On a kennismigrant permit when a PIP ends in dismissal

Does a PIP affect my residence permit?

No. A verbetertraject is not an immigration event. Your permit exists because a recognised sponsor employs you on highly-skilled-migrant terms, and a plan does not change that.

What changes it is the employment ending. Even then what follows is a fixed search period rather than an immediate loss of permission.

This page is about the highly skilled migrant (kennismigrant) permit. If you hold an EU Blue Card or another work permit, the IND's publication this rests on does not cover you and neither does this page.

Three months from the day the contract ends, or six after two years

The IND states it plainly. If you lose your job while the residence permit is still valid, you have three months to find a new one. Where you have held the permit two years or longer, it is up to six months. The same longer period applies to someone who has been the victim of labour exploitation.

It begins on the day the contract ends.

That last sentence is the reason the Dutch position is the clearest in this guide. Of the visa routes here, this is the only one where the period is both stated by the authority and starts on a date you already hold. Nothing has to be decided by an official first. Nobody has to be told before it begins.

If the period ends and no new employer has registered you, the IND may revoke the permit. That is a discretion rather than an automatic consequence, which is worth knowing, and is not worth relying on.

Your permit's own expiry date overrides the headline number

The search period cannot run past the date your permit was already due to end.

So a permit with seven weeks left gives you seven weeks, not three months. This is the number that actually applies to anybody near a renewal, and it is the input you can check today without asking anyone. Read your permit's expiry date before you read anything else on this page.

Two duties to notify, and one of them is yours

• Your employer's. A recognised sponsor must report changes to the IND within four weeks where they can affect the right of residence. The publication lists your employment has been terminated among its own examples.
• Yours. The same publication says the employee always has an obligation to provide information, is required to notify the IND of major changes besides the employer doing so, and must in any case inform the IND when changing employer.

That second duty is easy to miss because the sponsor's is the famous one. It is also the practical difference from the British route, where the reporting duty is the employer's alone and the worker waits. Here you are a party to the notification rather than a subject of it.

The end date you negotiate is the date the search period starts

This section and the next are about an exit being negotiated. If yours is not, nothing above depends on them and they are the part to come back to.

A Dutch employer cannot end a permanent contract on its own. It needs the subdistrict court or the UWV, which is why most endings are settled by agreement instead. Why that is, and what the settlement holds, is the employment half of this.

The end date in that agreement is a negotiated term. And it is doing two jobs at once: it sets the notice arithmetic and the benefit position, and it starts the immigration clock on this page.

So a later end date is worth asking for on immigration grounds as well as the ordinary ones, and it is an ask that costs an employer very little. What to ask for in a severance conversation has the rest of the list.

The fourteen days to undo a settlement move this clock too

Dutch law gives you fourteen days to revoke a signed settlement agreement, or twenty-one where the right was not set out in the agreement itself. The undo button is the employment page's subject.

It has an immigration dimension that page does not mention: revoking resets the end date the search period would have started from. If you use the bedenktermijn, you are moving the immigration clock as well as the employment one, and the next agreement's end date is the one that will count.

What to do while the traject is still running

None of this assumes the traject ends badly. It is the half of the preparation that costs nothing if it ends well.

• Read your permit's expiry date. It caps everything above and it is already fixed.
• Work out which band you are in. Two years or longer on the permit is the difference between three months and six.
• Start looking now. Job searching during a plan has what you can say and to whom. A new sponsor has to register you, and that runs inside your period rather than before it.
• Keep one date field. The contract end date drives the notice arithmetic, the benefit claim and the search period. Write it down once and check every calculation against it.

The two-year condition is not defined anywhere this page could read

The IND's publication says the longer period applies where you have held this permit for two years or longer. It does not say whether that means two years on the current permit, or two years of continuous highly-skilled-migrant residence across renewals or a change of sponsor.

That difference decides whether somebody who moved employer eighteen months ago has three months or six, and the wording alone is not enough to settle it. If you are near that line, ask the IND or an immigration lawyer rather than reading it off this page.

Fairhanded is not a law firm and this is not legal advice. The numbers above are the authority's own and they were read directly. What they mean for your permit, on your dates, is a question for somebody who can see both.