What Box 3 Will Look Like in 2028, and Why Landlords Need to Pay Attention

From 1 January 2028, the Dutch tax system is moving away from taxing a theoretical return on your assets and toward taxing what you actually earn. For homeowners who rent out a second property, that change is bigger than it sounds.

The Box 3 system has been on borrowed time for years. The Supreme Court ruled in 2021, and again in 2024, that taxing people on a flat deemed return rather than their actual return was incompatible with property rights under the European Convention on Human Rights. Since then the government has been working towards a replacement, and that replacement is now close to becoming law.

On 12 February 2026, the House of Representatives passed the Box 3 Actual Return Act (Wet werkelijk rendement box 3). The bill is currently before the Senate, with the intended start date of 1 January 2028. The Minister of Finance has indicated that amendments are likely, and the 2028 deadline depends on those amendments not being too far-reaching. But unless the timeline slips significantly, this is the system landlords will be working with in less than two years.

Two parts of the change matter most if you own a second home and rent it out.

From a deemed return to actual rental income

Under the current system, the tax authority assumes you earn a fixed percentage on your assets each year, regardless of what they actually produce. The presumed return is updated annually and has hovered above 5% in recent years. If your real rental yield is below that figure, you have been paying tax on income you never received. If it is above, you have been quietly benefiting.

From 2028, that calculation is replaced. If a property is rented out for 90% or more of the calendar year, the actual rental income becomes the taxable amount, with maintenance and other periodic costs deductible against it. Mortgage interest is also deductible. For mixed use, where the property is rented for less than 90% of the year, the tax authority compares the actual income against a deemed return of 3.35% of the WOZ value and taxes whichever is higher.

The proposed flat rate on the resulting income is 36%. A tax-free result of €1,800 per person applies to the total Box 3 outcome, and losses can be carried forward indefinitely against future Box 3 gains.

On paper, this is fairer. In practice, the impact depends entirely on your individual situation. Landlords with strong rental yields, particularly those who restructured to take advantage of the old flat-rate calculation, may find their tax bill rises noticeably. Landlords with thin margins or significant deductible costs may end up better off.

The part most people are missing: value growth becomes taxable

The change that has had less attention is the treatment of capital appreciation. From 1 January 2028, the increase in your property's value also enters the Box 3 calculation. For real estate, this works as a capital gains tax rather than a year-by-year mark-to-market. The gain is only taxed when the property is sold, but the gain itself is calculated against a baseline set on 1 January 2028.

For homes, that baseline is the WOZ value with reference date 1 January 2028. Anything your property has appreciated up to that point falls outside the new regime. Anything it appreciates after that point becomes taxable income at 36% when you sell, with improvement costs (as opposed to maintenance) added to the cost basis and reducing the eventual gain.

In Amsterdam, where house prices roughly doubled between 2015 and 2023 according to CBS, almost all of that growth sits safely on the right side of the 2028 line. But future growth will not. Even the more moderate annual appreciation forecast for Amsterdam over the next five years, around 3% to 4% a year, translates into a significant taxable gain on a property held for ten or fifteen years after 2028. For Eindhoven, where prices have climbed sharply alongside the city's tech sector expansion, the picture is similar.

The practical consequence is that the WOZ value as of 1 January 2028 matters more than usual. A low baseline means a larger taxable gain at the moment of sale. This is one of the few situations where it is worth checking whether your WOZ assessment for 2028 actually reflects your property's value.

What is still uncertain

The 2028 start date is the government's target, not a guarantee. Three things could push it back. The Senate has signalled it may reject the bill in its current form, the Minister of Finance has already said amendments are coming, and any new Supreme Court rulings on the existing system could force further changes. The current coalition agreement also notes that the system is intended to evolve over time from a hybrid model into a full capital gains realisation tax. The direction of travel is clear, but the precise final design is not yet settled.

There is also a separate question about how the new regime interacts with structures like a BV. Real estate held in a BV is subject to corporate income tax (currently 19% on the first €200,000 of profit) rather than Box 3, with capital gains only taxed on realisation. Whether shifting a property into a BV makes sense depends on the property, the rental yield, the holding period, and a number of personal tax factors. It is not a default answer.

What this means if you own a rental property in Amsterdam or Eindhoven

If you have a second home that you rent out, three questions are worth working through before 2028 arrives.

The first is your actual rental yield. The shift from deemed to actual return is the headline change, and whether it helps or hurts you depends almost entirely on what your property genuinely earns relative to the old flat-rate calculation.

The second is your current rental contract. The Affordable Housing Act has already changed what you can charge for a regulated property, and the rental market measures coming into force in 2027 will adjust the WWS scoring further. The combination of those changes and the new tax treatment may make some existing contracts considerably less attractive than they looked when they were signed.

The third is the structure around the property. For most landlords, holding the property privately and accepting the new Box 3 treatment will be the right answer. For some, particularly those with multiple properties or a long expected holding period, a different structure may be worth modelling out. This is not a decision to make on a hunch, and it is not the same answer for everyone.

A reasonable conversation to have now

At Expat Housing Network we're discussing this topic with clients every week at the moment. Most of them had no idea either of these changes was coming.

Two years is not a lot of time to absorb a tax change of this size, and the period before 1 January 2028 is the window in which decisions about contracts, structure, and the WOZ baseline can still be made in a calm, considered way. After that date, the choices narrow.

If you own a second property in Amsterdam or Eindhoven and want to think through how the 2028 changes affect your specific situation, we are happy to talk it through.