Free room check
What may my room cost?
If you share the kitchen or the shower with housemates, your room falls under a completely separate points system. Work out your maximum legal rent in about two minutes, with the letter to request a reduction.
Takes about two minutes
No account, no charge
Calculates in your own browser
Step 1 of 3Your own room
Your own room
Let us look up the building
We will fetch the building year and the energy label. Skipping is fine.
Why we ask for this
The building year and the energy label are about the building, so those can come from the register. Your floor area cannot: the register knows dwellings, not rooms, so a house let out room by room appears in it with the size of the whole house. If we filled that in, the check would count a hundred and forty square metres where fourteen belong, and the outcome would be that your rent is fine while you are paying far too much. That is why we ask you for it in a moment.
We send only your postcode and house number, keep neither, and link them to nothing.
Measure your room wall to wall, cupboards included. For the number of rooms, count every rented room in the building, including your own. If you live with four housemates, that is five rooms. An estimate to the nearest half metre is fine.
Is there a radiator in your room?
Fill in your floor area and the number of rooms, then you can continue.
The thing landlords tell international students most often
That the room is in the private sector, so the rent is whatever was agreed. That is simply not true. Non-self-contained housing never falls into the private sector. However high your rent, you have rent price protection and the Rent Tribunal may rule on it.
Why the date matters more than the amount
If you have been renting less than six months, you can have the initial rent assessed and a reduction applies retroactively to the first day of your tenancy. That is the strongest position there is, and the deadline is hard. Renting longer, you first make a written proposal for a reduction yourself, at least two months before the date you propose.
Talk to your housemates
Points for shared spaces are spread across all the rooms, so if your rent is too high, your housemates' rent probably is too. Making a proposal together is stronger than going alone, and it takes exactly the same effort.
A note for internationals
The letters this tool produces are in Dutch on purpose. They go to a Dutch landlord or to the Rent Tribunal, and the legal wording has to be exact, so you can send them as they are.
Not sure whether your place counts as a room? If you have your own kitchen and your own shower, use the rent points check instead. All our tools are listed at all checks.