Paid an agency fee in the Netherlands? A guide for internationals
You found the room from abroad. Maybe over email, maybe in a video call, maybe on the last weekend before your flight. Then an invoice arrived. It had a Dutch word on it, bemiddelingskosten, or a friendlier English one: contract fee, admin fee, housing fee. You paid it, because the other option was arriving with nowhere to sleep.
Nobody told you that Dutch law has a rule about exactly that invoice. This guide is for the person who paid and found out later, possibly from a friend, possibly from this page.
It covers four things. The rule and its one real exception. Two court cases that look a lot like the situation many international students and new arrivals are in. How the five-year limit works when you did not know you had a claim. And what to do if you have already left the Netherlands.
Want the letter now? Our free reclaim tool asks four questions and writes it, in English or Dutch. Dutch readers have their own guide, written in Dutch rather than translated from this one.
The rule, in plain English
The rule is in article 7:417 lid 4 of the Dutch Civil Code (Burgerlijk Wetboek, BW). An intermediary who works for the landlord may not also charge the tenant. Dutch lawyers call it serving two masters: you cannot negotiate for one side and bill the other.
The Hoge Raad, the Dutch Supreme Court, applied it in 2015 in the case known as Duinzigt (ECLI:NL:HR:2015:3099). The part that matters for you: an intermediary who puts a landlord's property on its website, at the landlord's request or with their consent, is in principle working for that landlord.
Since 1 July 2023 there is also the Wet goed verhuurderschap (the Good Landlordship Act), which lets the municipality act against landlords and letting agents who break the rules. It added enforcement. It did not create the ban, which is older, so a fee you paid before July 2023 is not outside the rule because of its date.
The rule covers rooms as well as whole apartments. For a room inside a home, that has been so since 1 July 2016, when the law dropped an exception for rooms (Stb. 2016, 20; the exception is described in the explanatory memorandum, in Dutch). A payment from the last five years is well past that date.
The one real exception. If you hired an agent to search on your behalf, you were their client, and they are allowed to charge you. If you replied to a listing for a specific room that was already on offer, the room was there before you were, and the agent was working for whoever owned it.
Not sure which it was? Ask the agent in writing: who was your client for this rental? Whatever they answer, or if they don't answer at all, you want it on paper.
The fee almost never calls itself an agency fee
Most people who paid this fee never saw the words "agency fee" on anything. The invoice said:
- bemiddelingskosten or courtage (the Dutch words for a mediation fee);
- contractkosten (contract costs);
- administratiekosten (administration costs);
- a "handling fee", a "registration fee" or an "intake fee";
- a "housing fee".
The label does not decide the case. What decides it is who the intermediary worked for and what you paid them for. In a case where the Rechtbank Gelderland ordered an agent to repay in 2018, the refund covered the mediation fee and the administration costs together.
The last name on that list is the one that brings us to the courts.
Two court cases that may look like yours
Both were decided by the kantonrechter, the part of the Dutch district court that hears smaller civil claims. Both were about the same thing: a university that ran a "housing service" for its international students and charged a fee to use it.
The 2024 case (ECLI:NL:RBAMS:2024:6179, 27 September 2024). Five international students started their studies in 2016. To get a room, they paid the university a housing fee, which gave them access to a room booking system listing the landlords the university worked with. They picked their preferred rooms, the university passed their details to the landlord, and the tenancy was signed directly with the landlord.
The court held that this was mediation for both sides. Under article 7:417 lid 4, the university therefore had no right to a fee from the tenants. The payment was undue, and the university had to pay it back, with statutory interest. One of the five was living in Hungary by the time of the judgment.
The 2026 case (ECLI:NL:RBAMS:2026:2648, 27 February 2026). The same university, four students from 2022 and 2023. The Hoge Raad left one exception open in 2015: a site that works only as an electronic noticeboard, letting landlord and tenant contact each other directly, falls outside the ban, and it is for the site to prove that it does. The university accepted that its housing page was not a noticeboard. It argued instead that this only created a presumption of mediation, which it could rebut with its contracts with the landlords.
The court did not accept that. Because only students who had paid the fee could log in and see the rooms, it held that the university had a mediation agreement with the landlords as well. That is serving two masters, so the clause requiring the fee was void, and the fee came back with interest and legal costs. Three of the four had moved to the United States by then.
What to take from them. A fee charged by an institution you had every reason to trust, explained in English, on a professional website, can still be the fee the law forbids. And a court heard both cases although several of the people bringing them had already left the country.
What not to take from them. These are two first-instance judgments about one university's system. A different set of facts can go the other way. What they show is how a court reasons about a fee like this: it looks at what the intermediary did and for whom, and only then at what the fee was called.
"I didn't know": how the five years work
The usual advice is that you can reclaim an agency fee for up to five years. The Woonbond, the national tenants' union, puts it that way, and it is the right starting point.
The law is slightly more precise. A claim for money you paid but did not owe falls under article 3:309 BW, and the five years run from the day you became aware of your claim and of who received the money. There is also an outer limit of twenty years from the day the claim arose.
The 2024 case above shows what that can mean. The students paid in 2016. They were told in the spring of 2021, by a tenants' foundation, that the university should not have charged them. The court started the five-year clock in spring 2021, relying on a 2016 Hoge Raad ruling (ECLI:NL:HR:2016:1052) that the period begins when you are actually in a position to bring the claim. The claims were not time-barred. The students paid in 2016 and sent their demand letters in 2021, and the university did not dispute when they had learned of their claim.
Two cautions, because this is the part people stretch:
- Count from your payment date anyway. It is the reading nobody can argue with. If your payment is inside five years, you do not need the more complicated argument at all.
- If it is older, do not write it off alone. When the clock started depends on facts: when you learned, from whom, and what you knew before that. Ask Het Juridisch Loket before deciding it is too late.
Our tool does not work any of this out. Next to the question about when you paid, it shows one fixed line, "Roughly the last 5 years is usually reclaimable". It does not check the date you enter; it only prints it in the letter.
If you have already left the Netherlands
This is the situation the usual guides skip, and it is a common one: a one-year master's, an exchange semester, a job that ended.
The letter travels by email. The tool's own instruction is to send it by email and by registered post. The registered letter is there to prove it arrived, so keep whatever receipt you get for it, wherever you post it from.
Your bank account can be anywhere. The IBAN field in our tool is optional and takes whatever you type into it. It does not require a Dutch account.
You were not the only one abroad. In both cases above, people who had moved to another country brought the claim, through an authorised representative.
Your evidence is probably in your inbox. When you rent from abroad, almost everything happened by email: the offer, the invoice, the payment confirmation, sometimes a screenshot of the listing. Search your mail for the agency's name and the word invoice, and most of the folder below assembles itself.
What to gather before you write
Three things, and you likely have all of them already.
Proof that you paid. A bank statement, the invoice, a payment confirmation.
Proof that the intermediary worked for the landlord. The listing you replied to, the emails in which they offered you the room, a screenshot of the housing portal. This is the part the whole case turns on, so it is the part worth searching for.
Your tenancy agreement. For the address, the start date and the landlord's name.
Put them in one folder. You need them for the letter, and you need them again if it goes further than a letter.
The letter, and what our tool does
The letter is short and you do not need a lawyer to send it. It says what you paid, when, and under what name; for which room or home; that the intermediary acted for the landlord; that article 7:417 BW does not allow that; and that you want the full amount back, to which account, within fourteen days.
vond.house/reclaim asks four questions: whether the agent advertised the place or worked for the landlord, what kind of fee you paid on top of rent and deposit, how much, and when. Then you add your name, the agency's name, the address and, if you like, your IBAN, and the letter fills itself in. You choose English or Dutch for the letter independently of the page, and you can copy it or download it as a text file.
There is no account and no email address to give. What you type stays in your browser: the letter is put together on the page itself and sent nowhere.
The letter tells the agency that if the refund has not arrived within fourteen days, you will report the matter to the municipality and, if necessary, take it to the kantonrechter, claiming statutory interest and costs.
It is worth saying what the tool does not do. It does not decide whether your fee was unlawful: its answer depends only on your answer to the first question, and it says "likely". If you choose "Not sure", you still get the letter, so find out who the agent worked for first. And as above, it does not check whether your payment is too old.
Where to go if they don't pay
The tool's page names three places, and they are the right three.
Het Juridisch Loket. Free legal advice from a government-funded service. It is the call to make before you go to court.
The kantonrechter. If the letter gets nowhere, this is where the claim goes. It is the court that decided both housing-fee cases above, and you do not need a lawyer to bring a claim there.
The Rijksoverheid answer on agency fees. The government's own page on whether you have to pay bemiddelingskosten for a room or a home, in Dutch.
And one place that is not the right one: the Huurcommissie, the rent tribunal. It decides on rent, service costs and maintenance. An agency fee is outside what it can rule on, and time spent there is time off your five years.
Separately from getting your own money back, you can report the agent to the municipality where the room was. In Utrecht the reporting point is called Klacht over huren, and double mediation or administration fees are on its list of things to report. A report is enforcement against the agent. Your refund still comes from your letter, or from the court.
Where Vond fits, and where it doesn't
Vond opens in Utrecht. You rent directly from whoever is letting the place, and as a tenant you pay us nothing: no agency fee, no subscription to send a message.
To be exact about what that is: we speak to whoever is letting the place and build the listing with them. We do not verify identity, we do not check a register, and we do not claim to. We do not copy listings from other sites.
The reclaim tool has nothing to do with any of that. You do not sign up for anything to use it, and it works for a fee paid in any Dutch city, not only Utrecht. If you are about to rent here rather than looking back at a fee, how to rent in Utrecht without a makelaar is the place to start.
The short answer
If an agent, a platform or a university charged you for a room that the landlord had them offer, in principle the law says that fee was not yours to pay, whatever the invoice called it. You can usually reclaim it within five years of paying, and in the right facts the five years start later than that. Leaving the country does not end the claim. Gather the payment proof and the listing, send a letter by email and registered post, and give them fourteen days. If they don't pay, the kantonrechter is the route, not the Huurcommissie.
General information, not legal advice. Whether your fee can be reclaimed depends on facts this page cannot see, such as who the intermediary worked for and when you paid. Have your own situation confirmed by Het Juridisch Loket or read the Rijksoverheid answer on agency fees.