Can a UK company hire in the Netherlands?

Yes, and the question that actually needs answering is which company signs the contract. A Dutch hire works under a Dutch arbeidsovereenkomst, and article 7:610(1) BW describes that agreement in four elements: work, pay, over a period of time, in the service of the employer. Whoever is named as the employer on that contract carries the duties attached to it.

A UK business has two ways to fill that box. It can set up a company of its own in the Netherlands and be the employer directly, or it can use an employer of record, in which case the EOR becomes the legal employer of the person you hire. Your business still chooses the candidate, sets the salary, directs the work and decides when the role ends.

What does not change between the two routes is the content of the employment. Statutory leave under article 7:634 BW is four times the agreed weekly hours, so 20 days for a full-timer. The 8% vakantiegeld in article 15 WML is owed on the pay. Article 7:629 BW puts 104 weeks of sick pay at 70% of wage on the employer. Those attach to the Dutch contract, not to the buyer’s own country.

So the honest version of the question is not whether a UK company may hire in the Netherlands. It is whether the UK company wants to spend the effort becoming a Dutch employer itself, or would rather buy the employment and keep the work.

Brexit changed the immigration question and left the employment question alone. The United Kingdom sits outside the EU and the EEA, so the free-movement arrangements that run between member states are not available to a UK company or to a UK national arriving in the Netherlands. Dutch employment law, by contrast, reads the same whether the client paying for the work is in the United Kingdom or in the Netherlands: the arbeidsovereenkomst, the leave, the vakantiegeld and the dismissal rules are set by Dutch statute and do not soften for a foreign buyer.

Where the post-Brexit position bites is the permit. Under the IND regime, an employer sponsoring a kennismigrant, the Dutch highly skilled migrant route, must be a recognised sponsor, an erkend referent. The IND conditions for recognition include registration in the Dutch Handelsregister, sufficiently guaranteed continuity and solvency, and the reliability of the organisation, its directors and its officers. Recognition costs € 5.080,00 in 2026, or € 2.539,00 at the reduced rate for an organisation of 50 employees or fewer, and the IND has 90 days to decide on the application.

Read that as a description of the Dutch sponsorship regime rather than as a route your own company can take from London. It is built around a Dutch registration test, and whether any individual needs a permit at all turns on that person’s nationality and circumstances rather than on where the buyer sits. If the person you want is a third-country national, treat the permit as separate work with a Dutch immigration adviser and settle it before you fix a start date.

For a hire who already has the right to work in the Netherlands, none of that arises, and the whole question collapses back into the first one: who signs the arbeidsovereenkomst. The reflex to check is the assumption that a UK employment contract can be posted to a Dutch address and left to work. It cannot, because the entitlements described in this post attach to the Dutch employment itself rather than to the employer’s preference about which law to write into the document.

Budget about 26% on top of base salary: 8% vakantiegeld plus about 18% employer social charges, both expressed on base salary. That is the figure a budget holder experiences, and it assumes no CAO applies and no occupational pension scheme is compulsory.

Underneath it, statutory employer charges in 2026 run from 16,55% to 28,60% of total gross pay, with a typical figure of 16,77% for a small employer on a permanent written contract in business services. Five components make that up: AWf for unemployment insurance, Aof for disability, the Wko childcare surcharge, the employer-specific Whk set by Belastingdienst decision, and the werkgeversheffing Zvw at 6,10%. Three of them move with facts about your hire rather than with the salary, which is why a single national percentage does not exist.

All five stop at the 2026 ceiling of € 79.409 of premieloon. Earnings above it attract no further employer charges, so the percentage falls as the salary rises. A worked example on a € 48.000 base salary, with every assumption stated, is in our post on the cost of hiring in the Netherlands.

Two things that percentage deliberately excludes. Pension: there is no general statutory occupational pension in the Netherlands, but a bedrijfstakpensioenfonds made compulsory for a sector, or a CAO, can impose one and that is a substantial extra layer. And a generally binding CAO can impose a wage scale, extra leave and a 13th month on an employer that never signed it, decided by the CAO’s own scope clause rather than by your view of your industry.

The part of a UK hiring plan that needs rebuilding is the exit. An employer may end an indefinite arbeidsovereenkomst only where there is a redelijke grond from the exhaustive list of nine in article 7:669(3) BW, a to i, and only where herplaatsing, redeployment into another suitable role within a reasonable period and if necessary with training, is not possible or not reasonable. That is article 7:669(1) BW, and there is no route that substitutes a payment for the process.

The ground is tested by an outside body before notice is given: UWV for redundancy and long-term incapacity, the kantonrechter for the other grounds. UWV permission is valid for four weeks under article 7:671a(6) BW, and notice must then be given in writing stating the reason. Any clause excluding the permission requirement or extending that four weeks is void. UWV’s own published expectation is that a complete dismissal application usually takes about four weeks to handle.

Money follows the process rather than replacing it. The transitievergoeding is one third of a month’s pay for each year the contract lasted, pro rata for part years, capped at € 102.000,00 for 2026 under article 7:673(2) BW or a year’s pay if that is higher, and it is owed from the first day of employment. It is also owed on a non-renewal, so letting a fixed-term contract run out is a decision with a price. The full mechanics, including the vaststellingsovereenkomst route, are in our post on terminating employment in the Netherlands.

Setting up your own company in the Netherlands is a genuine option, and the capital requirement is not the obstacle people expect: the minimum share capital for a B.V. is € 0,01. What that figure hides is everything around it. A notarial deed before a Dutch notaris is mandatory, the notaris charges € 500 to € 1.500, the company is entered in the Handelsregister, and the company then registers itself with the Belastingdienst as an employer before it takes on staff, which is what produces the loonheffingennummer, the sectoraansluiting and the Whk decision. Banks and counterparties also look at the capital, so € 0,01 is rarely what a real company is formed with.

That is worth doing when the Netherlands is a permanent part of the plan and there will be a team there. It is heavy for one hire, and it puts a Dutch payroll, a Dutch filing calendar and a Dutch employer’s liabilities on a UK finance function that has never carried them. The registrations are not the hard part either; the hard part is the year after them, when somebody has to run the monthly loonaangifte, read the Whk decision that lands each autumn and answer a question about vakantiegeld in May. Our post on an employer of record versus a Dutch B.V. compares the two on steps and control.

The other route is to buy the employment. The employing company signs the arbeidsovereenkomst, runs the monthly loonaangifte, withholds and files the loonheffingen, applies the statutory leave and vakantiegeld and carries the duties that come with being the employer on paper. You keep the candidate choice, the salary, the work and the decision to end the role. Employer of Record Netherlands charges from €599 per employee per month for that, on top of the salary and the statutory charges above.

Five questions decide whether the first Dutch month goes quietly, and four of them are cost questions dressed up as admin. Settle them while the offer is still a draft.

• Does a CAO apply to this role? A generally binding CAO binds employers that never signed it, and the SZW register at cao.minszw.nl is where that is checked, not your industry classification.
• Does the salary you quoted include or exclude the 8% vakantiegeld? Dutch salaries are normally quoted excluding it, but that is market convention rather than a rule, so the contract has to say which.
• Permanent or fixed-term? Every fixed-term, oral or on-call contract costs 5,00 percentage points more in AWf than an indefinite written one, which is the single largest lever on the employer percentage.
• Is there a proeftijd, and is it valid? In a contract of at most six months no proeftijd may be agreed at all, and a clause contrary to article 7:652 BW is void rather than merely shortened. See our post on Dutch employment contracts.
• Who runs a long-term illness, and who pays for it? The 104-week duty in article 7:629 BW is the largest single employer liability in Dutch employment and it does not wait for a UK buyer to be ready for it.

None of that is exotic once it is written down. It is simply a different set of defaults from the ones a UK employer works with, and the cost of learning it in month three rather than month zero is measured in loonaangifte corrections.