On this page
- Why funding is a non-EEA question in the Netherlands
- The NL Scholarship (formerly the Holland Scholarship)
- Which schools actually offer it — the part most guides skip
- The calendar, and where it stands right now
- The Orange Tulip Scholarship: read this before you chase it
- The school’s own scholarships are now the main event
- How the Dutch schemes fit Europe’s national-scheme pattern
- How to sequence your Dutch scholarship applications
- The honest read
Every guide to studying in the Netherlands mentions the two big Dutch scholarship names — the NL Scholarship (you’ll still see it called the Holland Scholarship) and the Orange Tulip Scholarship — and then leaves you to work out whether either is actually worth chasing for a Master in Management.
We re-read both at their official sources on 1 September 2026, and the honest answer has changed since most guides were written. One of the two schemes is real, well-defined and worth applying for — but not at every school, and not at the two names most likely to be at the top of your list. The other is being described all over the internet by a route that no longer exists.
This is the MiM-specific decode of what Dutch funding actually looks like now. For the wider picture of how scholarships work across Europe, start with our guide to how MiM scholarships work in Europe; this piece zooms all the way in on the Dutch schemes.
The short version. In the Netherlands, funding is mainly a non-EEA question. EU/EEA students pay the statutory tuition rate — €2,694 for a one-year programme in 2026/27 — so for them scholarships are about living costs. Non-EEA students pay the institutional rate (roughly €18,900–€25,800 at the Dutch public universities we profile), so the awards matter. The NL Scholarship is a €5,000 one-off for non-EEA students, funded by the Dutch government and the institutions, applied for through each school — but only 11 research universities take part, and RSM, the University of Amsterdam and Tilburg are not among them. The Orange Tulip Scholarship was run through Nuffic’s Neso offices, and that network was closed between 2020 and the end of 2023 — so the application route every guide still repeats is gone. What is left, and often the larger money anyway, is each school’s own non-EEA merit awards.
Why funding is a non-EEA question in the Netherlands
The single thing that shapes Dutch MiM funding is the tuition split. The leading Dutch business master’s all sit inside public research universities, which charge two very different prices depending on where you’re from:
- EU/EEA students pay the Dutch statutory tuition rate — €2,694 for the full one-year programme in 2026/27, the figure Study in NL publishes. That is a fraction of what the private elites in France, the UK or Spain charge, and it is why the Netherlands ranks among the best-value English-taught MiM destinations in Europe (see our cheapest MiM in Europe shortlist and how much a MiM costs).
- Non-EEA students pay the institutional rate instead — from about €18,873 at Radboud and €21,342 at Utrecht up to €24,830 at VU Amsterdam and €25,800 at RSM, per each school’s published fees for the current cycle.
So for an EU/EEA applicant, the tuition is already low and the funding conversation is really about covering living costs. For a non-EEA applicant, there is a real fee to defray — roughly ten times the statutory rate — and that is exactly who the national scheme is built for. If you’re weighing the Dutch option against its neighbours, our Netherlands vs the UK, France vs the Netherlands and Germany vs the Netherlands comparisons put the cost difference in context; for the full country picture, see the Netherlands MiM hub and best MiM in the Netherlands.
The NL Scholarship (formerly the Holland Scholarship)
The NL Scholarship is the Dutch government’s flagship award for international students, and until recently it went by the name most guides still use — the Holland Scholarship. Read from Study in NL, the official portal, on 1 September 2026:
- Amount: €5,000, and in its own words, “You will receive this in the first year of your studies.” It is a one-time grant — not renewable — and Study in NL states explicitly that it is not a full-tuition scholarship. Against a €25,800 institutional fee that is a useful contribution, not a solution.
- Who funds it: jointly, by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and the participating institutions — for the 2026-2027 cycle, 11 research universities and 23 universities of applied sciences.
- Who it’s for: non-EEA nationals enrolling in a full-time bachelor’s or master’s, who — in the portal’s wording — “do not have a degree from an education institution in the Netherlands”, and who meet the specific requirements of their chosen school.
- How you apply: through the university, not through a central portal. Each participating school runs its own selection and sets its own deadline.
A correction to an earlier version of this page, and to a lot of second-hand advice: the count is 23 universities of applied sciences, not 24.
Which schools actually offer it — the part most guides skip
“11 research universities” sounds like most of the country. It isn’t, and the gaps land in awkward places. Three of the eleven are small theological institutions (the Protestant Theological University, Theological University Apeldoorn and Utrecht Theological University), which leaves eight general research universities — and only some of them teach a Master in Management.
Here is the official participating list, cross-checked on 1 September 2026 against the nine Dutch schools in our own programme catalogue:
| School we profile | NL Scholarship? | Non-EEA fee |
|---|---|---|
| Maastricht University (SBE) | Yes | ~€21,500 |
| Radboud University | Yes | €18,873 |
| University of Groningen | Yes | €22,200 |
| Utrecht University | Yes | €21,342 |
| VU Amsterdam | Yes | €24,830 |
| RSM — Erasmus University Rotterdam | No | €25,800 |
| University of Amsterdam | No | €24,050 |
| Tilburg University | No | not published |
| Nyenrode Business University | No (private) | €36,450 total |
Three things follow from that table, and they are the practical point of this page:
- RSM is not on the list. The Netherlands’ highest-profile and highest-fee MiM does not participate in the country’s flagship national scholarship. RSM’s own MSc scholarships page, read the same day, corroborates this from the other side: it names the RSM Non-EEA Scholarship of Excellence, the Erasmus Trustfonds award and two external funders, and mentions the NL Scholarship nowhere. If RSM is your target, your funding plan is RSM’s own awards, not this one.
- The two Amsterdam universities split. VU Amsterdam participates; the University of Amsterdam does not. These two are routinely compared side by side on cost, and a €5,000 award available at one and not the other is a real difference that no ranking table will show you.
- The award is worth least where the fee is highest. It is a flat €5,000 whether you are paying €18,873 at Radboud (27% of the fee) or €24,830 at VU Amsterdam (20%) — and it is unavailable at the €25,800 school entirely.
Participation is reviewed each cycle, so check the current list on Study in NL before you plan around it — that is exactly the check that turned up these gaps.
The calendar, and where it stands right now
The 2026-2027 cycle opened on 1 November 2025, and the school-set deadlines fell through the following winter. Radboud University, one of the participating schools we profile, set its 2026-2027 deadline at 31 January 2026, 23:59 CET (with files to be completed by 14 February 2026), and requires applicants to be fully admitted to an English-taught master’s starting that September — and, in a wrinkle worth knowing, to also apply for the Radboud Scholarship Programme. You flag your interest inside the university’s own OSIRIS application system; there is no separate portal.
That cycle has closed. When we checked Study in NL on 1 September 2026, the page still described the 2026-2027 round and had not yet published the 2027-2028 dates. On last cycle’s pattern the window should open around 1 November 2026 — we state that as the expected shape of the cycle, not as a verified date, and you should confirm it on Study in NL and on your school’s page before you plan around it.
What that timeline tells you is the same thing every national scheme in Europe tells you: the scholarship window opens before many schools’ own admissions rounds even close, and the deadlines land in late January and February, months before you would otherwise be thinking about money.
The Orange Tulip Scholarship: read this before you chase it
The Orange Tulip Scholarship is the other name you will find in every listicle about studying in the Netherlands, usually with the same instruction: apply through the Nuffic Neso office for your country, which collects applications and forwards them to the Dutch institutions.
Those offices no longer exist. Nuffic published a phase-out and termination schedule for the Netherlands Education Support Office network, following the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science’s decision to end the subsidy as of 1 January 2024. The closures ran on this timetable:
| Closed by | Neso offices |
|---|---|
| 31 December 2020 | Turkey |
| 31 December 2021 | Brazil, China, Mexico, Russia |
| 31 December 2022 | Vietnam, South Africa, Korea |
| 31 December 2023 | India, Indonesia |
So the “Neso countries” list that circulates as the OTS eligibility list — Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Vietnam — is, as of 2024, a list of closed offices. Nuffic’s own international offices page, read on 1 September 2026, lists a single overseas presence: Nuffic Southeast Asia in Jakarta, framed around institutional cooperation between Asian and Dutch knowledge institutions rather than around student scholarships.
Two further checks point the same way. The official Study in NL scholarships page names three schemes — the MENA Scholarship Programme, Erasmus+ and the NL Scholarship — and does not mention the Orange Tulip Scholarship at all. And the dedicated orangetulipscholarship.nl domain, still cited by aggregator sites, no longer resolves in DNS (checked 1 September 2026).
What we could not establish, and will not guess at: whether individual Dutch universities still run their own OTS-branded awards, applied for directly. Several — Tilburg and Maastricht among them — still have Orange Tulip pages in search indexes, and it is entirely plausible that some of those awards survive locally under the old name. We could not read them to check: Tilburg’s estate returned 403 to every route we tried, Maastricht’s Orange Tulip index returned 403 and its country pages 404. A blocked page is not a closed programme, and we are not going to report it as one.
The practical instruction, then, is simple. Do not build a funding plan around the Orange Tulip Scholarship, and do not go looking for a Neso office. If you see an OTS award advertised on a specific Dutch university’s own site, email that university’s admissions or scholarships desk and ask whether it is running this cycle before you treat it as money. Anything you read about OTS on an aggregator, a scholarship-listing site or an encyclopaedia entry is describing a programme structure that ended.
The school’s own scholarships are now the main event
With the national picture thinned out, each Dutch school’s own scholarship portfolio is where the substantial money for non-EEA applicants sits — and, at RSM, the University of Amsterdam and Tilburg, it is the only route.
- RSM offers merit-based awards for non-EEA students who would otherwise pay the institutional fee, including an RSM Non-EEA Scholarship of Excellence, alongside the Erasmus Trustfonds award for students from EEA countries. RSM says the number of awards is limited and mainly merit-based, so a strong application is your scholarship application — read the RSM admission requirements guide for how selective the file is.
- Radboud is the one Dutch school that answers the stacking question in writing, and the answer is yes: “The Radboud Scholarship can be combined with the NL Scholarship.” That is worth more than it sounds, because almost no funding page in Europe says either word. The Radboud Scholarship Programme itself is the larger of the two by a wide margin — it “will reduce your tuition fee to €2,694”, the Dutch statutory rate, against a €18,873 institutional fee for the MSc in Business Administration, and it also covers “visa, residence permit, health insurance and liability insurance” (living costs excluded). The catch is volume and timing: 33 Radboud Scholarships across the whole university for 2026/2027, of which six sit at the Nijmegen School of Management — the faculty a MiM applicant applies to — and Radboud states plainly that “admission to the Master’s programme does not imply selection for the scholarship”, with its own earlier deadline (31 January, already closed for 2026/2027). On a two-year master’s you must pass every first-year course to hold it into year two.
- Maastricht, Groningen, Utrecht and VU Amsterdam each administer the NL Scholarship for their own applicants alongside additional merit or high-potential awards; the Maastricht admission requirements guide and the Netherlands MiM hub point you to where each publishes its funding.
The principle that carries across all of them is the one every scholarship guide repeats: at most Dutch schools you are considered from your admission file, and the pools are largest in the earliest round, so applying early with a strong application does double duty. For the mechanics of assembling a scholarship application, see how to apply for a MiM scholarship, and for the full funding stack beyond scholarships — loans, savings, part-time work — read how to fund a MiM in Europe.
How the Dutch schemes fit Europe’s national-scheme pattern
The Netherlands runs a version of a pattern you’ll see across the continent: a government-backed award that channels international talent into the country’s universities, each with its own quirk and its own early calendar.
- France runs the Eiffel Excellence Scholarship — but you can’t apply for it yourself; the school nominates you, so you flag your interest early.
- Germany has DAAD, whose main master’s line is a living-cost stipend, not a tuition waiver — worth the most at Germany’s near-free public universities.
- The UK runs Chevening, a fully-funded award for a one-year master’s, gated behind a two-year work-experience requirement and closing in early October.
- The EU co-funds Erasmus Mundus Joint Masters, which can fund an entire programme but only inside specific consortium degrees.
The Dutch scheme sits at the partial-support end of that spectrum — €5,000 is a top-up, not a full ride. But it also demonstrates the failure mode this whole series keeps running into: the amount is usually reported correctly and the rules around it are usually reported wrong. €5,000 and €2,694 are both exactly right in nearly every guide you will read. Which schools take part, and whether the Orange Tulip route still exists, are the parts that are wrong — and they are the parts that decide whether you get anything. For the full map, see how MiM scholarships work in Europe.
How to sequence your Dutch scholarship applications
- Fix your nationality question first. EU/EEA? Your tuition is already €2,694 — focus on living costs and home-country grants. Non-EEA? The NL Scholarship and the school’s own non-EEA awards are in play.
- Check whether your target school is on the list before you build a plan around the NL Scholarship. Five of the nine schools we profile take part; four, including RSM and the University of Amsterdam, do not.
- Apply for admission early. Nearly every Dutch scholarship needs you to hold, or be applying for, an offer from an eligible programme — Radboud, for instance, requires full admission before the scholarship deadline. Track each school’s rounds on the deadline tracker.
- Open your school’s own NL Scholarship page the moment you decide. The cycle opens around November and the school-set deadlines (often late January or February) come fast — and each school sets its own, so there is no single date to remember.
- Read the school’s own non-EEA scholarship terms, since at four of the nine schools that is the only route, and at the rest it is often the larger award.
- Treat the Orange Tulip as unconfirmed. If a school advertises one, email and ask whether it is running. Don’t budget around it.
- Map it all on one calendar. Our MiM application timeline lays the year out; the winners are the applicants who ran the scholarship and admissions tracks in parallel, a full year ahead.
The honest read
Dutch scholarships reward a clear-eyed applicant. Four takeaways do most of the work:
- Funding in the Netherlands is a non-EEA question. If you’re EU/EEA, the €2,694 statutory fee already makes the country one of Europe’s best-value MiM destinations — spend your effort on living costs, not chasing the non-EEA schemes.
- Check the participating list before you plan. The NL Scholarship’s €5,000 is real and worth having, but it is not available at RSM, the University of Amsterdam, Tilburg or Nyenrode — and RSM is the school most people mean when they say “a Dutch MiM”.
- The Orange Tulip route in every listicle is gone. The Neso network that ran it closed between 2020 and the end of 2023. Verify anything you read about it directly with the school, and don’t count on it.
- Nothing here is a full ride — but stacked on a low base, it doesn’t need to be. €5,000 goes a long way when tuition starts lower than at the private elites, and it combines with each school’s own awards.
Win the right mix and a Dutch MiM can be one of the most affordable serious options in Europe. And whether you’re competing for a scholarship or just for a place, the thing that decides it is the same: a coherent record, a clear reason this programme advances your goal, and an application that reads as deliberate rather than scattered. Building that case well is exactly what our Ultimate Guide to European MiM Admissions is for. Once you’re in and thinking about staying, our guide to working in the Netherlands after a European MiM covers the post-study routes.
Sources, all read on 1 September 2026: Study in NL — NL Scholarship (the €5,000 amount, “not a full-tuition scholarship”, the joint Ministry/institution funding, the non-EEA and no-prior-Dutch-degree conditions, the 11 research universities and 23 universities of applied sciences, the full participating-institution list, and the 1 November 2025 opening of the 2026-2027 cycle); Study in NL — tuition fees (the €2,694 statutory fee for 2026-2027); Study in NL — scholarships (the three schemes it lists, and the absence of the Orange Tulip Scholarship); Radboud University — NL Scholarship (the 31 January 2026 deadline, the full-admission condition, the linked Radboud Scholarship Programme requirement and the OSIRIS route); RSM — MSc scholarships (the RSM Non-EEA Scholarship of Excellence and the Erasmus Trustfonds award, and the absence of any NL Scholarship or Orange Tulip mention); and Nuffic — phase-out and termination of the Neso network together with Nuffic — international offices (the closure timetable, the 1 January 2024 end of the subsidy, and the single remaining office in Jakarta). Non-EEA tuition figures are from our own programme profiles, each carrying its own source and verification date.
Added 4 September 2026, read the same day: Radboud University — Radboud Scholarship Programme — the verbatim combination rule (“The Radboud Scholarship can be combined with the NL Scholarship”), the reduction of tuition to €2,694, the visa / residence-permit / health- and liability-insurance cover, the exclusion of living costs, the 33 awards for 2026/2027 with 6 at the Nijmegen School of Management, the separation of scholarship selection from admission, the closed 31 January 2026 deadline and the pass-everything-in-year-one condition for a two-year master’s.
Not verified, and deliberately not asserted either way: whether individual Dutch universities still run Orange Tulip–branded awards of their own. Tilburg University’s site returned 403 on every route tried, and Maastricht University’s Orange Tulip index returned 403 with its country-specific pages returning 404, so those pages could not be read — a blocked page is evidence of a blocked page, not of a closed programme. The orangetulipscholarship.nl domain did not resolve in DNS. The 2027-2028 NL Scholarship dates had not been published on Study in NL when we checked; the expected ~1 November 2026 opening is inferred from the previous cycle and is not a confirmed date. Scholarship amounts, participating institutions, eligibility and deadlines are set per cycle and change every year — always confirm the current details on the official pages before you rely on any figure. Last reviewed 1 September 2026.