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Living in a municipality reception centre
Last updated: 7/2/2024, 2:09 PM
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If you have fled from Ukraine, the municipality must arrange housing for you until you can rent accommodation yourself. You can also live temporarily with a host family.
Municipalities are responsible for providing a reception centre for Ukrainian refugees. For this purpose, they set up emergency reception centres, including empty office buildings. In many municipalities there is a great shortage of suitable locations. Therefore, the help of hotels is often requested. In this case, the hotel can provide food, drink and shelter.
Please note: if you are a refugee without Ukrainian citizenship and are not under Temporary Protection, you can check out your options on the Housing for non-Ukrainian refugees page.
You could choose to stay with a host family via RefugeeHomeNL until 25 August 2023. Via RefugeeHomeNL you could stay with a Dutch family for three months. Now it is no longer possible to register as a refugee. This is because RefugeeHomeNL stops on 31 December 2023.
If you are staying with a host family and are offered a lease so that you can have longer housing, it is important to be well-informed about other options of accommodation, for example.
You can take the rental contract, before you sign it, to a walk-in clinic or to an online consultation hour of VluchtelingenWerk Nederland. During the consultation hour, they can check whether it is a fair contract so that you can make an informed decision. You can use the appointment scheduler on RefugeeHelp to make an appointment for an online consultation hour.
Should you not want to use those options above and sign the rental agreement, it is important that both you and your host household de-register from RefugeeHomeNL.
RefugeeHomeNL is ending on 31 December 2023. You can still receive support from RefugeeHomeNL until 31 December. After that, you need to decide together with your host family whether you can continue to live with your host family in 2024 without the support of RefugeeHomeNL.
If the cohabitation is going to end in 2023, RefugeeHomeNL will guide you as well as possible around the time of departure. If you decide not to live together anymore, you do have the right to a place in a municipal reception centre.
You may receive less living allowance in the municipal reception centre than in a host family. This is because the municipality may pay part of the living allowance in kind. For example, as food and drinks.
If you are staying with a host family, as a guest, you do not have to pay financial compensation to the host household. Host families are allowed to ask for an allowance for e.g. energy costs, but you are not obliged to pay this. For staying with a host family, you will receive a supplement to your living allowance. The supplement may never exceed the amount of the living allowance. From 1 February 2023, the supplement to your living allowance will be reduced to €93 per person.
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