Working from No fixed residence as a Netherlands resident

At a glance

Rule coverage

What the rules say about No fixed residence

The rules below are the ones most likely to shape a stay in No fixed residence, in plain words and with the source behind each one. Your own report tells you which of them apply to you.

1. Significant issueSocial security

   You are building no state pension and carry no social insurance anywhere

   Social insurance follows either residence or work in a country's system. Registered nowhere and employed nowhere means insured nowhere: no state pension accrual, no unemployment cover, no disability cover, and voluntary continuation schemes in your former country typically have application deadlines that pass within a year of leaving. Every year in limbo is a permanent gap in your pension record that most systems never let you buy back later.

2. Significant issueHealthcare coverage

   No public health system anywhere, and travel insurance is not built for a life

   Public healthcare membership follows residence or insured work. Without either, your only cover is travel or international private insurance, and those products exclude exactly what a permanent traveller eventually needs: chronic conditions, pregnancy, mental health care, and anything that started before the policy. Many insurers also void cover once they see you have no home country to return to, because repatriation, their favorite escape hatch, has nowhere to point.

3. Significant issueMoving your company

   A business registered nowhere is legally just you, with unlimited personal liability

   Companies are creatures of registration: no registry, no company. Working for clients without any registered entity or sole-trader registration anywhere means every contract is personally yours, every debt and claim lands on you privately, most business banking is closed to you, and serious clients cannot even put you in their vendor systems, which ask for a registration number and a VAT status. Meanwhile the work itself does not float: the countries where you physically do it can treat you as a locally operating unregistered business, which is its own violation.

4. Needs checkingPersonal income tax

   No residence does not mean no tax, work is taxed where it is done

   Income tax has two hooks: residence and source. Losing the residence hook does not switch off the source hook. Days worked physically inside a country are taxable there under most domestic laws, and as a person without residence anywhere you also have no treaty protection, because every tax treaty starts by asking which state you are a resident of. The answer none means no treaty applies at all. A resident of nowhere is not invisible, they are unprotected.

5. Needs checkingTax residency

   Registered nowhere is your claim, your last country gets a vote

   Being deregistered everywhere feels like being outside every system, but tax residency is decided by each country's own law, not by your registration status. Most countries, including the Netherlands with its ties test and one-year return rule, keep treating you as resident until you can show a genuine new home somewhere else. Deregistering and leaving is step one of an exit, not the exit itself. Until a new residence exists, your last country of residence is the one most likely to still claim you, with your worldwide income in scope.

6. Needs checkingLocal registrations

   Banks must record a tax residency for you, and nowhere is not on their form

   Under the Common Reporting Standard, banks and brokers everywhere are required to record their customers' tax residency and report accounts to it. Nowhere is not an accepted answer: banks either keep your old country on file, and keep reporting to it, or they freeze onboarding until you produce a tax identification number from somewhere. In practice long-term nomads end up reported to the last country they left, which is exactly the country most likely to still claim them.

Tax treaty between Netherlands and No fixed residence