UPDATE MAY 21, 2025
It has just been announced that Aedes will initiate the lawsuit against the State in order to obtain a stop to the rent freeze. Thus, at this moment it remains unclear whether the rent freeze will go through or not.
As soon as more is known, we will update this article.
UPDATE MAY 19th, 2025
It has now been announced that the rent freeze will only apply in the social sector, to tenants renting from a housing association. Tenants in the social sector who, for example, rent from a private landlord, care agency or housing investor will therefore not be eligible for rent freezes.
Would you like to know if you rent in the social sector? Then you can do this check on the website of the Woonbond.
Furthermore, it is important to note that the rent freeze will thus in any case not apply to all tenants in the free sector and the middle rental sector, even if they rent from a corporation in that sector.
In addition, it seems that the lawsuit that housing corporations want to file about this is still going to take place about this. So it remains to be seen whether the rent freeze will actually go through. As soon as there is more news, we will of course update this article.
UPDATE MAY 9, 2025
The latest state of affairs regarding the rent freeze is that about two hundred housing associations are currently preparing a lawsuit together with umbrella organization Aedes, with the aim of being able to stop the announced rent freeze. Minister Mona Keijzer responded by saying that the rent freeze for social tenants is “a given.”
Before corporations can sue the State, they must first formally inform the State of their position and give it the opportunity to withdraw the rent freeze. To this end, they have now sent Minister Keijzer a formal notice of default. The minister has two weeks to respond, after which Aedes and the corporations can sue the State.
As soon as more is known or there are other important developments, we will of course update this article again.
Rental price freeze
On April 18, the Cabinet announced in the Spring Memorandum 2025 that a rent freeze will take place at least for the year 2025. In short, this means that no rent increase may take place for the social rental sector. Landlords will not be allowed to raise rents this year.
Unfortunately, there is still a lot of uncertainty about this issue at the moment. For example, it is still not known to which tenants this freeze will apply. After all, most of these tenants rent from or through a housing foundation or housing corporation. But in addition, of course, there is also a large group of tenants who rent social housing from a private landlord. Whether the rent freeze also applies to this group of people has yet to be announced by the cabinet. That is not clear at this time.
Already received a rent increase proposal anyway?
Because in the social sector the rent increase each year usually takes place in July and landlords have a legal obligation to make such a proposal two months in advance, you may therefore have already received a rent increase proposal.
In addition, such a proposal may have been sent before the news about the rent freeze became known.
This is of course confusing but at this point this does not necessarily mean that the rent increase will therefore actually take place. So our advice is to keep a close eye on developments in this area.
The Steunpunt Huren Groningen is of course monitoring all developments regarding the rent price freeze. So as soon as there is more clarity, this article will be updated and we will clearly explain exactly what the rent price freeze will look like.
Questions about rent price freeze and proposed rent increase
If you still have further questions on this subject, you are of course welcome to drop by our weekly walk-in consultation hours (Wednesdays from 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.), send us an e-mail or give us a call. We are happy to help.
