Central heating locked at a fixed temperature became a live grievance in student and shared housing, where the landlord controls the boiler and residents control nothing. Whether a persistently cold home counts as a legal defect, rather than a matter of taste, determines what a tenant can actually do about it.
Landlords do sometimes try this, usually to cap energy bills, and it sits on shaky legal ground. There's no single statute saying "tenants must control their own thermostat," but heating is treated as an essential provision the landlord has to maintain, and centrally throttling it to the point where a home is genuinely too cold edges into a gebrek — a defect in what you're entitled to. This got real attention in 2024 after student-housing complaints about landlords deliberately keeping communal heating low; the Woonbond has been pushing hard on it since. Start by putting your complaint in writing to the landlord with the actual temperatures you're getting. If nothing changes, the Huurcommissie's maintenance-defect procedure can order a rent reduction until it's fixed, and if it's a genuine health or habitability issue, your gemeente can get involved too.