When to file your Dutch taxes?

Index

When it comes to filing your Dutch taxes, it is not only important to make sure that you are filing them correctly, but also that you do so in a timely manner. It is therefore vital to make sure you not only know your obligations, but also that you know when these obligations need to be met.

Dutch tax season

The regular period for filing a Dutch income tax return, always falls after that tax year has concluded. This way you will always have the full information regarding that tax year, so that the return filed is fully comprehensive.

The period, or tax season as it is commonly referred to, starts the 1^st of March and end on the 30^th of April, of the year following the year for which you are filing.

Obligated to file a return?

It is not always required to file a return for any given year. You can be obligated however to do so. In the Netherlands we have 2 ways of becoming obligated to file a tax return for a specific tax year. The first of which is receiving an invitation to file, from the Dutch tax authorities.

The authorities receive preemptive data from several different financial institutions, regarding the tax related activities of Dutch residents. These institutions include, but are not limited to, all Dutch employers and banks. If based on this preemptive data, the authorities can conclude that you might still need to pay an additional amount in tax, then most likely the authorities will send you an invitation to file a return, thus creating the obligation to do so.

This does not mean that everyone who receives an invitation will have to pay an additional amount, as the authorities of course do not have all the information. If they did, you would not still need to file.

The other way to become obligated to file, is if it can be reasonably expected that you still need to pay an amount in that and that you can know that. This way of obligation is a lot trickier to determine. For example, say that there are two taxpayers, who both did not receive an invitation to file. One of them only has income from employment while the other only has income from his own business.

For the one in employment, his employer pays taxes over his income throughout the year for him. Since this wage tax, should in principle be equal to the income tax due, taxpayer 1 can presume that his taxes were paid properly and that he does not need to file a return.

Taxpayer 2 earns all his income throughout the year untaxed. He should therefore know that there should still be taxes to be paid over this income. It can therefore be reasonably assumed, that this taxpayer knows that he still needs to pay, which creates the obligation for him to still file an income tax return.

Extension

Like mentioned earlier, if you have an obligation to file, then you will need to do so before the 1^st of May. If this is, for whatever reason, not possible then you can request an extension. This extension will give you additional time to prepare and file your return. The standard time you get is 4 months. This extension will need to be requested before the original end date, so if you fear for not filing in time, be sure to file for an extension before it is too late.

As tax advisors, Expat Service takes part in the tax consultant ruling with the tax authorities. This allows us to better help you and our other clients, on various levels. One of which is the extended extension ruling. We can request automatic extensions in bulk for all of our clients. Not only does this make filing for extensions a lot easier, it will also give a lot more time to file than any other extension. We in fact have until the 30^th of April the following year to file your return if we use our extension ruling. We almost never need this amount of time of course, but is does allow both us and our clients to experience tax season without having to worry about getting everything wrapped up hastily.