The Largest Dutch Awards
Close First

Almost every guide to studying in the Netherlands lists the same three scholarships together, in the same paragraph, as though they were variations of one thing. They are not. Read the amounts side by side and the word funded stops holding.

Four numbers, read together

• The NL Scholarship, still widely called the Holland Scholarship, pays five thousand euros. Once, in the first year. It does not renew.
• The Orange Tulip Scholarship ranges from a quarter of tuition to all of it, depending on which university runs it and which passport you hold.
• The Amsterdam Excellence Scholarship pays twenty-five thousand euros and covers living costs. It asks that you graduated in the top ten per cent of your class.
• Non-EU tuition at Leiden or Groningen runs between fourteen and twenty-one thousand euros a year.

Set those against each other. One reduces a bill. One might close it. One closes it and asks for something you cannot produce in the month before the deadline.

The most generous awards are not the national ones

The routes that actually cover a degree are run by individual universities, not by the state.

TU Delft's Justus and Louise van Effen scholarship covers full tuition and adds fifteen thousand euros a year for living costs. Maastricht's High Potential scholarship covers tuition and adds just over twelve thousand. Radboud waives the non-EU portion of tuition and adds eleven thousand four hundred.

None of these are what people mean when they say they are looking for a scholarship in the Netherlands. They mean the Holland Scholarship, because it is the one every list opens with.

And they close first

Award	Deadline
TU Delft van Effen	1 December
Amsterdam Excellence	15 January
Leiden Excellence	1 February
Maastricht High Potential	1 February
Radboud	1 March
NL Scholarship	February to May, varies by institution

The order is worth sitting with. The award that covers the most closes on the first of December. The one that covers the least closes months later. Someone who starts looking in September has already missed the top of the list without knowing it existed.

Sources: institutional scholarship pages and Studyinnl (Nuffic), read August 2026. Cycles shift; verify against the current call before planning around any date.

The filters are not only about merit

Maastricht's High Potential scholarship asks that you be under thirty-five. Orange Tulip sets no age condition at all. Neither states this on the page you land on first, and neither will tell you before you have spent a week on the application.

Class rank works the same way. It is not a document you request; it is an outcome you build, and it is built years before anyone asks to see it. Which is why the students in the best position for the largest awards are the ones still early enough to shape it. With two years, the requirement is a plan. With two months, it is a fact.

What the Netherlands actually offers

There is a real argument for the country, and it is not the scholarship list. Graduates get a year to look for work or start a business without an employer sponsor, which is one of the more workable routes to staying in Europe after a degree.

That is a funding argument too, just not the one people go looking for. A year of legal residence with the right to work changes the arithmetic of the degree more than a five thousand euro award does.

Where I come into this

I do not send scholarship lists, and the Dutch case is a good illustration of why. The list is accurate and still misleading, because it puts four very different instruments in one column and lets you assume they are interchangeable.

The work is deciding which of them your passport, your class rank and your calendar actually put within reach, and whether the deadline that matters is close enough to be worth this cycle at all.