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

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

That peak isn't a sign that your admin isn't in order. Questions about the advance heating costs arrive in a concentrated wave every year, in the same weeks that boiler faults and draught complaints also peak. If you only start looking things up when the phone rings, you spend the rest of the quarter chasing the facts. If you have the answers ready, you handle every call in two minutes.

Why the advance heating costs raise 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 gap in visibility is the source of almost every phone call.

On top of that, the news cycle and the individual advance payment rarely tell the same story. According to het CBS, the average energy bill in January 2026 stood at 1,993 euros per year, 52 euros lower than a year earlier, a fall of 2.5 percent. But the same figures show that standing charges and network costs actually rose. A tenant who reads in the paper that energy is getting cheaper, while at the same time receiving a higher advance payment because of their own consumption or a final settlement, 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 back to the statement. The rule is simple and works in your favour: you may only pass on costs actually incurred. De Woonbond actively points tenants to the fact 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 about that statement to the Huurcommissie (the Dutch rent tribunal). Tenants are therefore being encouraged to check. Assume they will.

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

New rules make your supporting evidence more important, not less

The Wet modernisering servicekosten (the Act modernising service charges) comes into force on 1 January 2027. Rijksoverheid published the accompanying decree in April: there will be eight clearly defined categories of servicekosten you may still pass on, the start date has shifted from 1 July 2026 to 1 January 2027, and the rules apply to tenancy agreements concluded 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 therefore your dress rehearsal. From 2027, the breakdown of your advance payments will be testable 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 withstand that.

Three questions, one playbook

Almost every report during the heating season is a variant of three questions: why is my advance payment higher, where's my statement, and can my advance payment come down? Write a standard answer for each of those three, with the figures for that specific property, and make sure everyone who picks up the phone has access to it.

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

The first cold Monday morning is coming regardless. The only thing you decide is whether you'll have to look something up then, or be able to explain it.