What our housing applicants budgeted

Recorded contract rents: a separate sample of 14 cases

In a separate CRM snapshot taken on 24 September 2026, 14 completed Your Expat Butler cases had a median recorded contract rent of €2,172.50 per month. The middle half ranged from €1,196.50 to €2,712.50. These are basic rents recorded for the accepted home, not the household’s total monthly housing costs.

How we selected the cases. We required a YEB dossier marked completed, a paid final invoice, exactly one distinct accepted rental property and a positive recorded monthly rent. There were 15 completed cases with paid final invoices; 1 had more than one accepted property and was excluded because the final home could not be selected unambiguously. Each dossier is counted once. Payment dates describe this sample and are not the dates the tenancy agreements were signed.

What was confirmed. Your Expat Butler confirmed on 24 September 2026 that the CRM rent values can be used as contract rents. We did not independently reconcile every value against its signed lease. Service charges, utilities and total monthly costs were not populated for this sample, so they are not included in the figures.

How to use this result. This is an illustration of recorded rents in a small set of our completed cases, not a typical rent for every customer or a Dutch market estimate. All individual city groups contain fewer than ten cases, so we publish no city breakdown. These later cases are not matched to the May 2025–May 2026 applicants above: the difference between the two medians does not show how much those applicants increased their budgets. Compare homes that match your own city, size and requirements.

Separate market context: Pararius rents

Pararius reported a national average rent of €1,882 per month in Q2 2026 for its free-sector sample. The report was published on 10 July 2026. Its figures are based on advertised homes subsequently deregistered from the platforms. Read the official Pararius Q2 report.

The calculation method uses harmonic means, rather than our study’s medians. It also applies property and price filters. The publication does not establish a consistent utility-charge basis for comparison with our historical budgets. We have not independently checked signed leases behind this listing series.

Use these figures to orient your listing search. Subtracting the national average from our median budget would not measure an applicant’s actual shortfall. Dividing a budget by the city’s average price per square metre would not establish the size of home that applicant can obtain. Compare actual listings with the same location, property type, furnishing and included charges.

Turn a search budget into a workable plan

A budget close to the median tells you that others approached us with a similar spending limit. To decide whether that amount works for your household, compare it with current homes that match your requirements. Keep these three calculations separate:

1. Your monthly ceiling. Decide how much you can spend on basic rent, then record service charges, energy, water, internet and other recurring costs separately. For each listing, ask what the quoted rent includes. Do not compare an all-in budget with a basic-rent listing without adjusting it.
2. Your move-in cash. Add the landlord’s deposit, first rent payment, any agreed agency fee, travel, furniture and temporary accommodation where needed. A refundable deposit still ties up money. Keep a separate amount available for an overlap between temporary and permanent housing.
3. Your application evidence. Check the landlord’s income and document requirements for the actual property. A spending ceiling is not proof that an application meets those requirements. Our guide to renting without Dutch payslips explains what to prepare.

Build a shortlist using the same number of bedrooms, furnishing preference, move-in period and door-to-door commute. If suitable homes exceed your ceiling, decide which requirement can change before increasing the budget. A nearby town is worth checking, but fewer enquiries in our records do not prove lower rents or less competition there.

For a worked planning framework, read what renting in Amsterdam costs. For the complete sequence from search brief to keys, use our Netherlands housing-search guide. Employers can use the separate housing, move-in and service budgets in our corporate relocation guide.

Source and method

Source and coverage. We checked the original Monday.com export behind the Your Expat Butler · Holland Housing Growth & Pipeline Overview. It contains 1,219 application records: 1,141 labelled YEB and 78 labelled Holland Housing. This analysis uses the YEB records. Their creation dates fall between 12 May 2025 and 25 May 2026; both May endpoints are partial months. This is a historical snapshot analysed in September 2026.

Unit of analysis. One application record, not one person or verified housing placement. The business reports that duplicate applications were excluded. The export has no stable request identifier for independently confirming that process; repeated contact details are not enough to identify duplicate searches. We did not remove records merely because their contact details repeated. Household uniqueness is therefore not independently established.

Which budget? We use “Budget to”, the upper end of the requested rental-budget range, and present amounts in euros. Current enquiry forms and their Monday mapping corroborate that meaning. Monthly rental budgeting is the service context, but the archived field itself does not retain a time unit or specify whether utilities and service charges were included. We have not converted these entries into comparable basic rents or all-in monthly housing costs.

Screening. The main table includes numeric upper budgets from €500 to €10,000, inclusive. This exploratory rule leaves 1,114 YEB budgets and excludes 27 missing, zero or out-of-range entries. We did not guess intended amounts, replace missing values or assume every excluded value was an error. A low room budget can be real; a very high entry may have a different meaning. The screen is an analytical choice, not a minimum budget for using our service.

Sensitivity check. Retaining every positive original YEB value, including unusually high and low entries, gives 1,125 budgets. The overall median (€1,500), overall middle 50% (€1,200–€2,000) and all four city medians shown above remain unchanged. Some quartiles and smaller-city medians change. The CSV includes the unscreened positive-value results so readers can compare them.

Calculations and cities. The median is the middle value, or the mean of the two middle values for an even sample. Quartiles use linear interpolation at position (n−1)p. City groups follow the dashboard’s normalization, reconciled to original rows by brand and board group; they do not enumerate every location a household would consider. The four largest named groups are shown. No individual application data are included in the download.

What this study cannot tell us

These applications reflect one business’s reach, referral channels and service offering. They are not a representative sample of all expats, all renters or the Dutch housing market. The YEB brand label does not verify each applicant’s nationality or immigration status.

The historical budget analysis does not measure achieved rents. The separate current-CRM section reports business-confirmed recorded contract rents for 14 selected cases; it does not establish a representative rent, total housing cost or an outcome for the historical applicants. Neither dataset measures available stock, landlord acceptance, placement success, off-market share or typical search duration. Workflow labels such as “Done” and “Won” do not by themselves establish a concluded tenancy. Sparse completion and duration fields cannot support a general promise about how quickly a new customer will find a home.

Use these findings to understand the budgets in our historical enquiries, then check current listings and your own requirements. A €1,500 recorded median is not a promise that a particular home is available for €1,500.