Every ticket that departs a Dutch airport in 2026 carries a government air passenger tax of €30.25 per person, so the floor under a "cheap flight from Amsterdam" is higher than the floor in almost any neighbouring country. Five low-cost airlines are actually based at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol (AMS): Transavia, easyJet, Vueling, Corendon Dutch Airlines and TUI fly Netherlands. Ryanair and Norwegian serve Schiphol but are not based there, and Ryanair’s real Dutch network runs from Eindhoven. Expedia’s 2026 booking data puts the cheapest booking window at 31 to 45 days before departure, not the three to five months that most guides still repeat. This page explains the structure that sets Amsterdam fares. It publishes no live prices, because any price printed here would be wrong within a day.
Flying cheap from Amsterdam at a glance
| Question | Short answer (2026) |
|---|---|
| Unavoidable tax per departing passenger | €30.25, every Dutch airport, every ticket |
| Low-cost airlines based at Schiphol | Transavia, easyJet, Vueling, Corendon Dutch Airlines, TUI fly Netherlands |
| Cheapest booking window | 31 to 45 days ahead; 4 to 10 months for peak season |
| Cheapest day to fly | Tuesday, about 17.6% below Sunday |
| Cheapest day to book | Friday or Saturday night, not Tuesday |
| Direct destinations from Schiphol | 301 (2025) |
| Second Dutch option | Eindhoven, 6.96 million passengers in 2025 |
| Third Dutch option | Rotterdam The Hague, 2.4 million passengers in 2025 |
| Date to diarise | Eindhoven closes to all traffic 1 Feb to 19 Jul 2027 |
Which airlines actually fly cheap from Amsterdam Schiphol?
Schiphol is an operating base for five low-cost carriers: Transavia, easyJet, Vueling, Corendon Dutch Airlines and TUI fly Netherlands. A based airline parks aircraft and crew at the airport overnight, which is why it can run early departures and high frequencies on the same route. Ryanair and Norwegian also serve Schiphol, but they fly in from elsewhere, so their Amsterdam networks are thinner and their schedules less forgiving.
| Airline | Based at AMS? | Direct cities from AMS | Its most frequent AMS routes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Transavia | Yes | 55 | Málaga, Alicante, Faro, Heraklion, Palma |
| easyJet | Yes | 41 | London, Manchester, Milan, Bristol, Edinburgh |
| Vueling | Yes | 9 | Spanish network, Barcelona-centred |
| Corendon Dutch Airlines | Yes | Leisure network | Mediterranean and Canary leisure routes |
| TUI fly Netherlands | Yes | Leisure network | Package and charter leisure routes |
| Ryanair | No, serves AMS only | Limited | Dutch base is Eindhoven, not Schiphol |
| Norwegian | No, serves AMS only | Limited | Nordic connections |
Transavia is worth understanding properly, because it is not an outsider undercutting the flag carrier. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of KLM and therefore part of the Air France-KLM group. When a Transavia fare and a KLM fare appear side by side on the same route, they come from the same corporate parent, and the difference is the product, not a price war.
Why is a flight from Amsterdam more expensive than the same flight from a neighbouring country?
Two structural costs sit under every Amsterdam departure before an airline sets a fare: the Dutch air passenger tax, currently €30.25 a head, and a capacity ceiling at Schiphol that keeps slots scarce. Neither is something a traveller can shop around within Schiphol. Both are reasons the same short European hop can cost noticeably more out of AMS than out of an airport an hour or two away.
How much is the Dutch air passenger tax in 2026?
The Dutch air passenger tax (vliegbelasting) is €30.25 per departing passenger in 2026, up 2.9% from €29.40 in 2025. It applies to every passenger departing a Dutch airport regardless of where the flight ends, and it applies even to tickets bought before the increase took effect on 1 January 2026. A short hop to London and a long-haul to Bangkok carry the identical €30.25.
That flat structure is why the tax bites hardest on cheap tickets. On a €180 long-haul fare it is roughly a sixth of the price. On a €45 European hop it is two thirds of the fare again, which is the single clearest explanation for why genuinely low headline prices out of Schiphol have become rare.
| Passenger | Pays the €30.25? |
|---|---|
| Any passenger starting their journey at a Dutch airport | Yes |
| Transfer passenger connecting through Schiphol | No, exempt |
| Child under two years old | No, exempt |
| Flight crew | No, exempt |
| Ticket bought in 2025 for a 2026 departure | Yes, the 2026 rate applies |
The transfer exemption has a practical consequence that is rarely spelled out. A passenger connecting through Schiphol on a single ticket does not pay it, while a passenger who starts in Amsterdam does. Splitting a journey into two separate tickets so that the first leg begins at Schiphol adds the tax that a through-ticket would have avoided.
Is Schiphol still capped at 478,000 flights a year?
In practice yes, though the legal position is unsettled. The Dutch government set a ceiling of 478,000 aircraft movements a year, down from 500,000, with night flights cut from 32,000 to 27,000. The Council of State scrapped the underlying regulation in March 2026, and the government responded on 24 March 2026 that it is sticking to the 478,000 figure. The maximum has not moved while the legal question is worked out.
Schiphol handled 477,552 air transport movements in 2025, 0.8% more than in 2024 and 448 movements under the ceiling. That is the number worth remembering. The airport is not near its cap, it is effectively at it, and it still carried 68.8 million passengers across 301 destinations by flying fuller aircraft rather than more of them. Scarce slots are a floor under fares in a way that no booking trick reaches.
When should you actually book a flight from Amsterdam?
Expedia’s 2026 analysis puts the cheapest booking window at 31 to 45 days before departure, including for international travel. For peak departures, meaning summer and the winter holidays, book four to ten months ahead instead. The advice most travel pages still print, three to five months for Europe, sits in the gap between those two answers and matches neither.
The more expensive mistake is confusing the day you book with the day you fly. They are different questions with different answers, and swapping them costs money.
| Common advice | What the 2026 data says |
|---|---|
| Book on Tuesday night | Debunked. Friday and Saturday nights are the cheaper times to book |
| Fly on a weekend | Costly. Tuesday departures ran about 17.6% below Sunday departures |
| Book three to five months out for Europe | 31 to 45 days for ordinary travel; 4 to 10 months only for peak season |
| Wait for a last-minute collapse | Fares move constantly and at all hours; there is no reliable late window |
Prices adjust in real time to demand, so the honest version of every timing rule is a tendency, not a schedule. Set an alert on the route rather than waiting for a specific weekday, and treat the 31 to 45 day window as where to start looking rather than a moment to strike.
Is it cheaper to fly from Eindhoven or Rotterdam instead?
Often, on the routes those airports serve. The €30.25 tax is national and applies at all three, so the saving does not come from tax. It comes from lower airport charges and from Ryanair and Wizz Air competing at Eindhoven in a way they do not at Schiphol. The trade is a longer surface journey: Eindhoven sits about 125 km southeast of Amsterdam and Rotterdam about 70 km southwest, so the train fare and the extra hours belong in the comparison.
The only way to know is to price all three on the same dates. Run the same route from AMS, EIN and RTM side by side before assuming the regional airport wins, because on a route that only Schiphol serves well, it does not.
| Airport | 2025 passengers | Dominant airlines | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amsterdam Schiphol (AMS) | 68.8 million, 477,552 movements | KLM, Transavia, easyJet, Vueling | Choice: 301 direct destinations, long-haul, early departures |
| Eindhoven (EIN) | 6,956,486, a record | Ryanair, Transavia NL, Wizz Air | Low headline fares on Ryanair and Wizz Air routes |
| Rotterdam The Hague (RTM) | 2.4 million, 16,317 movements | Transavia, Pegasus | Small airport, quick to clear, limited network |
One number puts the shift in context. Across the five main Dutch airports 78.4 million passengers travelled in 2025, about 3% more than 2024 but still 3% below 2019. Eindhoven and Rotterdam were the only two main Dutch airports above both their 2024 and their 2019 totals. Traffic that Schiphol cannot take under its cap is finding the regional airports, which is exactly where the cheap seats have gone.
Rotterdam is growing partly by flying bigger aircraft rather than more of them. Transavia and Pegasus have both moved Airbus A321neo equipment onto Rotterdam routes, seating 232 and 239 respectively, roughly forty more seats than the Boeing 737-800 they replace. Transavia also added Trieste and London Stansted from Rotterdam.
What happens when Eindhoven Airport closes in 2027?
Eindhoven Airport closes to all air traffic from 1 February to 19 July 2027. The runway is being resurfaced, and the airport is using the shutdown to build a parallel taxiway, install a Category III instrument landing system and expand the terminal. Anyone booking a spring 2027 trip on the assumption that Eindhoven is the cheap option should check this first, because for those five and a half months it is not an option at all.
| Airline at Eindhoven | Plan for the closure |
|---|---|
| Transavia | Moving a large part of its winter 2026/27 schedule to Weeze in Germany, 1 Feb to 18 Jul 2027 |
| Ryanair | No detailed relocation plan confirmed at the time of writing |
| Wizz Air | No detailed relocation plan confirmed at the time of writing |
Weeze sits just over the German border and is a longer trip from Amsterdam than Eindhoven. Treat the Transavia relocation as a warning rather than a substitute, and expect Rotterdam and Schiphol to absorb demand and price accordingly during that window.
Does Ryanair fly from Amsterdam Schiphol?
Ryanair does serve Schiphol, from the low-cost H pier, but it is not based there and its Amsterdam network is small. The airline’s Dutch operation is centred on Eindhoven, where it is one of the three carriers that account for most of the 329 weekly scheduled departures. A guide that names Ryanair as the way to reach Dublin or Prague cheaply from Schiphol is describing Eindhoven’s network and attaching it to the wrong airport.
Did JetBlue stop flying from Amsterdam?
Partly. JetBlue has permanently ended New York JFK to Amsterdam, a route it launched in August 2023. The service was suspended for the winter and the airline decided in December 2025 not to restore it for spring 2026. Boston to Amsterdam continues. JetBlue cited competition from KLM and Delta, higher operating costs at Schiphol, and a product disadvantage flying narrowbody Airbus A321neo aircraft against widebody Boeing 777s and 787s.
Two things follow for anyone reading older advice. JetBlue is not a source of cheap European hops from Schiphol; it is a transatlantic carrier now serving one US city from Amsterdam. And the reason it withdrew, cost and slot pressure at Schiphol, is the same pressure that keeps short-haul fares from AMS above their regional-airport equivalents.
Where can you fly direct from Amsterdam?
Schiphol connected the Netherlands to 301 destinations in 2025. For a traveller hunting a low fare, the useful subset is smaller: the routes a based low-cost airline flies often enough to discount. Transavia’s heaviest Amsterdam routes are Málaga, Alicante, Faro, Heraklion and Palma, which is a Mediterranean and Iberian leisure map. easyJet’s heaviest are London, Manchester, Milan, Bristol and Edinburgh, which is a UK-plus-northern-Italy map. Vueling adds a Barcelona-centred Spanish network across nine cities.
Those two lists are the practical answer to "where is it cheaper to fly from Amsterdam". High frequency creates unsold seats to clear, and unsold seats create fares. A once-weekly route to an unusual city rarely discounts, however appealing the destination looks.
How should you search for a fare from Amsterdam?
Search the route, not the date. Set a price alert on the specific city pair, start looking around 45 days out for ordinary travel, and compare the Schiphol fare against Eindhoven and Rotterdam on the same days before booking. A comparison engine is the right tool for the price itself, and the two most useful views are a whole-month calendar and an everywhere-style search that ranks destinations by current fare.
Compare current fares from Amsterdam on Skyscanner, then run the same dates from Eindhoven before you commit. Add the €30.25 to any headline price you see, and add the train or bus fare to Eindhoven if you are pricing that option honestly.
Affiliate disclosure: the Skyscanner links on this page are affiliate links. If you book through them, Black Bear Media LLC may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. It does not change the fare you pay, and no airline or booking site paid for the recommendations above.
Getting to the airport is part of the total cost, and Schiphol is unusually easy to reach. Our guide to the airport train versus a taxi puts real numbers on that choice, the OVpay guide covers paying for the train without an app, and our Schiphol Airport guide covers terminals, security and transfers.
What this guide deliberately does not tell you
It does not print fares. Airfare changes hourly, so a euro figure typed into an article is misleading within a day and actively wrong within a month, and this page previously carried exactly that problem: a set of undated prices, several of them in US dollars for a market that transacts in euros. Everything here is a structural fact with a date attached and a source named at the foot of the page.
Three things are also left open on purpose. Airline route counts move seasonally, so the direct-city figures are current rather than permanent. Ryanair and Wizz Air have not published relocation plans for the 2027 Eindhoven closure. And the legal status of the 478,000-movement cap is unresolved, which means the slot picture could change.
More ways to keep an Amsterdam trip cheap
The fare is rarely the largest line in a city budget. Visiting Amsterdam on a tight budget and the free and low-cost things to do here both move the total more than a twenty-euro fare difference does. When to visit and what each season is actually like matter for the same reason the booking window does: the cheap weeks and the pleasant weeks are not always the same weeks.
Once you land, getting around Amsterdam and our general travel tips cover the daily spend, the tourist traps worth avoiding covers where money quietly disappears, and day trips from Amsterdam is often the cheaper answer to wanting a second destination. If the reason for the flight is a lower footprint rather than a lower price, travelling sustainably here makes the case for the train.
Frequently asked questions about cheap flights from Amsterdam
What is the cheapest flight from Amsterdam?
There is no fixed answer, because fares move hourly. What is fixed is the floor beneath them: every departing passenger pays the Dutch air passenger tax of €30.25 in 2026, on top of whatever the airline charges. The lowest fares out of Schiphol are usually on the high-frequency Transavia and easyJet routes, because those are the flights with seats to clear.
Where is it cheaper to fly to from Amsterdam?
The routes a based low-cost airline flies most often. For Transavia that means Málaga, Alicante, Faro, Heraklion and Palma. For easyJet it means London, Manchester, Milan, Bristol and Edinburgh. High frequency creates unsold seats, and unsold seats create fares; a once-weekly route to an unusual city rarely discounts.
Where can I fly direct from Amsterdam?
Schiphol connected the Netherlands to 301 destinations in 2025. Transavia alone flies direct to 55 cities from Amsterdam, easyJet to 41 and Vueling to 9, and those three lists cover most of the affordable short-haul map.
Which budget airlines fly from Amsterdam Schiphol?
Five low-cost carriers are based at Schiphol: Transavia, easyJet, Vueling, Corendon Dutch Airlines and TUI fly Netherlands. Ryanair and Norwegian serve the airport but are not based there. Ryanair’s Dutch network runs from Eindhoven rather than Schiphol.
How far in advance should I book a flight from Amsterdam?
Expedia’s 2026 data puts the cheapest booking window at 31 to 45 days before departure, including international travel. For peak periods such as summer and the winter holidays, book four to ten months ahead instead.
Is it cheaper to fly from Eindhoven than from Amsterdam?
Often, on the routes Eindhoven serves. The €30.25 tax is national and applies at both, so the saving comes from lower airport charges and from Ryanair and Wizz Air competing there. Weigh it against the roughly 125 km surface journey, and note that Eindhoven closes to all air traffic from 1 February to 19 July 2027.
How much is the Dutch air passenger tax in 2026?
€30.25 per departing passenger, up 2.9% from €29.40. It is the same amount whether the flight is to London or to Bangkok. Transfer passengers connecting through Schiphol, children under two and flight crew are exempt, and the 2026 rate applies even to tickets bought earlier.
Are last-minute flight deals from Amsterdam worth waiting for?
Rarely as a strategy. Fares adjust constantly and at all hours to real-time demand, so there is no dependable late collapse to wait for. Setting an alert on a specific city pair and starting to look around 45 days out is the approach the 2026 booking data supports.
Sources and how this page was checked
- Dutch air passenger tax rate and exemptions: Belastingdienst (Dutch Tax Administration), air passenger tax pages; 2026 rate increase to €30.25 confirmed against SUMMIT Benelux reporting. Checked 30 August 2026.
- Schiphol 2025 traffic (68.8 million passengers, 477,552 air transport movements, 301 destinations) and the airline base list: Schiphol Group annual traffic review and Amsterdam Airport Schiphol reference data. Checked 30 August 2026.
- The 478,000-movement cap, the March 2026 Council of State annulment and the government’s 24 March 2026 response: NL Times and Aviation Week reporting. Checked 30 August 2026.
- Eindhoven 2025 record of 6,956,486 passengers, its 329 weekly departures, and the 1 February to 19 July 2027 closure with the Transavia move to Weeze: ch-aviation and Eindhoven Airport reporting. Checked 30 August 2026.
- Rotterdam The Hague 2025 figures (2.4 million passengers, 16,317 commercial movements, A321neo deployment, Trieste and London Stansted): Rotterdam The Hague Airport newsroom and Luchtvaartnieuws. Checked 30 August 2026.
- The 78.4 million Dutch total and the Eindhoven and Rotterdam growth comparison against 2019: CBS (Statistics Netherlands). Checked 30 August 2026.
- Booking window of 31 to 45 days, the Tuesday-booking correction and the 17.6% Tuesday departure figure: Expedia 2026 air travel data as reported by The Points Guy and Euronews Travel. Checked 30 August 2026.
- JetBlue’s permanent withdrawal from New York JFK to Amsterdam and the retention of Boston: Aviation24.be and The Points Guy. Checked 30 August 2026.
Last updated 30 August 2026. This revision replaced the page’s undated fares, several of which were quoted in US dollars for a market that transacts in euros, with dated structural facts. It corrected three errors: that JetBlue is a budget option from Schiphol, that Ryanair is the cheap way out of Schiphol rather than Eindhoven, and that Tuesday is the best day to book. It added the 2026 air passenger tax, the Schiphol movement cap, the three-airport comparison and the 2027 Eindhoven closure, and it added the affiliate disclosure this page previously lacked. No live fares are published, by design.
