How to Check a Renovation Contractor Before You Sign

Almost everyone asks a contractor for a price. Very few ask for an insurance certificate, a KvK number, or a payment schedule tied to completed work rather than to dates. Those three, plus the way extra work is agreed, decide more about how a renovation ends than the number at the bottom of the quotation.

What follows is a checklist you can use on any contractor in the Netherlands. It is deliberately not about us; we publish it because these are the questions we would like to be asked.

1. Before the price comes the visit

A contractor who quotes without seeing the property is guessing, and the correction arrives later as extra work. For anything beyond a single room, expect someone to spend an hour in the house: open the meterkast, look into the crawl space, establish the floor construction, ask what the VvE rules say about hard floors. If none of that happened, the price you are holding has nothing under it.

2. The company, in the public record

• KvK number. Look the company up in the Handelsregister yourself: registration date, legal form, whether the trading name on the quotation matches the registered entity, and whether the activity codes cover building work.
• A real address rather than a mailbox, preferably a workshop you could visit. The VAT number is verifiable through the European VIES check. Claimed memberships of guarantee schemes belong in that scheme's own public register; a logo on a website is easy to copy.
• The bank account. The IBAN on the invoice should belong to the same legal entity as the contract. A request to pay a different name, or a change of account details announced by email midway through a project, is the commonest fraud here. Confirm any change by phone, on a number you already had.

3. Insurance is three separate things

• The contractor's liability cover (bedrijfsaansprakelijkheidsverzekering). Ask for the certificate and the insured amount, not a verbal assurance. In a stacked building, a pipe that lets go on a Friday evening is not only your damage; it is the two flats below.
• For larger works, a construction all risks policy. Ask who takes it out, what sum is insured, and whether existing property, the parts of your home not being renovated, is covered.
• Your own buildings insurance. Many Dutch policies restrict cover during building work and some require notification. Telling your insurer in writing beforehand takes ten minutes and closes a real gap.

4. What a good quotation contains

• Scope written room by room, with what is included and, just as important, what is excluded, and provisional sums (stelposten) at realistic levels. A 1,500 euro stelpost for tiles in a project using large-format porcelain is how a cheap quotation becomes an expensive project. Price every stelpost against what you actually want.
• Whether this is a fixed contract sum (aanneemsom) or cost-plus work (regie). Both are legitimate, but only fixed sums can be compared between bidders, and regie needs an agreed hourly rate, an estimate and a reporting rhythm.
• VAT stated explicitly. Most renovation work carries 21%; painting and plastering labour on a home older than two years falls under the 9% rate and should appear as its own line.
• A start date, a duration in working days, and what is agreed if the work runs over. Also who supplies power, water and containers, who arranges the pavement permit, and how keys are handled.
• An extra work clause. Dutch law obliges a contractor to warn you in time about price increases from extra work, and since 2024 that warning must be in writing. Put the mechanism in the contract anyway: extra work described, priced and signed off before it is done.

5. Payment terms, where the real risk sits

Read this section twice. Money should follow work, never lead it.

• Instalments tied to completed milestones, not dates: strip-out, first fix tested, screed poured, tiling complete, handover.
• A deposit of 10 to 20% at the start is normal and pays for ordered materials. Fifty percent before anyone has arrived is not, and no explanation makes it so.
• A final instalment of 5 to 10% held until handover and the snag list are both done. For new-build homes Dutch law lets a private client place 5% of the contract sum with a notary for three months after handover; renovation contracts are not automatically covered, but nothing stops you agreeing an equivalent retention in writing. A contractor confident in their finishing will not flinch at it.
• Never pay cash off the books. It removes your guarantee, your insurance position and your legal remedy in one transaction, and makes you a party to it rather than a victim. Where that road ends is the subject of the real cost of cheap renovations.

6. Liability after handover: what changed in 2024

Since 1 January 2024 the Wet kwaliteitsborging voor het bouwen has been phasing in, and two parts of it matter to a private client. The contractor now stays liable for defects that were not visible at handover unless they can show the defect is not attributable to them, where previously signing off shifted much of that risk onto you. And the contractor owes you a handover file documenting what was built and how. Ask for that file whether or not your project falls under the Wkb regime; a contractor who cannot produce one is telling you how they work.

7. Documentation while the job runs

Agree four things in advance: photographs of every concealed pipe and cable before the walls close, measured from a fixed point; a weekly note saying what is waiting on a decision from you; test records for pressure, ventilation flows and the electrical inspection; and the products installed, with type numbers, so a seal can be replaced in five years without demolition.

8. References, asked properly

Anyone can produce a reference from a project finished last month, and fresh work always looks good. Ask instead for one completed two or three years ago in a building like yours, then ask that client three questions. What went wrong? How quickly did they come back for the snag list? How close was the final invoice to the quotation? The third answer predicts your experience better than anything on a website.

Read the three-star reviews rather than the five-star ones; the middle ones show how a company behaves when something goes wrong. Photographs count too, provided they show the contractor's own work rather than stock images. Our project pages are all our own sites, which is the minimum to expect.

9. The planning horizon

A good team in Amsterdam is generally booked three to nine months ahead for a full renovation, longer for work that has to hit a season. A contractor who can start a substantial project next Monday in the busy season is telling you something, and it is rarely a bargain. Booking far ahead raises fair questions of its own:

• What does the deposit secure: a diary slot, ordered materials, or design work? Is there a price indexation clause, and which index does it follow?
• What happens if your permit or VvE approval slips? A season plan needs an agreed fallback, not an argument in October.
• Who will be on site: employed staff, long-standing subcontractors, or whoever is free that week? Ask to meet the person who will run the job, not only the one selling it.

The questions we invite

These are the ones we are happiest to answer. Show us your insurance certificate and KvK registration. Tell us what the payment schedule is tied to. Show us a job you finished three years ago. Explain how you will handle the VvE and the permit. Tell us what is not in the price. Renovation is stressful because of uncertainty far more than because of dust, something we wrote about in the psychology of renovation, and every item here removes a piece of that uncertainty before it turns into an argument.

We have worked in Amsterdam and Noord-Holland since 2009 and plan our seasons well ahead; the 2026 and 2027 diaries are open now. Early conversations produce better projects because they leave room for permits, approvals and lead times instead of compressing them. You can read more about how we work and who we are, and if you would like to test us against the list above, start the conversation. Bring the checklist.