What is the average income in the Netherlands, and which cities earn the most?

Amsterdam has a reputation for high salaries. Yet the average Amsterdam household has slightly less to spend than the average Dutch household. Across the 17 cities we cover, household income after tax was highest in Amstelveen in 2024, at about €75.1k a year, and lowest in Groningen, at €49.3k. The national average was €61.6k.

The full ranking, highest to lowest household income

These are average disposable incomes per household in 2024: what a household has left after income tax and social contributions, per year, from Statistics Netherlands. Student households are left out. Next to the overall figure are three groups: people who live alone, couples with children, and households whose main income is wages. All figures come from official open data.

Only 4 of the 17 cities sit above the national average: Amstelveen, Breda, 's-Hertogenbosch and Haarlem. Much of that comes down to who lives in a city. In 16 of the 17, a larger share of households is one person than in the country as a whole, Almere being the exception, and a one-person household has one income at most.

What is the average income in the Netherlands?

In 2024 the average Dutch household had €61.6k to spend after tax. That average hides a wide range: a person living alone had €34.2k, a couple with children €96.6k, and households living mainly on wages €67.5k.

None of these is a salary. A salary is gross pay for one job, before tax. These figures are net, per household, and a household can have two earners, benefits or a pension. If you are comparing a job offer, look at the gross salary; if you are working out what a household in a city lives on, these are the more useful numbers.

Why the average Amsterdam household earns less than the national average

Amsterdam ranks 7th on the overall figure, at €60.8k. But compare like with like and the picture flips. Every type of household in Amsterdam, from people living alone to couples with children, has more to spend than its national equivalent. People living alone in Amsterdam have €37.8k, against €34.2k nationally, and couples with children have €107.6k, against €96.6k. On both, Amsterdam is second of the 17.

The difference is who lives there. About 55 percent of Amsterdam households are one person, against 40 percent nationally, and with so many single incomes the overall average drops below the national one. It is also the most likely reason that Amsterdam households living mainly on wages, at €65.6k, sit just under the national €67.5k. The same pattern shows at the bottom of the table: Groningen, with the lowest income, also has the highest share of single-person households, 61 percent.

Amstelveen earns the most on every measure

Amstelveen tops every column. Its households have €75.1k on average, and couples with children €124.9k, well above any other city. It is also the most expensive of the 17 to buy a home in, which we look at in a separate story.

Among households living mainly on wages, Haarlem is second at €70.1k and Almere third at €68.4k. Almere shows how much the household mix matters: its working households earn more than the national average, yet its overall figure sits just below it.

What income figures do and do not tell you

A high average income says something about who lives in a city, not about what you will earn there, and not about what life costs. The ranking of incomes follows the ranking of home prices closely, so a higher income does not automatically leave more to spend. Averages can also be pulled up by a small number of very high incomes.

Income varies far more between neighbourhoods than between cities, as our story on the richest neighbourhood in each city shows. You can compare every neighbourhood on income and the other figures that matter to you in the explorer, open a city, or see how the figures are built on our data sources page.

A note on the city figures. The numbers in this article are the published municipal figures, covering every address in the municipality. The neighbourhood scores elsewhere on PlanetExpat are built differently on purpose. They count only residential areas, leaving out ports, business parks, cemeteries and parks, and they weight each neighbourhood by how many people live there. That is the right basis for deciding where to live, but it does mean a city figure here and a city figure on a city page are not the same measurement. Both are explained on our data sources page.