Remote work in the Netherlands: no right, but an allowance

There is no statutory right to work from home in the Netherlands. The bill that would have created one, the Wet werken waar je wilt, was rejected by the Eerste Kamer on 26 September 2023, and nothing has replaced it since.

That bill would have obliged an employer to treat a request to change the place of work in the same way as a request to change working hours or working volume. Because the Eerste Kamer rejected it, that alignment never happened. Hours and place of work are still governed differently, and only one of them has a statute behind it.

This is the point most English-language guides to Dutch employment get wrong, and they get it wrong in the employee’s favour. A page that tells you Dutch staff have a right to work from home is describing a bill that did not pass.

It matters commercially as well as legally. A buyer hiring a Dutch developer on the assumption that home working is a legal default has built a policy on something that does not exist, and will discover it the first time the arrangement has to change. The opposite mistake is just as common: an employer assuming it can simply instruct a Dutch home worker back to a desk, when the contract has quietly said otherwise for two years.

What remains is contract and CAO. Home working in the Netherlands is set by what the arbeidsovereenkomst says, by any collective agreement that binds the employer, and by what the employer has in fact been doing. Dutch law supplies a generous untaxed daily allowance and a set of working-time limits that follow the employee home. It does not supply an entitlement.

An employee can ask to change their working hours, and in a business of a certain size the employer has to let the request be made. Under the Wet flexibel werken, an employer with 10 or more employees must allow an employee with at least six months’ service to request a change to their working hours, once a year, or twice where the circumstances were unforeseen.

Read the words that matter: working hours. The Wet flexibel werken is about how much someone works. It is not about where. The Act that would have put the place of work on the same statutory footing is the one the Eerste Kamer threw out in 2023.

So a Dutch employee who wants to work from home asks their employer, and the answer comes out of the arbeidsovereenkomst and any applicable CAO rather than out of a statute. An employer that says yes has agreed something, and what has been agreed is where any later argument starts.

There is one further reason to be careful with the wording. The exact position of a request to change the place of work, as opposed to a request to change hours, is not something this site will state, because the Eerste Kamer page that records the rejection does not set out a replacement framework and no statute does either. What can be said with confidence is the negative: there is no right to work from home, and an employer that grants one is granting it, not conceding it.

Which is why the drafting carries more weight here than it would in a country with a statutory right. What a Dutch employment contract has to contain is a subject in its own right, and a home-based role is the one where the written record does the most work.

€ 2,45 for every day worked from home, paid untaxed. That is the 2026 thuiswerkvergoeding, set out in the Belastingdienst figures annex for 2026.

It is a gerichte vrijstelling inside the werkkostenregeling, which matters more than the phrase suggests. A targeted exemption does not consume the employer’s vrije ruimte. For 2026 the vrije ruimte is 2,00% of the fiscal wage bill up to € 400.000 and 1,18% on anything above that, and an employer that exceeds it pays eindheffing at 80% on the excess. The home-working allowance sits outside that arithmetic entirely.

The same annex sets the untaxed reiskostenvergoeding at € 0,23 per kilometre for 2026. The two are separate figures, resting on different facts, and a payroll that pays both has to be able to show what each one was for.

The allowance is small per day and material per year, which is why it is worth getting into payroll properly rather than folding into salary. Paid as gross pay it is taxed as gross pay, and the employee keeps roughly two thirds of it. Paid as a gerichte vrijstelling it arrives whole. The difference is a payroll configuration, not a negotiation, and it is the sort of thing that is set up once and then runs.

None of it is compulsory. Dutch law gives an employer a clean, untaxed route to contribute towards the cost of a home office. It does not oblige the employer to use it. A CAO can, and a contract can. Where the allowance is paid it runs through the monthly cycle as an untaxed reimbursement rather than as gross pay, which is a payroll setting rather than a pay rise: the mechanics sit with how Dutch payroll works.

The Arbeidstijdenwet applies wherever the work is done, and a spare bedroom is not an exception to it. A shift is capped at 12 hours and a week at 60 hours. The average working week may not exceed 55 hours over any four weeks, or 48 hours over any sixteen weeks.

• Maximum 12 hours in a single shift
• Maximum 60 hours in a single week
• Maximum 55 hours a week averaged over four weeks
• Maximum 48 hours a week averaged over sixteen weeks
• At least 11 consecutive hours of rest after a working day
• At least 36 consecutive hours of rest in every seven-day period

Rest is the half of the Act that employers forget once the desk is at home. An employee is entitled to 11 consecutive hours of rest after a working day, which may be cut to 8 hours once in any seven days where the nature of the work requires it, and to 36 consecutive hours of weekly rest in every seven-day period, or 72 hours in every fourteen days split into two blocks of at least 32 hours.

Breaks follow the length of the shift. More than 5,5 hours carries a 30-minute break, which may be taken as two blocks of 15 minutes; more than 10 hours carries 45 minutes, which may be split into blocks of at least 15 minutes. A CAO can vary the break rules, but the employee always keeps at least one 15-minute break after 5,5 hours. A night shift is any shift with at least an hour of work between 00:00 and 06:00.

The Arbeidstijdenwet is enforced by the Nederlandse Arbeidsinspectie. And the employer’s duty of care for working conditions extends to the home workplace, which is a duty rather than a checklist, and is worth taking Dutch advice on for any role that is home-based full time.

The starting point is whatever was agreed, because there is no statutory right pulling the other way. Where the arbeidsovereenkomst fixes the place of work, or where a CAO does, that is where the question is answered.

This cuts in both directions, and it is the reason to state the Dutch position precisely rather than generously. An employer has no statutory obligation to grant home working to anybody. An employer that has written a home workplace into the contract has agreed a term of employment, and changing an agreed term is a different exercise from issuing an instruction.

The other half of the answer is that the Netherlands treats this as an employment-terms question rather than a health-and-safety one, and the two get confused. An employer’s duty of care for working conditions reaches the home workplace whatever the contract says about attendance. Where the employee works is negotiable. Whether the employer owes them a duty of care while they work there is not.

So the practical advice is dull and sound. Write down where the work is done. Write down what happens if that changes, and who decides. Write down what the employer pays towards it and on what basis. The information duty in article 7:655 BW already obliges an employer to give the employee written information about the employment, among other things, and a home-based hire is the case where silence costs the most.

An Employer of Record becomes the legal employer of the person you hire. Your business keeps the work, the role and the pay decision. The arbeidsovereenkomst sits with the employer named on it, and that employer runs payroll in euro, withholds and files loonheffingen, applies statutory leave under article 7:634 BW and carries the statutory employer duties.

For a home-based Dutch hire that shows up in three specific places. The contract has to say where the work is done. The thuiswerkvergoeding has to be configured in payroll as an untaxed reimbursement rather than dropped into gross pay, where it would be taxed. And the working-time limits in the Arbeidstijdenwet have to be capable of being evidenced for somebody nobody sees.

None of that is exotic. It is the ordinary Dutch employment administration applied to a person who happens to work at home, run by people who do Dutch payroll every day and can answer a question about the thuiswerkvergoeding or the loonaangifte without looking it up. The difference from doing it yourself is that you do not first have to become a Dutch employer in order to employ one person.

You hire in the Netherlands without registering a company of your own there, on a Dutch contract, from day one. Our fee starts at €599 per employee per month, and Employer of Record Netherlands sets out what the arrangement covers. If you want the sequence rather than the summary, the steps to hiring a Dutch employee runs from the offer to the first loonaangifte.

One thing changes materially once the work happens at home rather than on your premises, and it is the paperwork around what the employee creates there. Our post on protecting IP when hiring in the Netherlands sets out who owns an invention by default and what a clause has to do to change it.