Employment contracts for international workers in the Netherlands: the complete guide for employers

A Dutch employment contract for international workers is governed by Dutch mandatory employment law whenever the employee actually works in the Netherlands, whatever law the parties write into the contract. Under Article 8 of the Rome I Regulation the parties may choose a law, but that choice can never deprive the employee of the protection of the mandatory rules of the country where the work is habitually carried out. In practice this means Dutch rules on dismissal, sick pay, the transition payment, holidays, minimum wage and the probationary period apply on top of whatever else was agreed.

That single rule explains most of the surprises foreign employers encounter in the Netherlands, and it is the reason a translated template is not an international employment contract. This guide sets out which law applies and why the answer rarely changes, which Dutch rules cannot be contracted away, what language the contract should be in, what information you are obliged to give in writing, how immigration status interacts with the employment relationship, and how to draft the clauses that a purely domestic contract never needs: relocation, the expat facility, repayment, remote work abroad and repatriation.

Which law applies to the contract

The starting point is Article 8 of Regulation (EC) No 593/2008, better known as Rome I, which applies in the Netherlands and across the European Union. Parties to an individual employment contract may choose the applicable law. That freedom is then immediately qualified: the choice may not have the result of depriving the employee of the protection of the provisions that cannot be derogated from by agreement under the law that would have applied in the absence of choice.

Identifying that fallback law follows a fixed order. The first test is the country in which, or from which, the employee habitually carries out the work. Temporary work elsewhere does not change that country; a Dutch-based developer seconded to a German project for two months still habitually works in the Netherlands. If no such country can be identified, the second test is the country in which the place of business through which the employee was engaged is situated. Finally, if the contract as a whole is manifestly more closely connected with another country, the law of that country applies instead. That escape clause exists but is rarely decisive.

For an employee who is recruited abroad and then comes to work at a Dutch office, the answer is almost always the same: the Netherlands is the country of habitual work, so Dutch mandatory law applies whatever the contract says. Choosing another law does not remove that protection; it simply produces a contract governed by two legal systems at once, with a Dutch court comparing the two rule by rule and applying whichever is more favourable to the employee. That is expensive to litigate and almost never worth the trouble.

There are situations in which another law genuinely deserves consideration: an employee who will keep working from their own country and never move, staff who work across several countries without a clear base, or a genuine posting for a defined period under the rules on posted workers. Even then the analysis has to be done deliberately, because the answer affects social security and tax as well as employment law. For anyone who will simply sit in your Dutch office, choose Dutch law in the contract and be done with it.

Two further points are worth recording in the contract itself. State the jurisdiction clause carefully: under the Brussels I bis Regulation an employee may in principle sue the employer in the country where they habitually work, and a jurisdiction clause agreed before the dispute arose cannot take that right away. And describe the place of work precisely, because that description is the first thing a court, the Tax Administration and the immigration service will each look at.

The Dutch mandatory rules that foreign employers underestimate

If Dutch law applies, in whole or in part, a set of rules applies that cannot be contracted away. These are the ones that produce the largest unpleasant surprises in practice.

Continued payment of wages during illness. Article 7:629 of the Civil Code obliges the employer to continue paying at least seventy per cent of the wage for up to 104 weeks of incapacity, with a floor at the statutory minimum wage during the first year. Alongside that, the Eligibility for Permanent Incapacity Benefit (Restrictions) Act (Wet verbetering poortwachter) imposes an active reintegration process on both parties, with fixed moments for a problem analysis, a plan of action and evaluations. An employer who neglects that process can be ordered by the employee insurance agency (UWV) to continue paying wages for a further period. This obligation has no equivalent in most countries and it is the single most common shock for a foreign parent company.

Dismissal protection. A Dutch employer cannot simply give notice. Termination requires either the consent of the employee, a dismissal permit from the UWV for redundancy or long-term incapacity, or a court order dissolving the contract on one of the statutory grounds in Article 7:669 of the Civil Code. In practice most terminations are settled by a vaststellingsovereenkomst (settlement agreement), which the employee may revoke within fourteen days of signing. A dismissal letter of the kind that is standard in many jurisdictions has no legal effect here.

The transition payment. Under Article 7:673 of the Civil Code the employee is entitled to a transition payment (transitievergoeding) whenever the employer takes the initiative to end the employment, including where a fixed-term contract is simply not continued. There is no longer a qualifying period of two years: entitlement runs from the first day of employment and is calculated as a third of the monthly wage for each year of service, pro rata for shorter periods. The statutory maximum is adjusted each year and published by the government; do not quote a figure from an older source.

Holidays. Article 7:634 of the Civil Code gives every employee at least four times the agreed weekly working hours in paid statutory holiday per year, which is twenty days for a full-time week. Statutory days lapse six months after the end of the year in which they accrued, unless the employee was reasonably unable to take them; contractual days above the statutory minimum are subject to a five-year limitation period. Employees arriving from countries with a more generous norm often expect twenty-five or thirty days, so state the total and the split between statutory and contractual days explicitly.

Minimum wage. The statutory minimum wage is set as an hourly amount and is revised twice a year by the Minister of Social Affairs and Employment, with the current figures published in the Staatscourant and on the government website. It applies regardless of what the employee would have earned at home, and it applies to the expat facility calculation as well.

The probationary period. Article 7:652 of the Civil Code permits no probationary period at all in a fixed-term contract of six months or less, a maximum of one month in a fixed-term contract of more than six months but less than two years, and a maximum of two months in a contract of two years or more or of indefinite duration. The clause must be in writing and identical for both parties; a probationary period that exceeds the statutory maximum is void in its entirety, not reduced to the maximum. Foreign employers who write in a six-month probation therefore end up with none at all.

Fixed-term contracts and the chain rule. Article 7:668a of the Civil Code converts a succession of fixed-term contracts into a contract of indefinite duration once three contracts have been used or once the chain has lasted longer than three years, counting interruptions of six months or less as continuous. A collective agreement can vary this within limits. Employers who plan to run a foreign specialist on rolling one-year contracts should check where the chain ends before, not after, the third renewal.

Because these rules are mandatory, they are also the reason to choose Dutch law openly. You gain nothing by trying to route around them, and a contract that promises less than the statute simply means the statute applies and your document is misleading the employee. Our overview of Dutch employment law covers the framework in more detail.

In which language should the contract be drafted

Dutch law does not prescribe a language for the employment contract. A contract in Dutch, in English or in both is equally valid. What matters legally is not the language but whether the employee understood what they agreed to, because that question decides how a court will interpret disputed clauses.

Dutch contract interpretation does not stop at the literal text. Courts apply the standard developed in Dutch case law under which the meaning of a contract depends on what the parties could reasonably attribute to the provisions in the circumstances and what they could reasonably expect of each other. Where an employee signed a Dutch-language document they could not read, that standard works against the employer: the clause the employee could not have understood is the clause a court will read narrowly, or in an employment context may refuse to enforce at all. Clauses that carry a written-form requirement, such as a non-competition clause, are particularly vulnerable, because the requirement exists precisely so that the employee weighs the consequences.

For most technology employers the workable answer is a bilingual contract in Dutch and English, signed in both versions, with a clause stating which version prevails in the event of a discrepancy. That gives the employer certainty about the meaning of Dutch legal concepts and gives the employee a text they can actually read. A purely English contract also works well where Dutch law is expressly chosen and the drafting is done properly, and it is often the more sensible choice in a company whose entire working language is English.

Two practical warnings. First, translate the concepts, not the words. Ontslag op staande voet is summary dismissal for urgent cause and not simply termination for cause; a vaststellingsovereenkomst is a settlement agreement terminating employment by mutual consent and not a severance letter; a concurrentiebeding is a non-competition clause subject to Dutch statutory requirements and not a generic restrictive covenant. A translation that borrows a foreign concept imports the wrong legal test. Second, if a collective labour agreement applies, it is in Dutch and will not be translated; where the English contract and the collective agreement conflict, the collective agreement generally prevails to the extent it is more favourable or is declared universally binding.

There is one area where language is not a matter of preference. Article 7:658 of the Civil Code imposes a far-reaching duty of care on the employer for the safety of the workplace, and the case law reads that duty strictly. Instructions about machinery, hazardous substances, evacuation and personal protective equipment must be given in a language the employee actually understands. If an accident happens and the instructions were only in a language the employee did not master, the employer will not be heard to say that the instructions existed.

The written information you are legally required to give

Separate from the contract itself, Dutch law obliges the employer to inform the employee in writing about a long list of matters. Article 7:655 of the Civil Code was substantially expanded when the European directive on transparent and predictable working conditions was implemented on 1 August 2022, and the expanded list is where foreign employers most often fall short without noticing.

• The identity of the parties, the place or places of work, the position and the date on which employment starts, and for a fixed-term contract its duration.
• The wage and its components, the payment intervals and the method of payment, together with any overtime pay arrangement.
• Working time, including the length of a normal working day or week, arrangements for overtime, and where the working pattern is largely unpredictable, the reference days and hours within which the employee can be required to work and the minimum notice of an assignment.
• Holiday entitlement and other paid leave, and the procedure for taking it.
• The applicable notice periods or the method of calculating them, and the procedure that both parties must follow to terminate.
• Any probationary period and its conditions.
• Training provided by the employer and any entitlement to it.
• The pension scheme, the applicable collective agreement, and where relevant the identity of the social security institutions receiving contributions.
• For work that will be carried out abroad for longer than four consecutive weeks, additional information about the country, the duration, the currency of payment, any benefits attached to the assignment and the arrangements for return.

Most of this information must be provided within one week of the start of work, the remainder within one month. It can be given in the contract itself, which is the tidiest solution, or in a separate statement. An employer who fails to provide it is liable for the damage the employee suffers as a result, and in a dispute the omission tends to be read against the employer on every point that was left unclear.

The same implementing act brought two further changes that belong in an international contract. Compulsory training that the employer is required by law or by collective agreement to provide must be offered free of charge, counted as working time and, where possible, scheduled during working hours; a study costs repayment clause covering that kind of training is void under Article 7:611a of the Civil Code. And a clause prohibiting the employee from taking other work outside working hours is void unless the employer can justify it on objective grounds, such as health and safety, the protection of confidential business information or the avoidance of a conflict of interest. Our article on ancillary activities and what employers can prohibit sets out how that justification test works.

Immigration status is part of the employment relationship

For an employee from outside the European Union, European Economic Area or Switzerland, the residence and work permit is not an administrative detail that sits beside the contract. It is a condition on which the whole arrangement depends, and the obligations attached to it fall on the employer as much as on the employee.

The most used route for technology employers is the highly skilled migrant scheme. It requires the employer to be a recognised sponsor (erkend referent) with the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (IND), a status that has to be applied for in advance and that carries continuing obligations: a duty to provide information about any relevant change, a duty to keep an administration that allows the IND to verify compliance, and a duty of care towards the employee. The position must genuinely correspond to the qualifications of the employee, and the salary must meet the criterion for the applicable category. Those salary criteria are set by ministerial regulation and indexed every year, so the figure to use is the one the IND publishes for the year in which the application is made. Our guide to the highly skilled migrant permit works through the requirements in detail.

Other routes exist and are sometimes the better fit: the EU Blue Card, the intra-corporate transferee permit for a posting within a group, the orientation year permit for recent graduates of designated universities, the single permit combining residence and work, and the startup scheme. Each has its own salary norm, its own duration and its own consequences on termination.

Two consequences of immigration status belong expressly in the contract. The first is that the offer is conditional on the permit being granted; without such a condition you may find yourself bound to an employment contract for a person who cannot lawfully start. The second is what happens when employment ends. A highly skilled migrant whose employment terminates keeps a limited search period in which to find a new sponsor: three months as a rule, extended to six months for those who lost their job on or after 22 May 2026 after holding the permit for at least two years. The employer must notify the IND that the employment has ended. That short window is the reason a longer notice period, or a notice period compensated in the settlement agreement, is often the fairer arrangement for an international employee.

The clauses an international contract needs that a domestic one does not

Every employment contract needs the basics: the parties, the position and its description, the start date and duration, the salary and payment interval, working hours, holidays, any probationary period, the pension arrangement, the notice period, the applicable law and the forum. For an international worker, the job description carries extra weight, because the immigration service will compare it with the qualifications on which the permit was granted, and a later change of duties can put the permit at risk.

Beyond that, the following clauses do real work in an international contract and are usually missing from a translated domestic template.

• A permit condition. State that the contract is entered into subject to the grant of the required residence and work permit, that both parties will cooperate in the application, and what happens if it is refused.
• The place of work, and whether working abroad is permitted. Silence here is what turns into a dispute about remote work from another country, with consequences for applicable law, social security and corporate tax.
• Relocation and, symmetrically, repatriation. What is reimbursed, up to what limit, against what evidence and by when.
• A repayment clause covering relocation costs, drafted so that it is enforceable rather than merely deterrent.
• The expat facility for extraterritorial costs. If the employee is expected to qualify, the contract must say how the salary is split and what happens if the facility is refused or ends.
• Intellectual property and confidentiality. Under Dutch law the copyright in works created by an employee in the performance of their duties vests in the employer by operation of law, and inventions made in the course of employment generally accrue to the employer, but neither rule covers everything a technology business relies on. Assign expressly, deal with pre-existing rights the employee brings with them, and address open source contributions.
• A non-competition or non-solicitation clause, if it is really needed. Article 7:653 of the Civil Code requires the clause to be agreed in writing with an adult employee, and in a fixed-term contract it is valid only if the employer sets out in the same document the compelling business interests that make it necessary. A court can annul or limit a clause that unfairly prejudices the employee, and can award compensation for the period of restraint. Clauses copied from another jurisdiction routinely fail these tests.
• Return of company property and access to systems, which is a practical rather than a legal problem, but a serious one when the employee leaves the country.

It is worth stating plainly what does not belong in the contract. A clause purporting to exclude the transition payment, to shorten the sick pay obligation, to allow dismissal by letter or to impose a six-month probationary period is void, and including it damages your position in any later dispute because it shows the employee was misinformed about their rights.

Relocation costs, allowances and the expat facility

Moving a specialist and their family to the Netherlands generates a long list of costs, and the legal question is rarely whether you may reimburse them. It is whether the reimbursement is treated as a tax-free allowance or as taxable wage, and who carries the difference if the Tax Administration takes the second view.

The costs themselves fall into three groups. There are the direct costs of the move: flights for the employee and the family, the removal of household goods, temporary accommodation before permanent housing is found, and the deposit on a rented home. There are the administrative costs: the permit and legalisation fees, sworn translations of diplomas, the exchange of a foreign driving licence where that is possible, and registration formalities. And there are the settling-in costs that clients consistently forget to budget for: language courses for the employee and the partner, the fees of an international school, and advice on the Dutch tax return.

The tax treatment of each item is a matter for a tax adviser and not for this firm, and the rules are detailed enough that guessing is expensive. What the lawyer contributes is the contractual architecture. Do not promise a gross-for-net outcome you have not verified. Specify each category with a ceiling. State that reimbursement is made against invoices and receipts submitted within a defined period. State expressly that any reimbursement which cannot be paid free of tax will be processed as taxable wage, and say which party bears the resulting charge. A contract that promises to reimburse relocation costs without addressing that last point is a contract in which the employer has silently taken on the wage tax as well.

For employees recruited from abroad, the Netherlands has a facility for extraterritorial costs that allows a fixed percentage of the salary to be paid free of tax without the employer having to substantiate each item. It is universally known as the thirty per cent ruling, although the percentage is being reduced and the salary thresholds increased, with the changes taking effect in 2027 under legislation already adopted. Because the percentage, the thresholds and the maximum duration have all been amended in recent years, the only safe course is to check the figures that apply in the year the employment starts. Our page on the expat facility in the Netherlands explains the conditions, which include recruitment from outside the Netherlands, a specific expertise scarce on the Dutch labour market, and having lived at a defined distance from the Dutch border for a defined part of the preceding period.

Two contractual points follow from the way the facility works. The application is made jointly by employer and employee, so the contract should oblige both to cooperate and set a deadline. And because the facility reduces taxable wage, it interacts with everything calculated on that wage: pension accrual, sick pay, holiday allowance and the transition payment. Agree in writing which basis is used for each, or you will be arguing about it at the end of the relationship rather than at the beginning.

Repayment clauses: when they hold and when they do not

If you have spent a substantial sum bringing someone to the Netherlands, you will want it back if they resign after four months. A repayment clause can achieve that, but only if it is drafted to survive judicial scrutiny, and Dutch courts scrutinise these clauses closely because they operate as a restraint on the freedom of the employee to leave.

Four requirements matter in practice. The clause must be agreed in writing and in clear terms before the costs are incurred, so that the employee knew the exposure when accepting the job. The obligation must taper: a sliding scale that reduces the repayable amount for every month worked is accepted, while an all-or-nothing clause over a long period generally is not. The clause must be limited to costs the employer actually incurred and can evidence. And it must be one-sided in the right direction: repayment can be triggered by resignation or by a dismissal for urgent cause attributable to the employee, but not by a redundancy, by a termination the employer initiated, or by a dissolution granted because of seriously culpable conduct on the part of the employer.

Two further limits are easy to overlook. A repayment obligation may not be set off against wages beyond the limits the Civil Code sets on set-off and attachment, so a clause that would leave the employee below the protected minimum cannot be enforced in that way. And a clause covering training that the employer is legally obliged to provide is void, which means the training component of a relocation package has to be separated from the rest.

Repayment clauses concerning training more broadly should also be checked against the study costs rules: where the training is not compulsory, a repayment arrangement remains possible, but it must be proportionate and must taper in the same way.

Notice periods, probation and ending the employment

Article 7:672 of the Civil Code sets the statutory notice periods. The employee owes one month, regardless of length of service. The employer owes one month for employment of less than five years, two months for five to ten years, three months for ten to fifteen years and four months from fifteen years. Notice is given against the end of the calendar month unless the contract or a collective agreement provides otherwise.

The scope for deviating is narrower than most international templates assume, and the rule is frequently stated wrongly. The statutory notice period of the employer can be shortened only by collective labour agreement, not by individual agreement. The notice period of the employee may be extended in writing, up to a maximum of six months, but if you do that the notice period of the employer must be at least twice as long as the period agreed for the employee. A collective agreement may bring the employer period back down, but never below the period applying to the employee. So the answer to the question whether you can give an expatriate a shorter notice period than the statute provides is, in the ordinary case, no.

Where genuine flexibility is needed at the start of the relationship, the probationary period is the instrument the law provides. Within it either party may terminate with immediate effect and without a reason, and the ordinary prohibitions on dismissal do not apply. The limits set out above are strict, the clause must be in writing, and it must be the same for both parties. For an international worker who has given up a job and moved a family, using the probationary period is a serious step, and it is worth agreeing in advance what happens to relocation costs and repatriation if it is exercised.

Ending the employment of an international worker involves three tracks that have to be run together. The employment track requires a lawful route to termination: agreement, a UWV permit or a court dissolution, with the transition payment due in the ordinary case. The immigration track requires notification to the IND and starts the limited search period for the employee. And the practical track covers housing, schooling, health insurance and the return of family members. A settlement agreement that addresses only the first of these leaves the other two to chance, and it is precisely in the second and third that the sense of unfair treatment arises which turns a negotiated exit into litigation. Our overview of the settlement agreement explains what such an agreement should contain.

Repatriation: no statutory duty, but a clause worth having

Dutch law contains no general obligation for the employer to pay the costs of returning an employee to their country of origin when the employment ends. If the contract is silent, nothing is owed. That is the legal position, and it is different from the position in a number of jurisdictions where a repatriation entitlement is compulsory, which is why employees from those countries frequently assume it exists here.

Silence is nevertheless the wrong answer for most employers. Where you recruited someone abroad and paid to bring them here, a court assessing whether a dismissal was handled fairly, or an employee negotiating a settlement, will look at what happened at the other end of the relationship. A repatriation clause costs little to draft, sets a ceiling on an obligation that would otherwise be negotiated at the worst possible moment, and can be made conditional in ways an ad hoc arrangement cannot.

A workable clause states what is covered, typically the return journey for the employee and any accompanying family, the transport of household effects and a period of storage. It sets a ceiling and requires invoices. It sets a deadline, usually a defined number of months after the end of employment, after which the entitlement lapses. And it distinguishes between the reasons for termination: reimbursement on redundancy or termination by mutual consent, no reimbursement where the employee resigns to take another job in the Netherlands or is dismissed for urgent cause. Mirroring the relocation package is the simplest defensible structure, and it is the one that avoids arguments about fairness.

As with relocation, the tax treatment is a separate question that belongs with the tax adviser, and the same contractual discipline applies: say what happens if a reimbursement turns out to be taxable, and who bears it.

Social security, remote work abroad and the risks that follow

Employment law is only one of the systems that attaches to a cross-border employment relationship. Social security is a separate question governed, within the European Union, by Regulation (EC) No 883/2004. The basic rule is that a person is insured in the country where the work is performed, with a posting exception under which an employee sent temporarily to another Member State can remain insured at home, evidenced by an A1 certificate issued by the competent institution. Outside the European Union the answer depends on the bilateral social security treaty, if there is one.

The problem case is the employee who works partly in the Netherlands and partly from home in another country. Where a substantial part of the work is performed in the country of residence, insurance can shift entirely to that country, which changes the contributions the employer owes and the benefits the employee accrues. For cross-border teleworking within the European Union a framework agreement allows employees who telework from their country of residence to remain insured in the country of the employer up to a defined share of their working time, provided both countries have signed the agreement and an application is made. Our article on cross-border remote work and the EU framework agreement on telework sets out how that works in practice.

Three further risks travel with structural remote work from abroad, and all three should be assessed before the contract is signed rather than after the employee has moved. The country of habitual work under Rome I may change, bringing that other legal system into the relationship. The employer may create a permanent establishment in the other country for corporate tax purposes, or a wage tax withholding obligation there. And the employer duty of care under Article 7:658 of the Civil Code extends to the home workplace, which is difficult to discharge across a border.

The contractual answer is not to prohibit remote work, which is unrealistic in the technology sector, but to control it: define the country or countries from which working is permitted, set a limit on the number of days, require prior written approval for anything beyond it, and reserve the right to withdraw permission if the tax or social security position changes.

A practical sequence for hiring an international worker

The order in which these questions are answered matters, because several of them constrain the others.

• Establish the immigration route first. An EU, EEA or Swiss national needs no permit. For anyone else, decide which permit fits, check whether you are or can become a recognised sponsor, and build the lead time into the start date.
• Fix the place of work. Full-time in the Netherlands keeps everything simple. Anything else triggers the applicable law, social security and tax analysis before the salary is agreed.
• Settle the salary against every applicable norm: the immigration criterion for the permit, the statutory minimum wage, any collective agreement scale, and the threshold for the expat facility if you intend to rely on it.
• Decide the relocation package and its tax treatment with a tax adviser, and only then write the reimbursement clause and the repayment clause.
• Draft the contract, bilingual or in English with Dutch law expressly chosen, covering the permit condition, place of work, remote work, relocation, repatriation, the expat facility, intellectual property, confidentiality and, if genuinely necessary, a non-competition clause that meets the statutory requirements.
• Provide the written information required by Article 7:655 of the Civil Code within the statutory deadlines, in the contract or in a separate statement.
• Brief the employee properly. Explain the sick pay regime, the dismissal system, the holiday rules and the search period attached to their permit. Most disputes with international employees begin as misunderstandings about entitlements that were never explained.

Collective agreements and pension obligations you may not have chosen

Two Dutch institutions can attach themselves to an employment relationship without the employer ever agreeing to them, and both catch foreign employers regularly.

The first is the collective labour agreement. A collective agreement can bind you because your company is a member of an employers association that concluded it, or because the Minister of Social Affairs and Employment has declared it universally binding for the whole sector. In the second case the agreement applies to every employer whose activities fall within its scope description, whether or not the employer has heard of it. A universally binding agreement can set higher minimum pay, longer notice periods, additional holiday entitlement, mandatory allowances and its own rules on probationary periods. Check the scope description of the agreement for your sector before you fix the salary, not after the first pay round.

The second is the industry-wide pension fund. Participation in a sector pension fund can be made compulsory for all employers in a sector by ministerial decision, and where it is, the obligation applies automatically and retroactively. Employers who set up their own arrangement, or none at all, can find themselves facing years of back contributions with interest. For an employee who will only be in the Netherlands for a limited period this matters twice over, because it also determines what the employee can take with them when they leave.

Pension is also one of the few places where the position of an international employee genuinely differs. An employee who remains socially insured in another Member State on the basis of an A1 certificate may fall outside the Dutch scheme. That is a determination to be made and documented at the start, not assumed.

If the worker is not an employee: contractors and intermediaries

Technology companies frequently engage international specialists as self-employed contractors, or through an agency or an employer of record. Dutch law looks past the label. Under Article 7:610 of the Civil Code the relationship is an employment contract if there is work, remuneration and a relationship of authority, and the Supreme Court has confirmed that all the circumstances of the case are weighed, including the way the work is embedded in the organisation of the client. Calling the arrangement a services agreement does not change the answer.

The consequences of getting this wrong are not theoretical. The Tax Administration resumed enforcement against false self-employment on 1 January 2025, and a reclassified relationship produces retroactive wage tax and social security contributions for the client, alongside employment law claims from the worker for holiday pay, sick pay and dismissal protection. Legislation introducing a legal presumption of employment below a defined hourly rate is in preparation, which will shift the burden of proof to the client where that rate is not met.

Where you hire through an agency, a separate regime is arriving. Under the Act on the admission of labour intermediaries (Wet toelating terbeschikkingstelling van arbeidskrachten, Wtta), agencies that supply workers will need admission. Registration with the admissions body opens on 1 November 2026 and closes on 31 December 2026, the Act enters into force on 1 January 2027, and enforcement against hiring from a non-admitted agency starts on 1 January 2028. Companies that rely on agency staff for international recruitment should verify now that their suppliers intend to register.

Equal treatment, pay and the works council

Differentiating between international and Dutch staff is legally dangerous ground. The Equal Treatment Act (Algemene wet gelijke behandeling) prohibits distinction on grounds including race, nationality, religion and belief, in recruitment as well as in terms and conditions, and Article 7:646 of the Civil Code prohibits distinction between men and women in pay for equal or equivalent work. Separate statutes cover distinction on grounds of age, disability and chronic illness, and between fixed-term and permanent employees and between part-time and full-time employees.

In practice the risk is not an explicit rule but a package. Paying an internationally recruited specialist less than a comparable Dutch colleague because the salary was benchmarked against the country of origin is difficult to defend. So is a relocation or bonus package that in effect only benefits one nationality, or a recruitment process in which a language requirement that the job does not really need filters out applicants of a particular origin. Where an employee makes a distinction plausible, the burden of proving that no prohibited distinction was made shifts to the employer, so the reasoning behind pay decisions should be recorded at the time.

This area is about to become more demanding. The European directive on pay transparency, Directive (EU) 2023/970, had to be transposed by 7 June 2026 and requires employers to publish pay ranges in vacancies, to refrain from asking applicants about their pay history, to give employees information about average pay levels for equivalent work and, above certain workforce sizes, to report on the gender pay gap. The Dutch implementing bill, which amends the Equal Treatment (Men and Women) Act, is before the House of Representatives and has not yet been adopted; entry into force will be fixed by royal decree. Until it takes effect the existing equal pay rules apply, but employers who set international salaries without a documented, job-based structure will find that structure hard to reconstruct later.

Finally, the works council. Where the company has one, its rights apply to international staff exactly as they do to everyone else. Under Article 27 of the Works Councils Act the council has a right of consent for arrangements including remuneration and job evaluation systems, working time and holiday schemes, and rules on staff monitoring and personnel assessment. A relocation or expat policy that fixes terms for a group of employees is capable of falling within that right, and a policy adopted without the required consent can be invoked as void by the works council. Introducing a policy is cheaper than repairing one.

Frequently asked questions

Getting the contract right the first time

An employment contract for an international worker is not a harder version of a domestic one; it is a document that has to satisfy four systems at once. Employment law decides what you may agree. Immigration law decides whether the person may start and how long they have if it ends. Tax law decides what a reimbursement really costs. Social security law decides where the contributions go. A clause that solves one of those problems can create another, which is why the sequence set out above matters as much as the drafting.

Law and More advises technology companies and other employers in the Netherlands on international employment relationships. We draft and review bilingual and English-language employment contracts, assess the applicable law and the consequences of remote work from abroad, work with recognised sponsors on highly skilled migrant and other permit routes, structure relocation, repayment and repatriation arrangements together with your tax adviser, and act in disputes and terminations involving international staff. If you are preparing an offer, or dealing with a contract that turned out not to say what you thought it said, book a consultation with our employment law team and we will go through it with you.