Senate approves abolition of judicial periodic penalty payment

With the elimination of the judicial periodic penalty payment, the IND is no longer required to pay this fine to applicants if the agency fails to decide on an application for a residence permit within the statutory decision period. The administrative periodic penalty payment was already abolished in 2025.

Periodic penalty payments  are not effective

The IND has long advocated for the periodic penalty payments to be abolished. The penalties were originally introduced as an incentive to prompt the IND to decide on cases more quickly. But in practice, they mainly result in additional pressure, high costs, and unnecessary workload. While the goal - quicker decisions - was not achieved.
‘Too many people have to wait too long for a decision and are left in uncertainty for extended periods. They are entitled to timely processing by the IND. And while it may sound odd, penalty procedures don’t help with that,’ says Rhodia Maas, Director General of the IND. ‘We certainly want to make faster decisions, but we are simply unable to do so. And handling penalty payments takes up a lot of time and capacity.’

Positive

Maas therefore welcomes the abolishing of periodic penalty payments. ‘The energy we are currently putting into processing periodic penalty payments can soon be redirected into processing applications. That would be much more helpful for both our applicants and the IND. In addition, the periodic penalty payments end up costing the Netherlands a tremendous amount of money. And that could end up costing even more now that some 150,000 Ukrainian cases may be added. That is all public money that could be put to much better use right now.’

More than 100 million

The IND paid approximately €79 millionin periodic penalty payments in 2025. The service has already paid out over 112 million euro in penalties in 2026.

Publication in the Dutch Government Gazette

The abolition of the a judicial periodic penalty payment becomes legally effective on the day after the legislative amendment is published in the Dutch Government Gazette.