Selling the car does not spend your claim-free years. They are held somewhere the sale cannot reach, and the transfer at the RDW does not touch them. What quietly costs people is the stretch that comes afterwards: a year with no car, no policy, and nobody writing to remind you that something is sitting in a register with your name on it.
The sale has a short follow-up list of its own, and the checklist for after a sale runs through all of it. This article stays on one line of that list, the line with the longest tail.
Who keeps the record of your claim-free years
Your insurer keeps it. No government body counts your claim-free years.
The RDW publishes a plain summary of what its registers hold, in its page on the data the RDW registers. The vehicle register (kentekenregister) holds vehicles and the people, companies and organisations they are registered to. There is a second register for insurance, and what goes in it is listed on the same page: your insurance company or intermediary, the policy number, and the start and end dates of the policy. Dates, in other words. Whether a car was covered, and between when and when.
Nothing in there describes how you drove. Claim-free years (schadevrije jaren) are counted by insurers, and Dutch insurers share them with each other through a central database of their own, usually called Roy-data. When you ask a new insurer for a quotation, that is where your history is looked up, and the figure that comes back was put there by the insurer you were with before.
Two things follow from that. The years are real and they are worth money on your next premium. And the terms attached to them belong to a private arrangement between insurers, so the answers you need are answers your own insurer has to give you.
What the sale does, and what it leaves running
The sale ends your duty to insure the car. It does not end the policy.
Those are separate events and only one of them happens by itself. The RDW’s page on transferring a registration to a person sets the rule out from the buyer’s side: a vehicle with an insurance obligation must be covered for third-party liability from the moment it stands in their name, and once the transfer is through, the buyer carries all the obligations that go with the car. Your side of that line closes the moment the register changes.
Your policy, meanwhile, carries on billing you until you tell the insurer to stop. Ring them with the proof of transfer (vrijwaringsbewijs) in front of you and read out the date printed on it. Ask for the end date in writing, because end dates come out of policy terms and policy terms differ.
And while you have them on the phone, ask the second question, the one almost nobody asks.
The years do not stop existing when the policy does
Ask what happens to your registered claim-free years now that you will be going without cover, and ask for the answer by email.
The mechanism is straightforward enough. When a policy ends, the insurer reports the closing position to the shared register, and the years stand against your name until somebody looks them up again. If that is next month, nothing has changed. If it is several years from now, your new insurer decides whether a registration of that age is still usable, and it decides that under its own acceptance rules.
Those rules are not published in one place, and they are not identical between companies. Anyone who tells you there is a single national expiry date for claim-free years is telling you something they cannot show you. So treat it as a question with your insurer’s name on it, put it in an email, and keep the reply. An email you can forward in three years is worth considerably more than a number you half remember from a phone call.
Get it on paper while somebody is still answering your letters
Before you cancel anything, ask the insurer for a written statement of your claim-free years. In Dutch it is a royementsverklaring, the statement issued when a policy is terminated.
Ask for four things on it: how many claim-free years are registered, the date the registration reflects, the start and end dates of the policy, and the name of the policyholder exactly as the insurer holds it. That last one matters more than it sounds. Years are registered against a person, and a statement that spells the name differently from your passport creates an argument you do not want to have remotely.
File it with the vrijwaringsbewijs and the final road tax letter. That small pile is the whole paper trail of a Dutch car, and it answers almost every question that arrives late.
If the next country is where you will drive
Get the statement before you leave, and get it before you cancel the policy.
The reason is practical. Once you have deregistered with the municipality (gemeente) and the Dutch address has gone, a request to a Dutch insurer becomes slower and more awkward: no Dutch postal address to send it to, a DigiD that may be heading for trouble, and a service desk that works office hours in a time zone you are no longer in. Everything is still possible. It is just a worse position to ask from.
Ask whether the insurer can issue the statement in English, or in a form with the dates and the number of years clearly set out, because somebody in another country will have to read it. Then ask your next insurer, in the country you are moving to, whether it accepts a foreign no-claims record at all and what it wants to see. Some will, some will not, and the answer decides whether the statement is a document or a souvenir. Finding that out while you can still reply to a Dutch email is the cheap version.
If the car stays but you stop driving it
A suspension (schorsing) looks like the same situation and has the same effect on your policy, so it belongs here.
The RDW’s page on requesting a suspension for a car explains what a suspension switches off: the road tax obligation (motorrijtuigenbelasting) stops automatically, the third-party insurance obligation drops away, and so does the APK obligation. The car may not stand on or be driven on a public road while it lasts. The same page notes that there are cases where keeping the insurance is the wiser choice anyway.
Plenty of people suspend a car, cancel the policy the same week, and discover two years later that they have a gap in their insurance history. The question to ask first is exactly the one above, and the time to ask it is before you cancel.
If selling is the simpler end of all this, ask us for an offer. It costs nothing, nothing binds you until you accept, and the whole sale runs in English, including the person who comes to collect the car.
Frequently asked questions
Does selling my car cost me my claim-free years?
No. The sale changes who the car is registered to and nothing else. Your claim-free years stay registered against you in the insurers’ shared database.
Does the RDW know how many claim-free years I have?
No. The RDW’s insurance register holds the insurer, the policy number and the start and end dates of cover. The counting of claim-free years happens between insurers.
How long do unused claim-free years stay usable?
That is set by the insurer you next apply to, under its own acceptance rules, so ask your current insurer and your next one and get the answer in writing. There is no single national rule you can point at.
What should I ask for before I cancel the policy?
A written statement of your claim-free years, with the number of years, the date it reflects, the policy dates and your name as the insurer holds it. Ask for the policy end date in writing as well.
I am leaving the Netherlands. What do I do first?
Order the statement, confirm the policy end date, and only then cancel. Ask your new insurer abroad what it accepts before you give up the Dutch paperwork.
Does suspending the car protect my claim-free years?
A suspension removes the duty to insure, which means people often end the policy. As far as your insurance history is concerned, that is a gap like any other, so ask the question before you cancel.