A recurring misreading treats the treaty permit as a flexible base that can be combined with long stretches abroad, sometimes borrowing assumptions from Schengen visitor rules. Residence permits carry their own main-residence expectations, and renewal is where a travel-heavy pattern tends to surface.
It requires you to genuinely live here, not just hold a Dutch address while working from wherever — this is one of the more misunderstood parts of DAFT. There's no official minimum number of days per year written into the rules, but the IND treats roughly six consecutive months out of the country as evidence you've effectively moved your main residence elsewhere, and a pattern of four-plus-month absences repeated across several years draws scrutiny too, even without any single trip crossing six months. The "part-time base" approach some Americans consider — treating the Netherlands as one stop among several while working remotely most of the year — doesn't line up with what the IND expects from this permit and puts renewal at real risk. At renewal, they ask for annual accounts and a balance sheet confirming the business has actually been active and the €4,500 capital stayed invested, which is hard to demonstrate convincingly if you were mostly elsewhere. Occasional travel for work or personal reasons is completely normal; the issue is treating the Netherlands as a legal address rather than where you actually live.