LUNTERO
Find your way home in the Netherlands with 20,000+ rental listings at your fingertips!
© 2025 Luntero. All rights reserved.
LUNTERO
Find your way home in the Netherlands with 20,000+ rental listings at your fingertips!
© 2025 Luntero. All rights reserved.
Luntero
Landlords can request credit checks with your consent, but demanding a criminal background check (VOG) for a standard rental is generally not permitted.
Application Process
A short-stay visa that allows travel within the Schengen Area for up to 90 days, which is entirely unsuitable for long-term renting.
A citizen of a European Union member state, who enjoys the right to freedom of movement and work within the Netherlands.
An internationally recognized form of certification that validates the authenticity of a public document for use in another country.
A legally valid translation of an official document performed by a translator who has been officially sworn in by a Dutch court.
The process of converting official documents from a foreign language into Dutch or English to make them understandable and acceptable for official procedures.
A person's record of managing debt and credit in a country other than the Netherlands, which is often difficult or impossible to verify for landlords.
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As part of the tenant screening process, a landlord or rental agency may want to perform a credit check to assess your financial reliability. In the Netherlands, this is a legal and relatively common practice, but it is strictly governed by privacy laws, primarily the GDPR (known as AVG in Dutch). A landlord cannot perform a credit check secretly. They must have a 'legitimate interest' (gerechtvaardigd belang)—in this case, mitigating financial risk—and, crucially, they must inform you that a credit check will be part of the procedure and obtain your explicit consent. This is often done via a clause in the application form you sign. These checks are typically performed by specialized agencies like EDR or Focum, which assess public records on debt and payment defaults. They do not show your bank balance or how you spend your money.
A key point of contention is how this information is used. A poor credit score does not give a landlord carte blanche to reject you, especially if you can demonstrate a stable income that easily covers the rent. A landlord should use the credit check as one part of a holistic assessment. If you know you have a negative registration from a past financial issue that has since been resolved, it's often better to be upfront about it and provide context, rather than letting the landlord discover it and draw their own, potentially incorrect, conclusions.
The Verklaring Omtrent het Gedrag (VOG), or Certificate of Conduct, is a document issued by the Ministry of Justice and Security that declares a person's criminal record contains no relevant offenses for a specific purpose (e.g., a job). Some landlords, in an attempt to be overly cautious, may ask potential tenants to provide a VOG. This is a significant overreach of their authority in almost all standard rental situations. While a landlord can ask, they generally cannot require a VOG as a condition of renting a normal apartment or house. Demanding one is considered a serious infringement on a tenant's privacy and is not proportionate to the landlord's legitimate interests.
A tenant is well within their rights to refuse such a request. The Dutch Data Protection Authority (Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens) has made it clear that a VOG should only be required when there are specific, high-stakes security concerns that justify such a deep level of vetting. This might apply to renting a home on a military base or within a courthouse complex, but it does not apply to renting a flat in Amsterdam. A landlord who insists on a VOG for a standard rental is likely ignorant of the law or is purposefully using intimidation tactics to screen tenants. In either case, it is a major red flag.