People in the Netherlands who have worked in multiple EU countries have no way of knowing how much pension they’ve built up, and the country is not yet part of a European system to fix the problem, according to broadcaster NOS.
There is no single body covering all EU member states, so if you lived and worked in other countries for some time you have to remember to contact each one before retiring.
“It is incredibly complicated,” Lisa Bruggen, director of pension research institute Netspar, told NOS. You can’t simply add up the amounts you see on, for example, the Dutch and German pension portals, because they’re calculated differently.
Around 700,000 people receiving the Dutch state pension (AOW) currently get a reduced amount because they lived abroad, according to social insurance bank SVB.
Foreign workers in lower-paid sectors such as construction, hospitality and transport are most at risk of pension poverty, NOS said.
One pension fund told the broadcaster it has some 18,000 retired members who have not claimed their pension, but that privacy rules prevent it from tracing them.
An EU-backed platform, Find Your Pension, aims to show people where they have pension savings, how much they are worth, and how to claim them. The Dutch pension law must be changed before the Netherlands can join, the social affairs ministry told NOS, saying that the cabinet is working on it.
The organisation behind the platform does not expect the Netherlands to join before 2028. Even after more than a decade of work, the platform can so far retrieve personal pension information only from Belgium and France, and users say that does not always work.
