FIRE Calculator Netherlands

What FIRE means in the Netherlands

FIRE stands for financial independence, retire early. The mechanic is the same everywhere: build a pot large enough that a safe withdrawal covers your spending, so paid work becomes optional. What changes is the plumbing, and the Dutch version has one feature that almost no other country shares. The Netherlands taxes the portfolio itself, every year, whether or not it made you a cent.

Start with the good news. AOW, the first pillar state pension, is genuinely generous by international standards. From 1 July 2026 the full amount for someone who lives alone is €1,662.16 gross a month, plus holiday pay of €104.78 a month paid out each May. That comes to about €21,203 a year, and it is the default this page uses. If you are married or living with a partner the amount is €1,139.39 per person per month plus €74.85 of holiday pay, because AOW pays a couple less each than two people living alone.

The AOW age is 67 in 2026 and 2027, rising to 67 years and 3 months from 2028 to 2031. It follows the life expectancy figures the Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek publishes each year, and the rule is that it must be fixed at least five years ahead, so it cannot be moved on you at short notice. That five year lock is worth more to a planner than it sounds.

AOW is residence based, not contribution based. You build up 2% for each insured year in the 50 years before your AOW age. Live or work outside the Netherlands for eight of those years and you have 84% of the full amount, not 100%. Anyone who moved to the Netherlands as an adult should type a reduced figure into the AOW box rather than the default.

The three pillars, and how they constrain early retirement

The Dutch system is officially built in three pillars. The first is AOW, the basic state income everyone living or working in the Netherlands accrues automatically. The second is workplace pension through your employer, which covers roughly 90% of employees and is usually funded around two thirds by the employer and one third by you. The third is what you arrange yourself, typically a lijfrente or annuity product, and it is the main route for self employed people who have no second pillar at all.

For a FIRE plan, the pillar structure is really an access map. Pillars one and two are locked until pension age. Pillar three lijfrente capital is locked too, and it is taxed as income in box 1 when it pays out. So if you intend to stop working at 50, none of the sheltered money helps you for the first seventeen years. Every euro of spending in that window has to come from ordinary savings and investments, which is precisely the money that sits in box 3. That is the same bridge problem described in what is Coast FIRE, except the bridge itself is taxed annually.

One structural detail is worth knowing before you plan. Pension entitlements and lijfrente capital are not box 3 assets, and your owner occupied main home falls under the eigen woning rules in box 1 rather than box 3. So the same euro can be inside or outside the annual wealth charge depending purely on which pillar holds it.

Box 3, the single biggest factor in Dutch FIRE

Box 3 does not tax your gains. It taxes a deemed return on what you own, and it does it every year regardless of what the market did.

For 2026 the numbers are these. The deemed return on investments and other assets is 6.00%. The deemed return on bank and savings balances is 1.28% and on debts 2.70%, both provisional until early 2027. The tax free allowance, the heffingsvrij vermogen, is €59,357 per person, so €118,714 for fiscal partners. The box 3 rate is 36%.

Multiply the two headline figures and you get the number that actually matters. 36% of 6.00% is 2.16%. That is what you pay each year on the value of your investments above the allowance, in cash, whether the portfolio rose, fell or sat still. It is not a tax on income. It is a charge on capital.

Now put that next to a 4% withdrawal rate. If you draw 4% and hand back 2.16% of the same pot, your usable rate is not 4%, it is closer to 1.84%. Run the arithmetic on €40,000 of spending and the target stops looking like €1,000,000 and starts looking like roughly €2.1 million. That figure assumes the deemed return applies in full every single year, which is the pessimistic reading, but it shows why importing an American FIRE number into a Dutch plan does not work.

There is a real safety valve. Since the Supreme Court rulings on box 3, a tegenbewijsregeling lets you declare your actual return and pay on that instead when the real figure is lower than the deemed one. In a flat or falling year, that turns a wealth tax back into something closer to an income tax. And the whole regime is due to be replaced: the government intends to tax actual returns from 1 January 2028, after the start date slipped from 2026 and then from 2027. Until that lands, 2026 and 2027 run on the deemed system plus the counter evidence rule.

A worked example in euro

Take Sanne, 34, who spends €40,000 a year and wants to stop working at 52. Using this page's defaults of a 7% return, 3% inflation and no fees, which is a 4% real return, and a 4% withdrawal rate:

• Ignore AOW entirely and her target is €40,000 ÷ 4%, which is €1,000,000.
• Count full single person AOW of €21,203 from 67 and the shape changes. From 52 to 67 she needs fifteen bridge years of full spending, worth about €445,000 in today's money. From 67 onwards she only funds €40,000 minus €21,203, which is €18,797 a year, needing about €470,000 at 67, or roughly €261,000 discounted back to 52.
• Her target at 52 is therefore around €706,000, close to €294,000 less than the naive figure. AOW does more work here than almost any other state pension in Europe.

Then apply box 3 to that same €706,000. Take off the €59,357 allowance and charge 2.16% on the rest and the annual bill is about €13,970. That is a third of her spending budget going out as tax on the pot itself, before she pays for anything. It is why Dutch FIRE planners talk about box 3 more than they talk about withdrawal rates, and why the sensible move is to model your own number with the fees slider pushed up to represent the drag.

Local risks worth pricing in

Box 3 reform risk, in both directions. The move to actual returns in 2028 could lower your bill in weak years and raise it in strong ones. Any plan built on today's exact percentages is built on sand, because the deemed rates for savings and debts are set annually and the investment figure has moved between 5.28% and 6.17% over the last several years.

AOW build up risk. The default assumes 50 full insured years. Expats, returnees and anyone with time abroad will have less, and 2% per missing year adds up quickly.

AOW age risk. The five year lock protects the near term, but the link to life expectancy means the age can keep drifting for anyone under about 40 today.

Tax on drawdown. AOW is a gross figure. Income tax and the Zvw healthcare contribution come off it, so the net amount landing in your account is lower than €1,662.16 a month.

Housing cost risk. An Amsterdam retirement budget and a Groningen one differ easily by €10,000 a year, and at a 4% rate that gap alone is €250,000 of FIRE number.

Honest limitations

This is a planning model, not advice, and it simplifies deliberately. It works in real terms, so every figure is in today's euro, and it assumes a constant real return rather than an actual sequence of good and bad years, so it ignores sequence-of-returns risk. Most importantly, the calculator does not model box 3. It applies a flat withdrawal rate and no Dutch tax at all, so the number it shows is a floor rather than a target for anyone holding the money outside a pension. It also assumes your AOW entitlement is complete and stays at the amount you type, in today's money. Nothing you enter leaves your browser. Compare the output with the 4% rule calculator and the early retirement calculator before you commit to a date.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

Every Dutch figure on this page comes from the primary sources below, so you can verify them directly rather than take our word for it.

• SVB, Bedragen AOW, the gross AOW of €1,662.16 a month for someone living alone from 1 July 2026, holiday pay of €104.78 a month paid in May, and €1,139.39 per person plus €74.85 for people who are married or living together.
• SVB, Opbouw van de AOW, 2% of build up for each insured year in the 50 years before your AOW age.
• Rijksoverheid, AOW-leeftijd, 67 in 2026 and 2027, 67 years and 3 months from 2028 to 2031, the link to CBS life expectancy under article 7a AOW, and the rule that the age is set five years in advance.
• Rijksoverheid, Opbouw pensioenstelsel, the three pillars, the roughly 90% of employees with a workplace pension, and the two thirds to one third premium split.
• Belastingdienst, berekening box 3-inkomen 2026, the 2026 deemed returns of 1.28% on bank balances, 6.00% on investments and other assets and 2.70% on debts, the heffingsvrij vermogen of €59,357 per person, and the 36% rate.
• Belastingdienst, Box 3 uitleg en tarieven, the box 3 rate of 36% for 2026.
• Belastingdienst, fictief rendement percentages by year, the historic range of the investment percentage, from 5.28% in 2020 to 6.17% in 2023.
• Rijksoverheid, Box 3 rechtsherstel en tegenbewijsregeling, the counter evidence rule allowing tax on actual return where it is lower, and the intended start of the actual return system on 1 January 2028.
• Belastingdienst, which assets are not declared in box 3, the treatment of pension and lijfrente capital and the eigen woning in box 1.