The step-by-step plan for Bulgaria

As a Dutch citizen you need no visa and may be in Bulgaria for three months with your passport or identity card. If you stay longer, within those three months you apply for a certificate of long-term residence at the Migration Directorate of the Ministry of the Interior. It costs 3.58 euros and is valid for up to five years.

That certificate is more than a paper: it gives you the personal number the bank, the health fund and the traffic police ask for. Without that number nothing starts in Bulgaria.

The tax. The treaty is new, from 2020, and of the modern type: pensions, annuities and social security payments may be taxed by the state they come from. So the Netherlands taxes your occupational pension and your AOW, without threshold. A wage tax exemption doesn't exist here.

And Bulgaria? It doesn't tax pensions — not its own, and expressly not those from compulsory insurance abroad either. So there's no second tax and nothing to credit: what you pay in the Netherlands is what you pay. What Bulgaria does tax is wages, profit and rent from a Bulgarian property, at a flat tax of ten percent.

Healthcare. Bulgaria is a treaty country. With a Dutch statutory pension you go through the CAK: an S1 form, registration at the regional office of the health fund, and choosing a GP on a form — after that you have the same care as a Bulgarian insured person.

Sofia has the international schools and the English-speaking doctors; Plovdiv is smaller and warmer. On the Black Sea, around Varna and Burgas, many Dutch and British people already live, and in the villages behind it and around Veliko Tarnovo houses cost a fraction of home. The mountains — Rila, Pirin, the Rhodopes — are cold and empty.

Bulgarian is a Slavic language in the Cyrillic alphabet. Outside the cities and the coast it is the only language at the counter, and you only read the signs once you know the alphabet. Go and look in winter: the summers are hot, the winters inland cold, and heating an old village house is a real item.

The paperwork is cheap here: the residence certificate costs 3.58 euros, the driving licence doesn't need exchanging, the registration of the car 17.90 euros. What there is: an environmental fee on the car by age, up to almost two hundred euros for a car older than ten years, and with a purchased home the municipal transfer tax of up to three percent. Since 1 January 2026 Bulgaria counts in euros, so the exchange rate has disappeared from the budget.

Discuss the language before you choose the place. For adults who work from home, Bulgarian is a hobby; for children at a village school it's the whole day, in another alphabet. Whoever goes to Sofia buys convenience; whoever goes to the coast or the countryside buys space and a language none of you speaks.

From here everything counts back. This journey has two clocks you start yourself: three months after entry for the residence certificate, and a month after the car's entry for its registration. Put them both in your diary on the day your date is fixed.