How to choose an EOR in the Netherlands

Not the law. Article 7:629 BW gives the same 104 weeks of sick pay whichever provider you sign with, and article 7:669 BW sets the same nine dismissal grounds. What differs is operational: what a provider checks before the first payroll, what it does in the second year of a sickness, what is inside the number it quotes, and what you are shown before you commit.

So the useful questions are about the situations that cost money rather than about the service description. Five of them do most of the work, and each has a right answer that is a process rather than an adjective.

• Does a CAO apply to this role, and who establishes that?
• What happens in month fourteen of a long-term illness?
• What does it take to end a contract, and how long does it take?
• Is the quoted cost the full cost?
• What do I get in writing, and when?

A provider that answers all five with a named step, a named document and a named point in the calendar is straightforward to evaluate. One that answers with a description of its software has told you about its software. The rest of this page is what a good answer to each question looks like, and where the figures come from.

This is the first question because it can change the salary you have already agreed. A CAO that has been declared algemeen verbindend by the Minister of SZW applies to every employer in the sector it covers, whether or not that employer signed it or belongs to the organisation that did, and it can impose a wage scale the salary cannot sit below, a compulsory pension, a 13th month, higher vakantiegeld and extra leave days.

There are three routes by which a CAO binds an employer: membership of an employers’ organisation that concluded it; incorporation by reference, where the CAO is written into the individual arbeidsovereenkomst; and an algemeen verbindend verklaring. The second route carries a drafting point worth asking about, because unless the clause says that successive versions apply, the version in force at signature is the one that binds.

What decides whether a sector CAO reaches a particular role is the CAO’s own scope clause, the werkingssfeer, and not the employer’s view of its own industry. That is guidance rather than a rule you can point at in a statute, but it is the way the question is settled in practice, and a provider that treats it as a matter of opinion is guessing on your behalf.

Ask when the check is done and what the output is. The Ministry of SZW keeps a public CAO and AVV register, so the answer should be a documented search against the role and the sector before the first payroll, not a view formed after a question from the employee. Ask, too, what happens if the answer moves the number: who tells you, and how quickly.

This is the biggest single liability in Dutch employment and the one foreign buyers most often price at zero. Under article 7:629 BW an employee who cannot work through illness keeps the right to 70% of wage for 104 weeks, with at least the statutory minimum wage for the first 52 weeks and no floor at all after that, capped by reference to the maximum dagloon of € 305,41 a day for 2026. The employer pays it, not the state.

Month fourteen is the question rather than month two because that is where the difference between providers shows. The employee is past the first-year evaluation, the pay floor has gone, and a statutory reintegration programme has been running alongside the payments since the absence was first reported. The dated obligations include notifying UWV of the long-term absence by the 42e-weekmelding and a WIA claim with a re-integratieverslag around week 93. Our guides cover the two halves separately: the payment duty in Dutch sick pay rules, and the process and its milestones under the Wet verbetering poortwachter.

Then the sanction. If UWV assesses the re-integratieverslag and finds the employer’s effort insufficient, it can order the employer to keep paying wages for up to 52 further weeks, taking the worst case to three years, and dismissal stays blocked for as long as the sanction runs. The sanction can be shortened by a bekortingsverzoek, which UWV decides within three weeks.

So ask who talks to the bedrijfsarts, who drafts the plan van aanpak and keeps the file, what happens at week 42 and week 93, whether a second track with another employer is opened and when, and who carries the cost if UWV finds the effort insufficient. A provider that has never had a two-year sickness will say so if you ask directly.

Longer than a buyer coming from an at-will system expects, and the timetable is mostly outside the provider’s control. An employer may end an indefinite arbeidsovereenkomst only on a redelijke grond from the exhaustive list of nine grounds in article 7:669(3) BW, and only where redeployment into another suitable role is not possible or not reasonable. Permission comes first, then notice.

Which body gives that permission depends on which ground is used. UWV handles bedrijfseconomisch redundancy and long-term incapacity; the kantonrechter handles the rest, and also hears cases UWV has refused. UWV states that a complete dismissal application usually takes about four weeks, and its permission is valid for four weeks from the decision, after which it lapses. The notice period is then shortened by the time the procedure took, with at least one month always remaining.

The money is separate from the process. A transitievergoeding is due: a third of a month’s pay for every year of service, pro rata for part years, subject to a 2026 ceiling of € 102.000 in article 7:673(2) BW, or a year’s pay where that exceeds it. It runs from the first day of employment, and it is owed even where the employer simply lets a fixed-term contract expire. Our guide to terminating employment in the Netherlands sets out the routes in order.

Ask the provider which route it expects to use and who decides, who signs the application, who pays the transitievergoeding and whether it has been accrued month by month or lands as one invoice, and how a settlement by vaststellingsovereenkomst would be handled, given that article 7:670b BW lets the employee dissolve the agreement within 14 days without giving reasons, and gives them three weeks instead where the agreement fails to mention that right.

Three assumptions inside a Dutch employer-cost quote move the total by more than ten percentage points, and none of them is usually stated. Whether the 8% vakantiegeld is included. Whether the contract is assumed to be permanent, written and not an on-call contract, which is what the low AWf rate requires. And what has been assumed about the sector and the size of the employer, which set the Whk and Aof rates.

The range is wide for that reason. Statutory employer social charges run from 16,55% to 28,60% of total gross pay for 2026. The typical permanent-contract figure is 16,77%. Failing the low-AWf test alone adds five percentage points; employer size moves the Aof by 1,36 points; and the Whk is set employer by employer by Belastingdienst decision.

The way to compare quotes is on base salary, because that is the number in your headcount budget. On the 2026 rates, a permanent written contract costs about 26% on top of base salary: 8% vakantiegeld plus about 18% employer social charges, both expressed on base salary. Above € 79.409 of pay the employer charges stop, so the percentage falls on senior salaries and a single percentage quoted without a salary attached tells you very little. Every assumption behind those percentages is written down in the cost of hiring in the Netherlands.

Two things sit outside that percentage and should be asked about by name: a compulsory bedrijfstakpensioenfonds or a CAO pension, which is why question one comes first, and the service fee itself, which here starts at €599 per employee per month and is quoted separately from the employment cost rather than folded into a percentage.

Ask to see the contract template before you commit, not after the candidate has accepted. Article 7:655 BW requires a written or electronic statement to the employee, and it has to reach, among other things, the place of work, the function, the start date, holiday entitlement or the method of calculating it, the termination procedure with its notice periods, and the pay split into its separate components. A provider that cannot show you a template is asking you to take the most important document in the arrangement on trust.

Four things in that template are worth reading closely. Whether the salary is stated inclusive or exclusive of the 8% vakantiegeld. Whether the proeftijd is correct for the contract length, given that a contract of six months or less can carry none at all. Whether holiday is expressed in hours, as article 7:634 BW writes it, rather than in days. And whether the concurrentiebeding, if there is one, meets its conditions: it is valid only in writing and with an adult employee, and in a fixed-term contract only where the written justification of necessity sits inside the clause itself.

Then ask what the employee receives and when: the contract, the statement, a payslip they can read, and the name of the person who answers a question about vakantiegeld or a loonheffingen line. Someone who works on Dutch payroll every day and replies under their own name is worth more to an employee in their first month than a portal is.

Those five questions are the whole test, and they are the ones Employer of Record Netherlands expects to be asked. A provider that answers them in writing, with dates and figures for 2026, is describing a service it runs. One that answers them in adjectives is describing a service it hopes to run.