NL Scholarship (Formerly Holland Scholarship) 2027 in the Netherlands for Bachelor’s & Master’s

Let’s start with the sentence that will save you the most time: the NL Scholarship is not a fully funded scholarship. It is a one-time grant of €5,000, paid in the first year of your studies, for international students from outside the European Economic Area (EEA) who are starting a full-time bachelor’s or master’s degree at a participating Dutch institution. Study in NL — the official Dutch study portal run by Nuffic — says this plainly on its own page: the scholarship amounts to €5,000, you receive it in the first year, and it is not a full-tuition scholarship. Any website that presents the NL Scholarship (formerly the Holland Scholarship) as a full ride covering tuition, living costs and travel is misleading you, and budgeting on that basis would leave you thousands of euros short.

Understood correctly, however, €5,000 is still worth having. Dutch tuition fees for non-EEA students are substantial, first-year costs — deposits, residence-permit fees, housing, settling in — arrive all at once, and a €5,000 grant in exactly that first year reduces the amount you must prove and pay upfront. The NL Scholarship is also unusually accessible in one respect: it covers both bachelor’s and master’s students, across research universities and universities of applied sciences, in a country with a very large range of English-taught programmes. The catch is procedural: there is no central application. You apply through the institution where you want to study, each institution sets its own deadline — typically 1 February or 1 May — and the list of participating institutions changes every year.

This guide explains who is eligible, what €5,000 does and does not do to a realistic Dutch budget, how to apply institution by institution, what documents to expect, and how to combine the NL Scholarship with other funding honestly. All core facts were checked against Study in NL’s official NL Scholarship page at the time of writing. Browse our scholarships directory and university directory alongside it, because for most students the NL Scholarship will be one piece of a funding plan, not the whole plan.

Scholarship at a Glance

Keep the "first year only" point in front of every financial decision you make in this article. From year two onward, the NL Scholarship contributes nothing. A three-year bachelor’s degree must be fundable for three years; a one- or two-year master’s must be fundable for its full length. The €5,000 improves year one — it does not change the overall affordability question.

From Holland Scholarship to NL Scholarship: What Changed?

If you have searched for Dutch scholarships before, you know this award by its old name. Nuffic explains that the Holland Scholarship continued under the name NL Scholarship to align with the Netherlands’ international positioning: since January 2020 the country no longer presents itself abroad as "Holland", Study in NL replaced the old Study in Holland branding in 2022, and the scholarship was renamed to match the NL brand. Nuffic is clear that the NL Scholarship remains fundamentally the same programme, available for incoming and outgoing students and applied for through participating colleges and universities — the main change is the name and the communication materials.

Practically, this means two things for your research. First, older pages, videos and forum posts about the "Holland Scholarship" are usually describing this same €5,000 scheme — but their deadlines, participating institutions and even amounts for outgoing students may be out of date, so verify everything against current pages. Second, when you reach a university’s own website, search for "NL Scholarship" first; institutions have adopted the new name, and pages using only the old name are often unmaintained. The programme has existed since 2015, and Nuffic notes that more than 10,000 scholarships have been awarded over that period across incoming and outgoing students — so this is an established national scheme, not a new or experimental one.

This article covers the incoming NL Scholarship — for non-EEA students coming to the Netherlands for a bachelor’s or master’s. There is also an outgoing variant for Dutch students going abroad, with different amounts and rules; it is not relevant to StudyGraduate’s international audience and we do not mix the two.

Eligibility: Who Can Apply?

Study in NL publishes four national application criteria. You must meet all of them, plus the specific requirements of your institution.

• Your nationality is non-EEA. The EEA consists of the EU countries plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway. If you hold an EEA nationality, this scholarship is not for you. Note that some institutions also state that students who are eligible for the lower statutory tuition fee — for example certain Swiss or Surinamese students, or non-EEA students qualifying for statutory fees under specific regulations — cannot apply, because the scheme is designed for students paying full institutional fees. Check your institution’s wording.
• You are applying for a full-time bachelor’s or master’s programme at one of the participating Dutch higher education institutions. Part-time programmes, exchange semesters and non-participating institutions are outside the scheme. Participation is per institution and per year — and at some institutions, per programme.
• You meet the specific requirements of the institution of your choice. Study in NL directs you to the institution’s own website for these. Institutions commonly require a strong academic record — "excellent student" standards defined by the faculty — and some set explicit grade or language thresholds. There is no single national grade cutoff.
• You do not have a degree from an education institution in the Netherlands. A prior Dutch degree makes you ineligible. (Short exchange study in the Netherlands is treated differently by some institutions — for example Utrecht notes that only having taken part in an exchange programme does not make you ineligible — but a completed Dutch degree does.)

What this means for StudyGraduate’s core audience

Students from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Nigeria and Indonesia are all non-EEA nationals, so the nationality test is met. The real filters for our readers are the other three: choosing a participating institution, meeting that institution’s academic and programme requirements, and not holding a prior Dutch degree. Because institutions define "excellent" themselves, two students with identical grades can face different outcomes at different universities — another reason the institution’s own NL Scholarship page, not a general blog, is the document that matters.

One application, once

Some institutional pages add that you can only apply for this scholarship once, and that you cannot combine it with another full scholarship for the same study year and programme at that institution. Rules on combining awards vary — a few institutions state the NL Scholarship can be awarded alongside their own talent grants, others exclude combinations. Read your institution’s combination rules before assuming you can stack awards.

Benefits and Coverage: What €5,000 Actually Does

Putting €5,000 into a realistic Dutch budget

To judge this grant you need the cost side. Study in NL advises that students in the Netherlands spend on average roughly €1,000–€1,500 per month on daily living expenses — a range that has to cover rent, food, insurance, transport and personal costs, with rent in Amsterdam and other high-demand cities at the expensive end and chronic pressure on student housing. On top of living costs, non-EEA students pay institutional tuition fees set by each university, which for many programmes run well into five figures per year, and must demonstrate sufficient funds for a residence permit.

Against that background, €5,000 is roughly three to five months of living expenses, or a meaningful slice of one year’s tuition — genuinely useful, especially in the expensive first months, and nowhere near full funding. The correct mental model is: Can I fund this degree fully without the NL Scholarship? If yes, the grant is a welcome €5,000 reduction in year one. If no, the grant does not close the gap, and I need a different university, a larger university scholarship, or a different destination. Students who reverse that logic — assuming the grant makes an unaffordable programme affordable — are the ones who end up in financial difficulty mid-degree. Explore funding combinations using our budget and cost tools and compare destinations in our study abroad guides before committing.

Participating Institutions and Programmes

The list of participating universities changes every year, so the list below — the official 2026–2027 list on Study in NL at the time of writing — is a guide to the scheme’s shape, not a promise for 2027–2028. Always confirm your institution on the official page and on the institution’s own site for your entry year.

Participating research universities, 2026–2027

Eindhoven University of Technology; Maastricht University; Protestant Theological University; Radboud University; Theological University Apeldoorn; University of Groningen; University of Twente; Utrecht Theological University; Utrecht University; VU Amsterdam; and Wageningen University & Research.

Notice who is not on that list. Several famous Dutch names that appear in older "Holland Scholarship" guides do not appear among the 2026–2027 research-university participants. If your target university is absent, it may run its own excellence scholarships — many Dutch universities do — but you cannot assume it offers the NL Scholarship this year.

Participating universities of applied sciences, 2026–2027

Aeres University of Applied Sciences; Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences; Amsterdam University of the Arts; ArtEZ Institute of the Arts; Breda University of Applied Sciences; Codarts Rotterdam; Design Academy Eindhoven; Driestar Christian University; Fontys University of Applied Sciences; Gerrit Rietveld Academie; The Hague University of Applied Sciences; Hanze University of Applied Sciences; Hotelschool The Hague; HAN University of Applied Sciences; HKU University of Applied Sciences; HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht; HZ University of Applied Sciences; NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences; Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences; Saxion University of Applied Sciences; Thomas More Hogeschool; University of the Arts, The Hague; and Zuyd University of Applied Sciences.

Bachelor’s vs master’s differences

Both levels are eligible nationally, but institutions decide which of their programmes actually offer the award. A research university may offer NL Scholarships only for master’s programmes in a given year — Utrecht’s NL Scholarship, for example, is presented for international master’s programmes, with a 1 February deadline — while a university of applied sciences such as Saxion presents it across its bachelor programmes and selected master’s. Programme-level checks are therefore essential: find your exact programme’s page and confirm the scholarship is mentioned there.

Ranking is not the same as fit, but if you are comparing Dutch options, our rankings explorer can help you weigh research universities against each other, while remembering that universities of applied sciences offer a more practice-oriented model that suits many bachelor’s students better.

How to Apply, Step by Step

There is no central portal and no Nuffic application form for incoming students. The application lives inside your university application. The steps below reflect the common pattern across participating institutions; your institution’s page is the final authority for its own variant.

1. Choose your programme and institution, and confirm participation. Check the official Study in NL list for your entry year and the institution’s NL Scholarship page. Confirm your specific programme is covered.
2. Apply for admission to the programme. Dutch applications typically run through the national Studielink system combined with the institution’s own application portal. You must be applying for a full-time bachelor’s or master’s starting in the relevant academic year.
3. Indicate or submit your NL Scholarship application through the institution. Depending on the institution, this may be a checkbox or section within the admission application, a separate scholarship form, or an application plus a motivation letter submitted to a faculty or scholarship office. Some institutions only email the scholarship application link to non-EEA students who have started the admission procedure — watch your inbox.
4. Meet the institution’s specific requirements and its deadline. Typical institutional deadlines for September entry are 1 February or 1 May — for example, Utrecht University uses 1 February for its master’s NL Scholarship, Saxion uses 1 May with applications opening the preceding November, and some faculties set mid-April dates. Your institution’s date, not a national date, is the one that counts.
5. Complete admission — including any conditional requirements — by the institution’s stated point in time. Several institutions require you to be (conditionally) admitted by the scholarship deadline or shortly after to remain in consideration.
6. Receive the outcome from the institution. The institution selects and awards its own NL Scholarships. Numbers per institution are limited — Radboud, for instance, indicated a maximum of 12 NL Scholarships for 2026–2027, offered alongside its own scholarship programme — so treat the award as competitive even where the application itself is simple.
7. If awarded, arrange the rest of your funding and your residence permit. The €5,000 arrives in your first year through the institution, but your permit application requires proof of the full cost of your first year. Do not wait for the scholarship money to fund steps that must be paid before arrival.

Required Documents

Because applications are institutional, there is no single national document list. Across participating institutions, expect to provide some or all of the following:

• Admission application documents — diploma / degree certificate and transcripts, with certified translations where required.
• Proof of nationality — passport copy showing non-EEA nationality.
• English-language test results where your programme requires them. Note that some institutions specify a particular test for scholarship purposes — Saxion, for example, states that only IELTS is accepted as the language certificate for its NL Scholarship selection, alongside a GPA threshold. Your institution’s rule governs.
• Scholarship application form — the institution’s own form, where one is used.
• Motivation letter or statement — required by a number of institutions, explaining your academic excellence, your choice of programme and institution, and the relevance of studying in the Netherlands to your future goals.
• CV — requested by some institutions or faculties as part of the scholarship file.

The pattern to notice: most of the file is your admission file. The scholarship-specific additions are usually the form and the motivation. That means the highest-return preparation is a strong, early admission application — late or incomplete admission files quietly drop out of scholarship consideration at many institutions regardless of merit.

Deadlines and Timeline

Because the 2027–2028 participating list and institutional dates are published progressively, build your own deadline sheet with three columns — institution, programme application deadline, NL Scholarship deadline — taken from each institution’s live page, and re-check it in January. A deadline remembered from a blog, even a good one, is not a deadline verified. Our guides section has more on organising multi-university applications without mixing up dates.

Selection Criteria and How to Improve Your Chances

Study in NL sets the national frame; institutions select. Across institutional pages, the recurring selection themes are:

• Academic excellence as the institution defines it. Several institutions describe applicants as needing to be excellent students by faculty standards; some publish explicit thresholds such as a high GPA percentage and a strong language score. Your transcript is therefore the central selection document.
• Motivation quality. Where a motivation letter is required, institutions assess the relevance of the programme and of studying in the Netherlands to your future goals. Generic letters that could be sent to any country score poorly against that criterion.
• Programme and institution fit. A coherent story — prior study, this programme, this institution, next step — reads as a lower-risk award than a scattered one.
• Completeness and timing. Some institutions have very small numbers of awards; at least one describes selection among eligible applicants partly by lottery when numbers are limited, which underlines that you cannot control everything — but you can control being eligible, complete and on time.

Realistic ways to improve your position: apply to more than one participating institution if you genuinely have more than one good programme fit (each application is separate); submit well before the deadline rather than in the final week; write the motivation specifically for the Netherlands and that institution, naming concrete features of the programme; and pursue the institution’s own excellence scholarships in parallel where its rules allow combinations, since those can be considerably larger than €5,000.

Common Mistakes

• Believing the NL Scholarship is fully funded. It is €5,000, once, in year one. The official page says it is not a full-tuition scholarship.
• Looking for a central application on Nuffic or Study in NL. There is none for incoming students; you apply through your institution.
• Assuming your university participates. The list changes yearly, and some well-known universities are not on the current research-university list. Verify for your entry year and your programme.
• Using one national deadline. Deadlines are institutional — 1 February at one university, 1 May at another, mid-April elsewhere. Missing yours by using another university’s date is a common, avoidable loss.
• Applying after gaining a Dutch degree, or while holding EEA nationality, both of which make you ineligible.
• Budgeting the grant twice — counting €5,000 toward both the residence-permit proof and later living costs, or assuming it repeats in year two.
• Ignoring combination rules. Some institutions restrict holding the NL Scholarship alongside other scholarships for the same programme and year; others allow specific combinations. Check yours.
• Treating €5,000 as the funding plan. Without fundable years two and beyond, the grant cannot rescue the plan.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the NL Scholarship fully funded?

No. It is a one-time grant of €5,000 received in the first year of your studies. Study in NL states explicitly that it is not a full-tuition scholarship. You remain responsible for the rest of your tuition and all of your living costs, in every year including the first.

What is the difference between the Holland Scholarship and the NL Scholarship?

They are the same programme. Nuffic renamed the Holland Scholarship to NL Scholarship to align with the Netherlands’ NL branding; the scheme itself remained fundamentally the same and is still applied for through participating institutions. Older "Holland Scholarship" pages describe this award but may carry outdated deadlines and institution lists.

Who is eligible for the NL Scholarship?

Non-EEA nationals who are applying for a full-time bachelor’s or master’s at a participating Dutch institution, who meet that institution’s specific requirements, and who do not already hold a degree from an education institution in the Netherlands.

How do I apply — is there a central portal?

No. You apply through the institution where you want to study, usually alongside or within your programme admission application, following that institution’s form, motivation and deadline requirements. Study in NL lists participating institutions and links you onward; it does not take applications.

When is the deadline for 2027 entry?

There is no single national deadline. Institutions set their own, typically 1 February or 1 May for September entry — for example Utrecht University’s master’s deadline falls on 1 February and Saxion’s on 1 May, with some institutions using mid-April dates. Check your institution’s NL Scholarship page for its exact 2027 date.

Can I combine the NL Scholarship with a university scholarship?

Sometimes. Rules differ by institution: some allow the NL Scholarship alongside their own talent grants, while others state it cannot be combined with another scholarship for the same study year and programme, and some institutions award it only together with their own scholarship programme. Your institution’s page is the authority — confirm before counting both amounts in a budget.

Can bachelor’s students apply, or is it only for master’s?

Both. The national criteria cover full-time bachelor’s and master’s programmes at participating institutions. In practice, check programme level at your institution: some research universities offer it mainly for master’s programmes, while universities of applied sciences commonly offer it for bachelor’s programmes.

How much money do I still need besides the €5,000?

Substantially more. You must fund the remainder of your tuition plus living costs that Study in NL puts at roughly €1,000–€1,500 per month, and you must demonstrate sufficient funds for your residence permit. Treat the €5,000 as a first-year contribution within a fully funded personal plan, not as the plan itself.

Sources and Verification

This article was prepared from official sources, checked at the time of writing:

• Study in NL (Nuffic) — NL Scholarship (studyinnl.org): €5,000 amount, first-year payment, "not a full-tuition scholarship" statement, financing by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and Dutch institutions, the four application criteria, the 2026–2027 participating institution lists, and the 1 November 2025 opening for 2026–2027.
• Nuffic — Holland Scholarship becomes NL Scholarship (nuffic.nl): the renaming rationale, confirmation that the programme remains fundamentally the same, and application through participating institutions.
• Institutional NL Scholarship pages via Study in NL’s participating-institution links — for example Saxion University of Applied Sciences — Scholarships (saxion.edu): examples of institution-set deadlines (1 February, mid-April, 1 May), excellence and language thresholds, combination rules and limited award numbers — always verify your own institution’s current page.

Disclaimer: Scholarship details, participating institutions, amounts and dates change between cycles. Always confirm deadlines and amounts on the official Study in NL website and on your institution’s website before applying. StudyGraduate is an information portal, not an agency or a scholarship provider, and no article can promise selection, admission or visa approval. The NL Scholarship is a partial, first-year grant of €5,000 — plan your funding for the full duration of your degree.