The situation is a bit weird in The Netherlands. Some PhD students are paid employees (AiO), their gross salary is ~31000 to 40000 Euro per year (I think this is excluding vacation money, but including 13th month).

Then there are PhDs that get a scholarship (bursaal), that is only around 24000-25000 gross per year.

Not too long ago, there were only employee PhDs, but some universities really love the scholarship system, because they have to pay less tax, so it's a lot cheaper for the universities.

My wife had a PhD scholarship in NL and it really had some large negative effects after finishing her PhD:

- She contributed 4 years less into a pension fund, since bursary PhDs do not build up pension outside the state pension;

- In her next academic position, they didn't consider her four years of PhD work as working experience, while they did do that for me as an employee PhD. So, she was set back 4 years in salary growth.

- She finished her PhD in August and started a full time job after her PhD. Because she had an income that went over some threshold, she had to pay the taxes that the university dodged by using the scholarship system. She worked the rest of the year at a loss (the taxes were higher than the income from September-December).

The worst part of it is that many foreign PhD students do not realize that there is a two-class system.