“It’s super complicated,” says Lisa Brüggen, Professor of Financial Services at Maastricht University and Director of Netspar, the knowledge institute for pensions in the Netherlands.
A growing number of Europeans live or work part of their lives in another EU country, building pension rights in several countries at once — but no institution collects those claims in one place, NOS reported.
Brüggen, who spent part of her life in Germany and will not receive a full Dutch state pension (AOW) as a result, cannot simply add the amounts shown on the Dutch mijnpensioenoverzicht.nl and the German portal, she said, because the figures are calculated differently.
No single overview exists
The free movement of persons was meant to strengthen the European economy, and it has: more Dutch people than ever now live or work part of their lives abroad. But that mobility means a growing group builds up pension in multiple EU countries without being able to see what they have saved for later.
The European Commission has mapped that workers in construction, hospitality and transport move between EU countries most often. These are sectors where salaries are often lower and pension poverty is a real risk.
Unclaimed money at Dutch funds
Many people from Poland, Romania and Spain come to the Netherlands to work and later move back home. The pension they built up here often stays unclaimed. At pension fund ABP alone, about 18,000 participants are now retired but make no claim on their money — some are foreigners, others are Dutch citizens living abroad, NOS reported.
The fund is not allowed to search for these people itself under the Dutch pension law, a spokesperson said, because exchanging data is not permitted under privacy legislation.
Find Your Pension excludes the Netherlands
A European platform called Find Your Pension is being developed to gather every citizen’s pension pots in one place, showing where someone has built up pension, how much it is and how to claim it. The Netherlands is not connected to the portal.
The EU has no formal say over pensions, so member states must decide for themselves whether to join, said Claudia Wegner-Wahnschaffe, chair of the organization behind Find Your Pension and also working at the German pension fund VBL. That often means national laws have to change.
A spokesperson for the Dutch Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment said the pension law must be amended to guarantee safe data sharing, and that the cabinet is working to make sure the Netherlands can connect.
Stefan Taubert, directeur van het pensioenregister dat alle informatie over burgers moet gaan verstrekken, hopes the Netherlands joins “really as soon as possible,” but said connection before 2028 is unlikely. Legislative processes in the Netherlands are highly uncertain, he said, and cabinets that fall can delay things further.
Ten years in the making
Wegner-Wahnschaffe said she and her colleagues have been working on the project for more than ten years. So far, personal pension information can only be retrieved from two countries, Belgium and France — and even that does not fully work for citizens who try it, she said.
Jelle Lössbroek, onderzoeker arbeidsmigratie aan de Radboud University, called tracking down pensions across borders a major challenge for labor migrants — a group that is large now and set to grow sharply in the coming years. Landing in pension poverty is bad for the European economy, he noted, and often unnecessary, because the money exists somewhere.
Can I see my pension from another EU country in one place?
Can I see my pension from another EU country in one place? Not yet for Dutch residents. The Find Your Pension platform is designed to do exactly that, but the Netherlands is not connected, and connection before 2028 is considered unlikely.
Dutch pension law currently forbids the data exchange needed, according to the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment. The law must be amended first, and the cabinet says it is working on that.
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