As part of the Dutch Formal Budget Presentation in September 2025, the Finance Minister of the Netherlands, Eelco Heinen, said that poverty in the Netherlands has gone down. Though still many people are at risk to slide into poverty and the severity of poverty increases, the claim turns out to be true.
Behind this statement stands Eelco Heinen, a Dutch politician for the right party VVD. Heinen specializes in Economics and has been the Minister of Finance since July 2024.
What exactly is poverty?
According to the Dutch Social and Cultural Planning Office (SCP), poverty is defined as: having insufficient financial resources for the minimum necessities of life. This means that in the Netherlands, a person is considered poor when their income is insufficient to afford basic necessities such as food and decent housing. This comes with limited expenses on these things.
Within poverty, there are specific categories that also count as a form of poverty. For example, a topic in The Netherlands is ‘energy poverty’. This means that people don’t have enough money to pay their energy bills. In The Netherlands, this consisted of 510 thousand households in 2024. Furthermore, there is something called ‘child poverty’. Child poverty consists of children who grow up in households that live below the poverty line. In 2023, 115 thousand (3.6%) of the children dealt with this.
For this factcheck, the general poverty numbers are used.
Poverty numbers
The latest numbers on poverty in the Netherlands by the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) are from 2023. 540 thousand people were considered poor in that year, which is 3.1% of the population. In 2023, one out of three people, 175 thousand people, lived in long-lasting poverty.
If you compare these numbers to 2019, for example, in that year, 6.3% of the population was considered to be poor. That is more than twice the current poverty rate. In 2022, the percentage was at 3.4%. This doesn’t differ much from the rate in 2023, but still means that 0.3% of the population got out of poverty. So over the years, the poverty number indeed kept going down. Since 2018, it has been at its lowest.
Anxiety and education
However, this does not particularly mean that it is going economically well for the rest of the population. Still, 1.2 million people have an income just above the poverty line with little to no savings. That’s approximately 6.9% of the total Dutch population. This is still alarming and not much better than poverty. People with a low income have more health problems for example, because of the anxiety they have over high health costs and then decide not to go to any doctors. A low income is also not good for education or social life, because it leads to having to miss out on school participation or on social events. All these factors lead to stress and eventually mental and physical problems.
These numbers are all measured by examining whether income and available assets are sufficient to cover necessary expenses and the minimum NIBUD budget for social participation.
Causes of poverty going down
What are the causes of the decline in poverty in 2023? Poverty is declining mostly because of the measures on energy expenses that the government took. An energy surcharge and a discount on the energy bill are good examples. The CBS even says that without these measures, the poverty risk would be at 7.7%, where it now stands at 4.4%. Furthermore, the increasing purchasing power among employees and the ability to hold asset buffers by some households bring the poverty number down.
Increasing severity of poverty
Spokesperson Lotte Meerhoeff from The Dutch Poverty Fund agrees with Heinen’s statement but thinks it shows a limited view on the topic: “The number of people below the poverty line has indeed decreased in recent years, but the severity of poverty has increased. This is alarming: those with the greatest shortages are increasingly short of money. They are going from bad to worse.”
“Moreover, there is a very large group just above the poverty line with little to no savings: even a minor setback puts them in dire straits. This situation is often no better than poverty. These include people with extremely high healthcare costs, the homeless, or people with problematic debt. The consequences of poverty in The Netherlands are still far too great. It places enormous pressure on healthcare, causes stress, and children who grow up in poverty suffer from this for the rest of their lives.”
Chief Economist Peter Hein van Mulligen of The Central Bureau of Statistics in The Netherlands also agrees with Heinen and explains why: “It is true that poverty has decreased in recent years. In 2023, the most recent figure, over half a million Dutch people were living in poverty. This is the lowest number CBS has ever measured; the figures date back to 1977. Declining poverty is related to many factors. These include the fact that more people than ever have paid employment and that during the 2022 energy crisis, various measures were taken to support people with low incomes.”
Conclusion
Has poverty really gone down in The Netherlands? Yes, it has gone down according to the poverty numbers in 2023. This is mainly because of the measures that have been taken by the government on the energy bills. Minister of Finance Eelco Heinen was correct. However, the severity of poverty has gone up. And there is still a very large group just above the poverty line, which means that the theme remains important to act on.
RESEARCH | ARTICLE © By Anna Tiemens and Polina Vasenda, Erasmus students at AP University of Applied Sciences Antwerp, Belgium
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