Please contact the Visa Department of Leiden University through this contact form.

The Visa Department of Leiden University will inform you via email once the IND approves your student visa. After your request has been approved, make an appointment to collect your visa at the Dutch consulate/embassy as follows:

• Go to the Netherlands and you - Long-stay visa page  
• Enter your country or region  
• Scroll down to ‘Long-stay visa for residents of this country or region’  
• Click on the link to ‘make an appointment’ via the online system
• Make sure that you indicate that your appointment is for a student visa (Student MVV)

The consulate/embassy will let you know exactly which documents you must bring to your appointment.  

Please note that your visa is only valid for the study programme and start date stated in your Offer of Admission.

For legal and practical reasons, you are advised not to arrive earlier than one month before the start date of your study programme. You do not have grounds for legal residence before this period.

Once your visa and residence permit application has been forwarded to the Dutch Immigration Department (IND) and your documentation is found to be in order, we expect that your application will be approved in approximately 2 to 4 weeks’ time.

You may only collect your visa in a country in which you have legal residency. Please note that legal residency means that you have a valid residence permit, not a short-stay or tourist visa.

If there isn’t a Dutch embassy that can issue visas in your country of residence, you may have to collect it elsewhere. See www.netherlandsandyou.nl for further information.

Note that you may not change your collection location after submitting your visa application. 

In order to fight the worldwide spread of tuberculosis, nationals of many non-EU countries who will stay in the Netherlands for three months or longer must be tested for tuberculosis. 

​You can find out if nationals of your country are required to undergo a TB test on the Dutch immigration department website. 

If a TB test is required, you will receive an invitation to undergo a test within one month of commencing your studies. 

If you transferred funds for living expenses to Leiden University as part of your visa/residence permit application, submit this refund form after arrival to notify us of your Dutch bank account details and request that the funds be returned to you.