Six in ten student rooms sit above the legal maximum: the rent check closes six months in

On 28 August 2026 NOS reported that the investigative programme Argos had checked 2,637 room listings on Kamernet against the legal maximum and found six in ten priced above it. In Amsterdam the share is 97 percent, on average €421 a month over the legal ceiling; in Utrecht it is 72 percent, and the national average room rent is €655 a month. In the same report Utrecht and Nijmegen had issued no penalties at all, Rotterdam had acted hundreds of times and Den Haag deploys its Pandjesbrigade. For anyone actually living in one of those rooms there is a route that does not wait for a city to act: a tenant can ask the Huurcommissie to test the starting rent, but only within six months of the date the contract began. Find that date today.

• Separate two things first. A municipality penalising a landlord under the Wet betaalbare huur is enforcement; asking for the starting rent to be tested is the tenant's own procedure. The two do not depend on each other, so 'my city does nothing' is not the same as 'I have no option'.
• The numbers that decide it: the six-month window runs from the contract start date; the threshold is 186 points for contracts signed on or after 1 July 2024 and 143 points before that; and the ruling states that the landlord must comply and lower the rent, while you keep paying the old amount until it lands.
• This matters most to international students and newly arrived tenants who signed recently, because the clock starts at the contract date. Plenty of people only hear about it after a full year, by which point the window has already shut.
• Work it out once: run the official Huurprijscheck to get the maximum rent for your room, subtract that from the starting rent in your contract for the monthly gap, then multiply by the months left on your contract. Put Amsterdam's average gap of €421 into that and a year comes to €5,052.

Hokimi field note: look up the start date on your contract and count how many months have gone by - one minute of work that decides whether anything else here is still open to you. Measuring the room, counting the windows and noting the kitchen and bathroom is something you can do yourself, and it makes the official calculator far quicker to fill in. (Sources: source 1, source 2, checked 29 August 2026.)