[tinco]

I'm Dutch as well. A couple of years ago my university fees were made tax deductible, I'm hazy on the details but basically I dropped out of my masters degree to work on a startup. Normally if you finish your degree some of your costs are relieved by the government with some loan forgiveness scheme. After 5 years or so they decided I definitely wasn't finishing that degree and all my university costs were suddenly tax deductible.

Obviously I had no idea of this scheme, I have no accountant and my university fees of 5 years ago were far from my mind.

Randomly got €6000 euros income tax back, very nice windfall courtesy of the Netherlands government.

[EE84M3i]

That seems like a surprisingly large amount of money. I thought university wasn't that expensive there (enough that the deduction of the income saved 6000 euros on taxes). Did you mean it became a tax credit and you just got all the money you paid in fees back?

[tinco]

Yeah it was all of it for three years, education costs are 100% deductible, so if it was 3 years at 2000/yr (standard university rate back then) it would be 6000 total. I forgot the exact amount because in that same year I also bought a house and there's a bunch of tax deductibles there as well, I think I got back over 8000 in total that year.

Normally the final dues are a lot less, probably 0 for people who have no mutations and a regular job. I had to pay 300 euro this year because I did a single freelance gig on the side.

edit: Note that this is probably a very exceptional situation. Normally college students don't make enough money to be paying taxes in the first place, I had the perfect storm of having all the deductibles being applicable in a single year, and making a good wage that year. I'm just telling this story because it's an example of the system randomly giving me the sort of tax benefit even a dedicated accountant might have missed, just because it system applied its rules to all the information it has about me.

[EE84M3i]

In the US that's called a "tax credit". A "deduction" is something that reduces the amount of income used for tax calculations.

So I thought you meant you got 6000 back because your university fees became deductable. At 25% tax rate, that would be 24,000 in fees. It sounds like you got a tax credit.

[tinco]

Hmm, you're right. So there's one thing I didn't mention and that is that my income was abnormally high that year because I was bought out of the company I resigned from. Pushing me into the 50% tax rate territory. This might have made the deductibles that much more significant. I would have to look up the exact numbers to know for sure.