You have an offer, or you are close to one. The gross salary looks fine against the number you checked last month. Then someone mentions that the HSM salary threshold 2027 figures come out at the end of the year, and you realise you have been measuring your offer against a bar that is about to move.

This is the part almost nobody explains before you sign. The highly skilled migrant salary criterion is not fixed for the length of your permit. It is reset every 1 January, and your employer has to keep paying you above the applicable amount for as long as you hold the permit. An offer that clears the bar comfortably in November can sit uncomfortably close to it in February.

This post is about that reset specifically. You will get how the indexation actually works, how to reason about the likely 2027 figure without anyone inventing a number for you, why the under-30 and 30-and-over brackets behave differently at the edge, the exact questions to put to your employer before you sign a Q4 offer, and how to stop refreshing the IND page every week to find out whether the number has landed.

Nothing here is legal advice, and no number in this article is a prediction you should rely on. Where the figure decides your case, the only source that counts is the IND's own salary criteria page.

The highly skilled migrant (kennismigrant) route works on a salary criterion rather than a labour market test. Your employer, which must be a recognised sponsor (erkend referent), declares that it will pay you at least the applicable gross monthly salary, excluding holiday allowance. The IND checks the declaration rather than the vacancy.

That criterion is republished by the Dutch government each year and applies from 1 January. It is not tied to when you signed, when you arrived, or when your permit was granted. The calendar does the work.

There is an important nuance that softens this, and you should understand it rather than assume the worst. In the Dutch implementation, the salary criterion that applies to an existing highly skilled migrant is generally the one that applied when the permit was granted — the annual increase does not automatically drag every existing permit holder up to the new figure. What changes on 1 January is the criterion for new applications and for changes that trigger a fresh assessment.

That is the trap in a single sentence: a new application or a new employer is assessed against the criterion in force on the day it is submitted, not the day you accepted the offer.

So if you sign in November 2026 but your employer files the application in January 2027, you are in the 2027 world. If you switch employers in March 2027, you are in the 2027 world. Our guide to switching employers safely on an HSM visa covers the mechanics of that second case in detail.

The salary criteria are not picked by a caseworker. They are indexed using a published wage index — in the Dutch rules, the criterion is adjusted annually in line with the index of collectively agreed wages (the CAO wage index) published by CBS, the national statistics office.

In practice this means three things for you.

The practical takeaway is that you can reason about the direction with confidence and the exact number not at all. It goes up. It has gone up every year in recent memory. By how much depends on a CBS index you do not control.

If you are new to how the criterion sits inside the wider permit, the highly skilled migrant visa Netherlands guide walks through the requirements end to end.

Why the HSM salary threshold changes every January, not on your start date

Here is where most articles start inventing figures. This one will not.

What you can do honestly is bound the problem. The criterion has risen every January in recent years, and the size of the jump has moved roughly with Dutch collective wage growth, which has run in the low-to-mid single digits per year for most of the last decade and higher in the years after the 2022 inflation spike. A sensible way to stress-test an offer is to assume an increase of a few per cent on the current figure, and check whether your gross monthly salary still clears it with margin.

So, concretely, take the current criterion for your age bracket from the IND page. Add a buffer that reflects a plausible indexation step — many people use 3% to 6% as a planning range, not as a forecast. If your offer clears the upper end of that band, the January reset is not your problem. If it only clears the current figure, you have a conversation to have with your employer.

Three things this exercise is not:

Plan with a buffer, sign against the published figure, and never let an estimate reach your employment contract.

The highly skilled migrant criterion has two main age brackets: a reduced amount for migrants under 30, and the standard amount for those aged 30 and over. There is also a separate, lower criterion for people applying within the orientation year after graduating from a Dutch or qualifying foreign institution.

The gap between the under-30 and 30-and-over figures is substantial — it is not a rounding difference. That creates a second reset that has nothing to do with January: your own birthday.

Read carefully, because this is where people get caught. The applicable criterion is generally determined at the moment the application is assessed, and turning 30 while you already hold the permit does not by itself push you onto the higher criterion for that permit. But an extension, or a new application with a new employer after you turn 30, is assessed on the adult figure.

The dangerous combination is both resets in one quarter: you are 29 with a salary just over the reduced criterion, you turn 30 in February 2027, and you plan to change employers in the spring. The salary that was comfortably compliant becomes a salary that would not support a fresh application at all.

If you are in that position, the fix is boring and effective: get the increase agreed before the switch, in writing, effective from the start date of the new role. Our post on raises and promotions as a highly skilled migrant explains how salary changes interact with the criterion once you are already in the system.

The realistic 2027 range, based on the last five years of increases

This is the scenario the whole article exists for.

You interview in October. You get the offer in November. The company's HR team quotes you the current year's criterion, because that is the number on their internal template, and your gross salary clears it by a small margin. You sign. The application is filed in December, or it slips to January because of the Christmas shutdown at half of Dutch corporate life.

Three things can go wrong from there, in order of how often they actually happen.

The filing slips across the year boundary. Your application is now assessed against the 2027 criterion. A salary that cleared 2026 by 1% does not clear 2027. The application is refused or, more commonly, the employer is asked to fix the salary and the whole thing takes six extra weeks.

You start on a compliant salary and then need an extension sooner than expected. Short first contracts are common. If your permit or contract runs to a point where a fresh assessment happens, the criterion that applies then is the one in force then.

You want to move within a year. The Dutch market rewards switching, and plenty of people move after twelve months. That move is a new application at the new year's criterion. If you started at the floor, you have no room.

None of this makes a Q4 offer a bad offer. It makes the filing date a term worth discussing, in the same breath as the start date. A start date in January with a December filing behaves very differently from a December filing that quietly becomes a January one.

For the wider question of whether an offer qualifies at all — job title, contract type, sponsor status, salary structure — read is your offer eligible for the highly skilled migrant scheme alongside this post.

You are allowed to ask these questions. A competent recognised sponsor will answer them in a sentence each, because their immigration adviser has already thought about them. Hesitation is itself information.

- Which criterion did you use for this offer, and from which year? You want to hear the current published figure and the correct age bracket, not "we always use around this number".

- When will the application be submitted to the IND? Before or after 1 January. If after, ask which criterion they have budgeted for.

- Is the quoted salary gross monthly excluding holiday allowance? The criterion is defined that way. A package that only clears the bar once you count the 8% holiday allowance does not clear the bar.

- Are bonuses, allowances or the 30% ruling being counted towards it? Variable and conditional pay generally does not count towards the salary criterion. Only fixed, contractual gross monthly salary does.

- If the 2027 figure lands above my salary before filing, will you top it up? Get the answer in writing, in the offer letter or a side email. This single question has saved more start dates than any other.

- Which legal entity is the sponsor, and is it currently in the public register? You can verify this yourself; our guide to finding IND recognised sponsors shows how to check the register properly.

Do not apologise for asking. From the employer's side, a refused application costs them a hire and several thousand euros of wasted process. They would rather fix a number in November than explain a refusal in February.

Say you are already here, already a highly skilled migrant, and your salary sits just above the criterion for your bracket. You are not in immediate danger — the criterion applied to your existing permit is generally the one from when it was granted — but you are in a fragile position for anything that triggers a fresh look.

Work through this in the autumn, not in January.

Check what actually counts. Pull your payslip and identify your fixed gross monthly salary. Strip out holiday allowance, thirteenth month if it is discretionary, bonuses, and any allowance that is not fixed in your contract. That stripped number is what gets compared.

Find out when your permit expires. If an extension falls in 2027, the assessment happens then. Give yourself two salary review cycles of runway, not two months.

Time the salary review. Many Dutch companies run reviews in Q1 with an effective date of 1 January or 1 April. If yours is April and your risk is January, say so to your manager now. Framing matters: this is a compliance date, not a negotiation tactic.

Get changes in writing. A verbal promise of a raise is not evidence for the IND. An addendum to the employment contract, signed, with an effective date, is.

Do not fix it by taking a side job. Income from a second employer does not combine into one salary criterion for this purpose, and unauthorised work creates a much bigger problem than a marginal salary. If self-employment is what you actually want, read our post on moving from HSM to ZZP first, because the permit implications are not small.

The rhythm is predictable even when the number is not.

The indexed amounts are calculated from the CBS wage index and published by the responsible ministry in the autumn, then reflected on the IND's salary criteria page and in the Government.nl material ahead of 1 January. Employers' immigration advisers usually circulate it within days. Job boards and blogs update it far later, which is exactly why so many articles you find in February still quote last year's figure.

A workable routine, without refreshing anything daily:

If a page quotes an HSM salary figure without naming the year it applies to, close the page.

Everything above assumes you are evaluating one offer. Most people are actually doing something harder: holding a salary requirement in their head while scanning job boards for roles that will clear it, at companies that can sponsor at all.

That is a filtering problem, and doing it by hand is where the time goes. You open the sponsor register, cross-check names against boards, open a posting, discover the salary band sits under your bracket's criterion, and start again. Then you repeat the whole loop next week because postings appear and disappear on their own schedule. Our Netherlands job search timeline post puts real numbers on how many weeks that pattern typically costs.

The January reset makes it worse in one specific way. Every salary band you mentally filed as "just about enough" in December has to be re-evaluated against a higher bar. If you are near the line, your entire shortlist changes on 1 January and nothing on any job board tells you that.

The fix is to stop treating the threshold as a fact you look up and start treating it as a filter you apply — to every new sponsored posting, as it appears, rather than to the three you happened to see.

Seeing and applying to every job on ArrowLancer is free, so you can browse visa-sponsored jobs and check salary bands against your bracket yourself. Premium Alerts is €9/month or €90/year on top of the free account: it gives you full details on every match with a short reason it fits your CV, new matches as new jobs arrive, and an email when there are new ones — so a posting that appears the week the new criterion lands reaches you instead of waiting for your next manual scan.

If you would rather stop refreshing job boards and get matched automatically, that is what it is for.