Last Verified: 5 September 2026
You have an offer letter, or you are about to chase one, from a Dutch university that keeps showing up in the rankings. The programme looks right. Then you open the fee page, see a number above twenty thousand euros, and the whole plan starts to look like something other people do.
That is the situation the Leiden University Excellence Scholarship, usually written as LExS, was built for. It is one of the better known awards for international master’s students in the Netherlands, and it is also one of the most misunderstood, because a lot of blogs describe it as fully funded when the university itself never uses that phrase. This guide walks through what the award really pays, who is allowed to be considered, what the December 2026 deadline actually asks of you, and whether a realistic applicant should spend an afternoon on it.
The short version, before the detail
LExS is a tuition fee reduction offered by Leiden University to strong international students who are starting a full time master’s programme in September. It is awarded once, at the point of admission, and it is attached to the fee you owe the university rather than paid to you as cash.
It is worth somewhere between 10,000 euros and 19,000 euros, awarded in five fixed steps. The exact level is decided by the university, it is final, and there is no negotiating your way up a tier. Because Leiden’s institutional master’s fees for students who need a visa sit above 22,000 euros for most faculties, even the top award leaves a balance you have to cover yourself, alongside every living cost for the year.
Trying costs you an admission application, whatever fees that application carries, and a motivation letter of no more than 500 words submitted by 1 December 2026. Around 25 awards are made each year against more than a thousand applications. Everyone who applies hears the outcome by email before the end of March.
Should you spend a December afternoon on this?
Start with the honest arithmetic, because it changes how you should treat the whole thing. Twenty five awards against over a thousand applicants is roughly two or three successes in every hundred attempts. Those are not encouraging odds, and anyone telling you that a good CV makes this one likely is selling something.
What makes the odds less depressing is the cost of entry. You are not writing a research proposal, sitting an entrance exam, or flying anywhere. You are ticking a box inside an application you were already submitting and attaching one short document. Compared with awards that demand referee letters, interviews and a fifteen page project plan, LExS asks for very little. Low probability paired with low effort is a reasonable bet. Low probability paired with three weeks of unpaid work is not, and this is the first kind.
The one situation where you should think harder is if the award would still leave you unable to enrol. If your funding plan reads “LExS or nothing”, the gap between the top award and the actual fee, plus a year of rent and food in a Dutch university city, is a real problem rather than a rounding error. In that case, treat LExS as one line in a wider funding plan and keep hunting for other sources at the same time. Students who arrive with a shortfall and no plan tend to spend their first semester panicking about money instead of studying, and that is a worse outcome than a deferred start.
The passport rule that decides most applications
More applicants are ruled out by nationality and residence rules than by grades, so check yourself against these before anything else.
- You must hold a passport from a country outside the EEA and outside EFTA. This is the main gate.
- You must not be eligible for Dutch government student finance. If you already qualify for that support, LExS is not for you.
- Two programmes ignore the passport rule and are open to all nationalities: the Advanced LLM programmes, and the MSc in International Relations and Diplomacy.
- Students from the United Kingdom are eligible following Brexit, with one carve out. If you were registered in a Dutch municipal register before 1 January 2021, that eligibility does not apply to you.
- Academically, Leiden describes the target as students who sit among the top 10% of graduates from their previous degree. Treat that as the standard the committee is looking for rather than a box you fill in.
The academic bar deserves a word of context. Leiden does not publish a grade point average cut off, and it cannot, because a first class degree in Karachi, a 3.7 in Manila and a cum laude in Bogotá do not convert into one another cleanly. What the committee is doing is comparing you against other graduates of your own system. A strong result from a mid ranked university in your country can read better than a middling result from a famous one, so do not talk yourself out of applying because your institution is not a household name in Europe.
The programmes that are shut out
LExS is not available across the whole Leiden catalogue, and this catches people out late in the process when they have already paid for an application.
- Only master’s programmes that begin in September are covered. If your intake starts in February, there is no LExS attached to it.
- At Leiden Law School, the standard LLM programmes that are not Advanced LLMs, and the MSc programmes, are excluded.
- You cannot receive LExS if you already hold a master’s degree from Leiden University. There are exceptions where an earlier programme was a compulsory prerequisite for the one you are entering, which is how some Advanced LLM routes work.
Confirm the September start and the faculty exclusion on the page for your specific programme before you spend money on an application. Programme pages at Leiden are maintained separately, and the scholarship page cannot list every edge case in the catalogue.
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What the university actually pays, and what is left over
Here is where the honesty matters most, because this is the single fact that blog posts about LExS most often get wrong.
The award is a reduction applied to your tuition fee. It comes in five fixed levels:
- 10,000 euros of the tuition fee
- 15,000 euros of the tuition fee
- 17,500 euros of the tuition fee
- 18,500 euros of the tuition fee
- 19,000 euros of the tuition fee
You do not choose your level and you cannot appeal it. The committee assigns it and the decision is final.
Now hold that against the fee itself. For the 2026 to 2027 academic year, Leiden’s institutional master’s fee for students who are not eligible for the statutory Dutch rate is 22,300 euros at most faculties and 22,500 euros at the Faculty of Science, with medical programmes at the LUMC running from 22,500 euros up to 33,100 euros depending on the specialisation. The MSc in International Relations and Diplomacy sits at 21,100 euros, and Advanced LLM programmes range from 12,250 euros to 22,300 euros.
Fees for the year you would actually start have not been published yet and have risen in each of the past two cycles, so use the current figures as a floor rather than a forecast. Even so, the shape of the outcome is clear enough. A student on the top award at a standard faculty still owes roughly 3,300 euros in fees. A student on the lowest award owes around 12,300 euros. Neither number includes rent, health insurance, food, transport or the flight.
This is a substantial discount on an expensive degree. It is not a free degree, and you should build your budget on that basis from the beginning.
There is one more financial condition attached that people discover late. If you need a visa or residence permit, the Dutch immigration process requires you to prove you hold sufficient funds to support yourself for the year. Receiving LExS does not remove that requirement. The award reduces your fee, but the immigration service still wants to see money in an account, and the amount it expects is set by that service rather than by the university. Plan for that proof of funds as a separate hurdle with its own timeline.
Applying: the order the steps have to happen in
The most common failure on LExS is not a weak letter. It is a student who leaves the admission application until late November and then finds they cannot reach the scholarship section in time, because the scholarship request lives inside the admission system.
- Apply online for admission to your chosen Leiden master’s programme, and pay any application fee that programme charges.
- Once your application exists in the system, open the Scholarships section of your application portal.
- Indicate there that you wish to be considered for LExS.
- Upload your motivation letter as a PDF file of no more than 500 words.
- Submit everything before the deadline of 1 December 2026.
Late submissions are not considered, and the university is explicit that meeting the deadline is the applicant’s responsibility rather than something an admissions officer will chase you about. Aim to have the admission application in by early November so that a document problem, a payment that fails, or a transcript your university takes three weeks to issue does not cost you the scholarship as well as the place.
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The 500 word letter is the whole competition
Everything else in your file is either a fact or a transcript. The motivation letter is the only place where you get to argue for yourself, and at 500 words it is shorter than most people expect. That length is a hard ceiling, not a suggestion, and a letter that runs long signals that you did not read the instructions before writing.
Five hundred words is roughly one page. That is enough for a specific argument and nothing else. It is not enough for your life story, a paragraph praising the university’s reputation, or a list of every society you have ever joined. Committee members read hundreds of these in a compressed period, and the ones that survive are the ones that say something only you could have written.
What tends to work in a document this short:
- One concrete reason this specific Leiden programme, named, is the right next step rather than any good European master’s.
- One piece of evidence that you perform at the level the award is aimed at, described plainly rather than claimed.
- One clear line on what you intend to do afterwards, specific enough to be checkable.
What tends to sink it: opening with a quotation, spending your first hundred words on how prestigious the Netherlands is, listing achievements the committee can already see on your transcript, and writing sentences that could be pasted into an application to any university on earth. If you could swap the university’s name for another one without changing a word, the letter is not finished.
Write a draft, leave it for two days, then cut it to length. Cutting is where the letter improves, because it forces you to decide which of your three arguments is actually the strongest. And write it yourself. A letter assembled from a template or generated wholesale reads flat to people who compare a thousand of them side by side, and it wastes the only part of the application you fully control.
From 1 December to the end of March: what happens next
After the deadline, the work moves to the faculties. Selection committees within each faculty put forward the students they want to nominate, and the university works to a window of about ten weeks from the closing date for that stage.
The outcome then reaches you the same way for everybody. Leiden sends an email to every applicant telling them whether or not they have been awarded a LExS, and that email goes out before the end of March. Silence during January and February is normal and means nothing. There is no ranked list published, no partial notification, and no advantage to writing in to ask where your file has got to.
If you are successful, you will be asked to confirm in writing that you accept the terms and conditions attached to the award. Read them rather than clicking through, because they set out how the reduction is applied to your fee, how long it runs against your programme, and what happens if your circumstances change. Anyone handling their own visa paperwork at the same time should keep those conditions to hand, since the funding documentation and the proof of funds requirement tend to be needed in the same few weeks.
If the answer is no, that is a normal outcome for this award rather than a verdict on your file, given how many strong applicants are competing for twenty five places. Your admission decision is separate, so a rejection here does not affect the offer itself.
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Frequently Asked Questions:
Does applying to two Leiden master’s programmes improve my chances?
You are allowed to submit more than one application, and to request LExS in each of them. That gives you more than one faculty committee looking at your file, which is a real advantage if two programmes suit you equally. It is not a free win. Each application carries its own admission requirements and its own fees, and a letter that has been recycled across both without adjusting the programme specific argument will read weakly in both. Only do this where you would genuinely accept either offer.
My university does not rank its graduates. How do I prove I am in the top 10%?
You are not asked to prove it. The top 10% figure is described as an indication of the level the award is aimed at, and Leiden does not require you to supply evidence of your ranking. Your transcript, your degree classification and your institution’s own grading conventions are what the committee reads. If your grading system is unusual, a single plain sentence explaining what your final grade means in your country is more useful than a chart.
Can I hold LExS at the same time as another scholarship?
Not alongside another full scholarship. The award is not designed to sit on top of funding that already covers your studies completely. Smaller awards, family contributions and part time earnings are a different matter, and in practice most recipients are combining LExS with something else to close the gap. If you are expecting a decision from a full scholarship elsewhere, tell the scholarship office rather than letting two awards collide after the fact.
My programme runs for two years. Does the award repeat in the second year?
The award runs for the duration of your study programme rather than for a single year, so a longer programme is covered for its length. What it does not do is stretch to cover extra time. If you fall behind and need a third year on a two year master’s, you should assume the reduction has run out and budget for that possibility before it becomes urgent.
Is there an interview or a second round before the March email?
The published process describes faculty committees nominating candidates and a single email to all applicants, with no interview stage mentioned. Do not treat that as a promise. If a faculty contacts you for anything, respond promptly, and if you want certainty about your specific programme, ask the admissions office at the point you submit rather than assuming silence means nothing further is required.
Should I pay an agent to submit the application for me?
No. Everything LExS requires is done inside Leiden’s own admission portal with documents you already have, and nobody outside the university can influence a faculty committee’s nomination. Treat any offer to guarantee a scholarship, submit on your behalf for a fee, or sell you a winning letter as a warning sign. The only money that should leave your account in this process goes to the university itself for the admission application, and to the Dutch immigration process later.
Before you close this tab
Open Leiden’s programme page for the master’s you want and confirm two things right now: that it starts in September, and that it is not one of the excluded Law School programmes. Those two checks take three minutes and decide whether any of the rest applies to you.
If both check out, put the admission application in during early November rather than late, and give yourself a week between finishing the motivation letter and submitting it. Almost everything that goes wrong with a LExS application is a timing problem, not a talent problem.
