What does the Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency do for foreign companies?

The NFIA is the Dutch government agency that helps foreign companies set up or expand in the Netherlands. It gives information, makes introductions and connects a company to the regional agency for its location. It is part of RVO, the Netherlands Enterprise Agency. It does not give legal or tax advice, arrange permits, or act as a commercial agent.

A founder who starts reading about moving a company to the Netherlands meets the NFIA early. It turns up in government pages, at trade fairs and in embassy introductions, and the help it offers costs nothing. It is worth knowing exactly what it is, what it does, and where its work ends.

This page describes the agency in the government's own terms. How we work with companies from a particular country is on the corridors pages.

What is the NFIA, and who runs it?

The NFIA is the Dutch government's agency for foreign companies. According to the Dutch government's own directory, it is an implementing organisation and part of RVO, the Netherlands Enterprise Agency, under the responsibility of the Ministry of Economic Affairs, and steered jointly with the Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Aid.

The same entry sets out its task: to attract foreign companies to the Netherlands, to help them with follow-on investments here, and to keep them here when a group reconsiders its strategy. That is a policy task rather than a client relationship. The agency works for the Dutch economy, and helping your company is how it does that work. Both things are true at the same time, and neither is hidden.

Source: Rijksoverheid, Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency

What does the NFIA do for a foreign company?

It gives information and makes introductions. Business.gov.nl, the Dutch government's portal for entrepreneurs, describes the agency as helping and advising foreign companies on establishing and growing their activities in the Netherlands, and lists what that help covers.

In practice a founder can expect:

• Information about setting up a business here, and about permits, talent, innovation and business locations.
• Sector and regional information, so that a company with a particular technology hears which part of the country works on it.
• Introductions to the organisations that decide things: the tax office, the IND, RVO, a municipality.
• A connection to the regional development agency for the location under consideration.

None of that arrives as a document. It is access, context and a warm introduction, which is the thing that is hardest to arrange from abroad and easiest to underrate from a distance.

Two conditions are worth knowing before the first meeting. The agency's report to parliament states that its service is free of charge, and that it works only for companies with substance, meaning companies that create employment and added value, so it does not support letterbox companies or paper constructions. The same report says the agency performs no gatekeeper function: it does not decide who may come.

Sources:
Business.gov.nl, Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency
Rijksoverheid, Terugblik 2025: resultaten NFIA en Invest in Holland (in Dutch)

What does the NFIA not do?

Three things, and business.gov.nl states them plainly: the NFIA does not provide legal or tax advice, it does not arrange any permits, and it does not act as a commercial agent. So it can tell you that the highly skilled migrant route exists and who decides on it, and it cannot file that application for your first engineer.

That boundary shapes the whole relationship. An introduction to the right official is genuinely valuable, and the work that follows it stays with the company and the people it hires: a civil-law notary for the deed, an accountant for the payroll, an adviser for the tax position. The same line runs through every trade office, at home and here, and it is drawn in more detail in what a trade office can and cannot do.

Source: Business.gov.nl, Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency

Who else is in the Invest in Holland network?

The regions. The Dutch government describes the Invest in Holland network as a nationwide public-private partnership of fourteen organisations with the shared aim of attracting and keeping foreign investment, with the NFIA as the national government's representative in it and the regional agencies, the large cities and Nederland Distributieland alongside it.

The regional half of that network matters more than founders expect, because a company does not land in the Netherlands, it lands in a city. Alongside the network sit the regional development companies, the ROMs. Business.gov.nl counts nine of them, each covering one or more provinces: NOM for Groningen, Friesland and Drenthe, Oost NL for Gelderland and Overijssel, BOM for Noord-Brabant, LIOF for Limburg, InnovationQuarter for Zuid-Holland, Horizon for Flevoland, ROM InWest for Noord-Holland, ROM Utrecht Region for Utrecht, and Impuls Zeeland for Zeeland.

These companies do something the NFIA does not. Business.gov.nl says a ROM does not give grants: it invests, it offers support, and it can become a temporary co-owner of a company through shares. Which one you deal with follows from where you land, which is the subject of choosing a Dutch city, and what they do with money is in which Dutch regional development fund fits your company.

Sources:
Rijksoverheid, Inzet kabinet en regio's, 6 February 2025
Business.gov.nl, Regional Development Agencies (ROMs)

How should a founder approach it?

Usually through the office nearest you, and with a plan rather than an open question. The agency's report to parliament describes a head office in The Hague and 25 offices abroad, housed in Dutch embassies and consulates. They include Seoul, Taipei, Tokyo, Osaka, Singapore, Istanbul, New Delhi, Mumbai and San Francisco, so a founder can often start at home rather than in Amsterdam.

The agency works on investment projects, so the conversation improves when there is something to react to: what the company makes, which part of it would sit in Europe, roughly how large the team would be, and when. The same report counts 180 supported investment projects in 2025, and puts research and development at the top of the list of business activities behind them.

Source: Rijksoverheid, Terugblik 2025: resultaten NFIA en Invest in Holland (in Dutch)

It also helps to separate the two conversations a founder usually has at once. One is about the country and the region, and the NFIA and its regional partners are built for it. The other is about your own company: the entity, the shareholder structure, the payroll, the funding stack and the round. That one belongs with advisers, and it starts with the ordinary question of whether a foreign national can register a business here at all, answered in can a foreigner start a business in the Netherlands.

Where this sits in a move to Europe

Free government help is real, and it comes before everything that costs money. It tells you where to go and whom to call. It does not tell you what your European entity should look like, and it does not do the filing. Knowing which half is which before the first meeting saves a season, and it is why the weeks after arrival have a list of their own: see the first ninety days in the Netherlands.

Sources

1. Rijksoverheid, Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency (in Dutch), checked 22 September 2026
2. Business.gov.nl, Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency, checked 22 September 2026
3. Business.gov.nl, Regional Development Agencies (ROMs), checked 22 September 2026
4. Rijksoverheid, Inzet kabinet en regio's: Nederland moet topbestemming voor buitenlandse investeringen blijven (in Dutch), checked 22 September 2026
5. Rijksoverheid, Resultaten en inspanningen van NFIA en het Invest in Holland netwerk, Terugblik 2025 (in Dutch), checked 22 September 2026

Checked on 22 September 2026. This page is general information, not legal, tax or investment advice. Rules change: check the official source, or ask an adviser, before you act on it.