The heating season starts in your inbox: how to handle questions about the heating cost advance

It's Monday morning, the first genuinely cold week of autumn. The heating has come on across all your properties, and the first tenant calls: why is my advance payment so high, and where is last year's statement? While you're pulling up the file, two emails arrive with exactly the same question. The heating season doesn't start at the boiler. It starts in your inbox.

That peak isn't a sign your admin is out of order. Questions about the heating cost advance arrive in a concentrated burst every year, in the same weeks as boiler breakdowns and draught complaints. If you only start looking things up once the phone rings, you'll spend the rest of the quarter playing catch-up. If you have the answers ready, you handle every call in two minutes.

Why the heating cost advance raises the same questions every autumn

The tenant sees only one thing: the monthly amount. You see what's behind it: tariffs, consumption, communal heating, the previous statement. That difference in visibility is the source of almost every phone call.

On top of that, the news headlines and an individual's advance payment rarely tell the same story. According to CBS, the Dutch national statistics office, the average energy bill in January 2026 stood at 1,993 euros a year, 52 euros lower than a year earlier, a fall of 2.5 percent. But those same figures show that standing charges and transport costs actually rose. A tenant who reads in the paper that energy is getting cheaper, while at the same time facing a higher advance payment because of their own consumption or a settlement shortfall, feels cheated. Not because your calculation is wrong, but because nobody explained the difference to them.

The servicekosten (service charges) statement is your strongest answer

Every conversation about an advance payment eventually comes down to the statement. The rule is simple and works in your favour: you may only pass on costs actually incurred. De Woonbond (the Dutch tenants' association) actively points out to tenants that the annual statement for 2025 had to be sent by 30 June 2026 at the latest, and that they have until 1 July 2028 to bring a dispute over that statement before the Huurcommissie (the Dutch rent tribunal). Tenants are being actively encouraged to check. Assume they will.

In practice that means your front office needs to be able to show the latest statement and the breakdown of the advance payment for each property within a minute. An advance payment you can trace straight back to the latest statement makes for a short, reassuring conversation. An advance payment without the supporting figures to hand is the start of an objection, and in the worst case, a case before the Huurcommissie that you could have prevented with a single email.

New rules make your supporting evidence more important, not less

The Wet modernisering servicekosten (Act on the modernisation of service charges) comes into force on 1 January 2027. In April, Rijksoverheid (the Dutch central government) published the accompanying decree: there will be eight clearly defined categories of service charges you're still allowed to pass on, the start date has been moved from 1 July 2026 to 1 January 2027, and the rules apply to tenancy agreements signed from that date onwards. More important for your working week: the Huurcommissie will gain the power to assess all costs within an advance payment, and smaller groups of tenants will soon find it easier to file a joint, collective request.

This heating season is effectively your dress rehearsal. From 2027, the way you build up your advance payments will be open to scrutiny at a level you're not yet used to. Every question that comes in this winter is a free test of whether your supporting evidence can stand up to it.

Three questions, one playbook

Almost every query during the heating season is a variant of three questions: why is my advance payment higher, where is my statement, and can my advance payment go down? Write a standard answer for each of these three, with your own property's figures built in, and make sure everyone who picks up the phone can access it.

Also log every advance payment query as a report, even if the conversation only took two minutes. After a month you'll see exactly which properties generate the questions, where communal heating is causing unease, and which statement clearly wasn't understood. That's the information you'll use next year to send the letter before the phone rings.

The first cold Monday morning will come regardless. The only thing you get to decide is whether you'll be looking something up, or explaining it.