Expertise requirement

You may apply the Expat Scheme (30% facility) for an employee who comes to work in the Netherlands, if certain conditions are met. One of these conditions is that the employee has specific expertise. To prove this expertise, an income standard applies. This standard is indexed once a year.

In 2025, an employee is regarded as having specific expertise if their taxable annual wages are higher than €46,660, excluding the specific exemptions. For academic employees who have obtained a Dutch master’s degree, or an equivalent foreign degree, and who are under 30, the income standard is €35,468, excluding the specific exemptions.

An exception is made for employees who carry out scientific research at specific institutions and physicians training to become specialists: they do not need to comply with an income standard.

Scarcity requirement

In exceptional situations your employee will not only need to comply with the income standard, but will also need to comply with a scarcity requirement: your employee's expertise must be unavailable or virtually unavailable on the Dutch labour market. This is the case when virtually all employees in a specific sector comply with the income standard, such as professional footballers. You will then also need to demonstrate the scarcity of your employee's expertise.

Assessment of the requirement of expertise and scarcity

When assessing compliance with the expertise and scarcity requirement we take into account the following 3 factors:

• your employee's level of education
• your employee's experience of relevance to the position
  When your employee has worked in a comparable position for more than 2.5 years then we assume that your employee has experience of relevance to the position.
• the relationship between the remuneration level for the position in the Netherlands and the remuneration level in your employee's country of origin
  This is assessment is made on the basis of the principle that the net remuneration for the position in your employee's country of origin is not lower than the net remuneration for the position in the Netherlands. The reimbursement for the extra costs incurred for a temporary stay away from the country of origin (the extraterritorial costs) is not then taken into account.