven, €465,418 in The Hague and €414,579 in Rotterdam, and the series has kept climbing: “The average transaction price for an owner-occupied home in June was 496,235 euros”, 4.1% higher than a year earlier and 17.3% above the July 2022 peak, on 20,378 transactions, up 7.9%. Australia is moving the other way: Cotality’s Home Value Index at 31 August 2026 has Sydney at $1,222,718, Brisbane $1,080,142, Perth $999,987, Adelaide $937,207, Canberra $864,998 and Melbourne $786,718, after a fifth consecutive monthly fall nationally. Converted at the RBA’s end-of-August rate of 0.6182, the Dutch figures land in the same neighbourhood.

CBS averages (StatLine 83625ENG, calendar 2025) against Cotality medians at 31 August 2026; an average and a median differ, so the pairing is indicative. Sydney’s $1,222,718 sits above every Dutch city average.

Two readings. Buying to live in later, an Amsterdam-priced budget is a Perth or Brisbane median budget and a Dutch national-average budget is a Melbourne one; every capital’s monthly movement is in our median house prices tracker and the expat angle on each city in the city by city expat guide. Buying to hold while you stay, remember that box 3 will ask for the value of that property every January.

FIRB, the established-dwelling ban and state surcharges, for a citizen living in the Netherlands

The Foreign Investment Review Board’s residential page lists the cases where “a residential real estate application is not required”, and the first row is “Australian citizens living abroad: No”. The full list is on foreigninvestment.gov.au. The ban that made headlines does not touch you either: “From 1 April 2025 to 30 June 2029, foreign investors are generally prohibited from purchasing established dwellings.” A Dutch partner buying in their own name, without you on the title, is a foreign person and should take advice before signing.

State surcharges follow the same logic. Revenue NSW: “The current surcharge purchaser duty rate is 9% of the dutiable value of the property”, and “It must be paid in addition to transfer duty”. Its ruling G009 leaves no doubt: “An Australian citizen, including a person who holds dual citizenships (one of which is an Australian citizenship), is not a foreign person under any circumstances, whether or not the person is ordinarily resident in Australia.” A permanent resident is different, because a non-citizen counts as ordinarily resident only if “the person has actually been in Australia during 200 or more days of the preceding 12 month period”. Victoria’s State Revenue Office states that “Foreign purchasers pay 8% extra duty on residential property”, and a foreign natural person is someone who is “not an Australian citizen” and does “not hold an Australian permanent residence visa”, so citizens and permanent residents are outside it wherever they live. Standard transfer duty still applies; the schedules at current medians are on our Sydney and Melbourne mortgage broker pages.

Box 3, the 1976 treaty and owning Australian property as a Dutch tax resident

While you are a Dutch tax resident, box 3 covers savings and investments, and the Belastingdienst’s 2026 provisional assessment page lists “a second home outside the Netherlands” among the assets taxed as investments. The 2026 settings: “The tax-free allowance in 2026 is €59,357 per person”; notional returns of 1.28% on bank balances, 6.00% on “Investments and other assets” and 2.70% on debts; and a box 3 rate of 36%. The page adds: “If your actual return turns out to be lower than the notional return, we will adjust your Box 3 income in your income tax return for 2026”, and the companion page on the actual return says what a home abroad requires: “the value on 1 January or the date of purchase” and “the value on 31 December or the date of sale”, at market value, plus rental receipts if let. And, for anyone used to negative gearing: “You don’t need to look up costs such as maintenance costs. These are not deductible from the actual return.”

So an Australian property owned from the Netherlands is a box 3 asset valued every January, a loan against it sits among box 3 debts at the 2.70% notional rate, and the notional income above the allowance is taxed at 36% unless you show a lower actual return.

The treaty is where the two systems meet. Treasury’s list of Australia’s income tax treaties records the agreement with the Netherlands signed on 17 March 1976 and in force from 27 September 1976, amended by protocol in 1987 and by the Multilateral Instrument from 1 July 2019. The ATO’s one-line description: such agreements “foster cooperation and prevent double taxation or fiscal evasion”. Which country taxes the rent and how a Dutch notional return interacts with an Australian rental loss are questions for a Dutch tax adviser; a broker’s job is to structure the loan so that whatever the answer is, it does not cost you the property.

Identity, signing and settlement from The Hague to Melbourne, eight or ten hours apart

Every Australian lender verifies identity before it lends, and from the Netherlands the place to do it is the Australian Embassy at Carnegielaan 4, 2517 KH The Hague. Its notarial service covers “witnessing signatures, certifying copies, legalising (apostilles) on public documents and swearing oaths or affirmations for affidavits”, with fees “current from 1 January 2026 and charged per act” in Australian dollars: AUD 90 to verify and certify an identity document such as a passport or driver’s licence, AUD 90 to witness a signature on a form or declaration, and AUD 105 for an apostille. Notarial appointments run between 09:00 and 12:00 on Wednesdays only, and “There are no walk in appointments”. Book the Wednesday the week you decide to buy, not the week the lender asks.

Settlement is electronic. PEXA puts it in one sentence: “Every time a house is bought, sold or refinanced in Australia your lawyer, conveyancer and lender will most likely use a digital platform to settle your property, this is where PEXA comes in”, and its network “helps over 20,000 families a week safely settle their homes”. You attend nothing. Where a wet signature is required it can be witnessed at the embassy, or a power of attorney to someone in Australia is the usual alternative.

Then the clock. Victoria is UTC+10, or +11 from the first Sunday in October to the first Sunday in April; the Netherlands is UTC+1, or +2 from the last Sunday in March to the last Sunday in October. So from April to early October you are eight hours behind Melbourne, from late October to late March ten, and nine for a few weeks either side of the changeovers. Your 7am is our 3pm to 5pm and your 10pm is our 6am to 8am; those are the windows for a live conversation, and everything else runs asynchronously.

Already own in Australia: refinancing, equity release and the return home

Many left a property behind with a loan nobody has reviewed since they boarded the plane. With the cash rate at 4.35% and held there since May 2026, the gap between what a long-standing borrower pays and what the same lender offers a new one is the first thing to check, and it can be checked from the Netherlands on the same shaded euro income, with the discharge and new mortgage settling on PEXA. The mechanics are in our guide to refinancing an Australian mortgage from overseas.

Equity release suits the ruling calendar: if the property has grown while you have been away, some lenders will lend against that growth from overseas, and the released amount can become the deposit on the next purchase, one that does not depend on your Dutch net pay when the ruling ends. A falling market narrows the ceiling, so run the numbers before the next valuation rather than after. The return home is its own file: when the euro income stops and an Australian salary starts, usually on probation with no local pay history, lenders read you differently, and our returning expat guide covers the sequencing.

Why former bankers in Melbourne for a loan arranged from the Netherlands

Everstone Finance is a mortgage broking firm in South Yarra, Melbourne, run by former bankers. For a Netherlands file that is the point: the difference between lenders is not the advertised rate but how each treats a euro salary, a ruling payslip, a 13th month, and a jaaropgaaf that undercuts the contract. We compare more than 40 lenders on those questions, we are paid by the lender on settlement and not by you, and appointments are by video or phone in the two windows above. Our expat mortgage broker page describes how we place a file from overseas, our comparison of Australian banks for expat home loans sets out where the policies diverge, and Australians elsewhere in Europe can read the same purchase from London or Berlin.

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The people behind Everstone

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Ahmed Lotfi

Mortgage Broker & Co-Founder

A former major bank lender who now works entirely for you. Ahmed runs the file personally: structure, lender selection and the negotiation with the credit desk. English, Arabic and French.

Zappelin Heng

Mortgage Broker & Co-Founder

Co-founder with deep lender experience, focused on getting complex and self-employed files assessed on their real strength, not a tick-box, including business owners and investors with multiple securities.

Australian expat in the Netherlands, home loan: the country-level answer from Rotterdam and Utrecht to Eindhoven and the Brainport region

An Australian citizen living anywhere in the Netherlands, in Rotterdam, The Hague, Utrecht, Eindhoven and the Brainport region around it, Groningen, Maastricht or a village well outside the Randstad, can buy or refinance in Australia on a euro salary under exactly the rules this page sets out from Amsterdam. The euro is a preferred currency for Australian lenders, so the more generous desks commonly count around 80 per cent of gross income and the rest around 70, and that setting is attached to the currency, not to the city on your address; the 30% ruling is a national scheme, so a lender’s way of reading it does not change between Eindhoven and Amsterdam; and the vakantiegeld, 13th month and jaaropgaaf questions are answered by Dutch national payroll law wherever your employer sits. A search phrased at country level, an Australian expat home loan from the Netherlands, lands on the same answer as the Amsterdam version because the rules are national on both sides of the file.

The Australian Embassy in The Hague is the only Australian Government post in the Netherlands, so it is the certification address for the whole country, and DFAT’s mission list also routes Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao, Saba, Sint Eustatius and Sint Maarten to it. Two details sit beyond the appointment window described above. There is no mail route for identity verification or a witnessed signature, since only apostilles, authentications and certificate-of-conduct applications are handled by post, so a reader in Groningen or Maastricht travels to The Hague for the identity act itself. And the embassy takes payment by credit or debit card only, with Dutch pin cards and cash not accepted, at fees charged in Australian dollars. Our guide to refinancing from overseas notes that some lenders accept a notary public or digital verification instead, and that the accepted route varies by lender and country, so ask which applies before you book the train.

The European Netherlands keeps a single clock, Central European Time at one hour ahead of UTC, with Central European Summer Time at two hours ahead from the last Sunday in March to the last Sunday in October, 29 March to 25 October in 2026; the windows for a live conversation with Melbourne described above are therefore the same in Rotterdam, Eindhoven, Groningen and Maastricht as in Amsterdam, with nothing to adjust by city. The exception is the Caribbean part of the Kingdom. Aruba, Curaçao, Sint Maarten, Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba run on Atlantic Standard Time, four hours behind UTC all year, which puts an Australian working there fourteen hours behind Melbourne now and fifteen once Melbourne’s clocks go forward on 4 October 2026.

The currency on the file is the euro from every Dutch address; the Reserve Bank’s daily figure for 4 September 2026, 0.6201 euros per Australian dollar or about A$1.61 per euro, sits one trading day on from the 3 September rate in the table above. In short: for an Australian lender the Netherlands is one country, one currency and one clock; the euro is read on the preferred tier from Rotterdam to the Brainport region, The Hague certifies every identity in the country, and the only address that changes the arithmetic is a Caribbean one.

Buying a home in Australia from the Netherlands: the ruling, the jaaropgaaf and The Hague

Search it as buying a home in Australia from the Netherlands, buying a house in Australia from Amsterdam, buying property in Australia from the Netherlands or can I buy a house in Australia from Holland: yes for a citizen or permanent resident, with no foreign investment approval and no surcharge in New South Wales or Victoria, and the box 3 question answered before you exchange.

Netherlands-based Australians: home loan FAQs

How do I buy a home in Australia from the Netherlands, step by step?

Get a pre-approval on the euro salary first, sending the contract, the ruling decision and the jaaropgaaf together so the lender can reconcile gross and net. Book the notarial appointment at the Embassy at Carnegielaan 4 in The Hague for identity certification in the same week. Search with a buyers agent or family in Australia, have an Australian conveyancer review the contract, sign electronically, transfer the deposit from your Dutch account with statements showing the trail, and settle through PEXA. Take advice on box 3 before exchange, because the Australian property enters the Dutch return from the first of January after settlement.

Netherlands guides worth reading before you borrow

• Australian expat home loans: overseas income, shading and documents.
• Australian expat mortgage broker: how a file is placed from overseas.
• Australian banks for expat home loans, compared: where the policies diverge.
• Refinancing an Australian mortgage from overseas: the remote process.
• Returning expat home loans: sequencing the move home around the loan.
• Australian property, city by city, for expats: each capital for an overseas buyer.
• Median house prices in Australia: every capital on the same index, monthly.
• Buying from London and the UK and buying from Berlin: the sterling and German-payslip versions of this page.

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