Workplace relationships in the Netherlands are not prohibited by Dutch law. An employer may not forbid staff to have a private relationship, because private life is protected by article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights and article 10 of the Dutch Constitution. What an employer may do is regulate the consequences: conflicts of interest, reporting lines, confidentiality and conduct towards colleagues. The legal questions are therefore rarely about the relationship itself and almost always about the decisions taken around it.
This article sets out what employers and employees in the Netherlands can require of one another when colleagues become partners. It follows four lines: the employer’s right of instruction under article 7:660 of the Dutch Civil Code (Burgerlijk Wetboek, BW), the code of conduct that gives that right concrete shape, the limits privacy law places on any investigation, and the statutory duty to prevent undesirable conduct at work. It closes with the routes available when a relationship goes wrong and the working relationship goes with it.
What Dutch law says about a relationship between colleagues
There is no provision in Dutch employment law that deals with romantic relationships at work. That absence is the starting point: what is not regulated is permitted. A blanket ban in a staff handbook, a clause requiring one of the two to resign, or dismissal purely because two colleagues live together will normally not survive scrutiny, because the employer cannot show that the measure is necessary and proportionate to a legitimate business interest.
The picture changes as soon as the relationship touches the work itself. A team leader who assesses a partner’s performance, a buyer who awards a contract to a partner’s company, a colleague with access to personnel files that concern the person they live with: in each case the employer has a real interest, and in each case that interest can be addressed without reaching into anyone’s private life. The rule of thumb that Dutch employment lawyers apply is simple. The employer may regulate the effect of the relationship on the work; it may not regulate the relationship.
Both parties are also bound by the general standard of article 7:611 BW, which requires the employer and the employee to behave as a good employer and a good employee. That open standard is what a court uses when there is no specific rule: it is the reason an employee is expected to flag an obvious conflict of interest, and the reason an employer is expected to look for a workable arrangement before it reaches for a sanction.
How far the employer’s right of instruction reaches
Article 7:660 BW gives the employer the right to issue instructions about the performance of the work and about good order within the undertaking, and obliges the employee to follow them, provided the instructions do not conflict with the contract, a collective agreement or the law. That is the legal basis for a relationship clause, and it is also its outer limit: an instruction must relate to the work or to order in the workplace, and it must be reasonable in the circumstances.
Within those boundaries a number of instructions are usually defensible. An employer may require that a relationship in a direct reporting line is disclosed to HR or to a director. It may remove the assessment, pay and promotion decisions concerning one partner from the other. It may reassign one of the two to a different team, provided the new role is comparable and the transfer is not presented as a punishment. It may prohibit the use of company systems and confidential information for private purposes, and it may set expectations for conduct at business trips and staff events.
Instructions that go further are generally not enforceable. Requiring the identity of a partner outside the organisation, demanding access to private messages, imposing a probationary period on the relationship, or making continued employment conditional on the relationship ending all fail the proportionality test, because the same business interest can be protected by a less intrusive measure. If an employee refuses an instruction that is lawful and reasonable, that refusal – not the relationship – is what the employer may act upon.
A change of duties or reporting line is a change to the working relationship, so the employer must observe the ordinary rules on unilateral variation. Where the employment contract or the staff regulations contain a written unilateral variation clause, article 7:613 BW requires a substantial interest that outweighs the employee’s interest. Where there is no such clause, the employer depends on the standard of good employership and must make a reasonable proposal that the employee can reasonably be expected to accept.
What a workable relationship clause in the code of conduct contains
Most disputes about workplace relationships in the Netherlands arise because nothing was written down and the employer improvised. A short clause in the code of conduct removes that problem, and because it is a rule of conduct rather than a rule about private life it fits comfortably within article 7:660 BW. Keep it factual, keep it symmetrical between the two people involved, and make clear what happens after a disclosure.
- When disclosure is required: normally only where there is a reporting line, an assessment role, or authority over pay, promotion, procurement or recruitment.
- To whom the disclosure is made, and that it is recorded in one place with restricted access.
- Which decisions the parties withdraw from, and who takes those decisions instead.
- What the employer will and will not do with the information, and how long it keeps it.
- That disclosure in good faith never in itself leads to a sanction, a transfer against the employee’s wishes, or non-renewal of a fixed-term contract.
A code of conduct is not a formality. If a conflict later ends up before the subdistrict court (kantonrechter), the written rule is the first thing the court reads, and an employer that sanctions conduct it never described will struggle to explain why the employee should have known better. Bear in mind that a works council may have a say in the rule itself; that point is dealt with below.
Conflicts of interest and decisions about pay, promotion and procurement
A conflict of interest is the concrete risk that Dutch employers are entitled to manage. It exists where one partner is in a position to influence a decision that benefits the other: a performance review, a bonus, a promotion, the allocation of a project, the award of a supply contract, or the decision to renew a fixed-term contract. The conflict arises from the position, not from anyone’s intentions, which is why good faith is no answer to it.
The standard remedy is to take the decision away from the person concerned and to record who took it instead. In practice that means the assessment moves one level up, procurement decisions require a second signature, and the recruitment file notes that the interested party played no part. Where an employee holds a formal position within the company, the same logic already follows from company law: a director with a direct or indirect personal interest that conflicts with the interest of the company may not take part in the deliberation and decision-making on that subject, under article 2:239 paragraph 6 BW for a private limited company (besloten vennootschap) and article 2:129 paragraph 6 BW for a public limited company.
Keep the written record neutral and short. What belongs on file is the fact that a conflict was reported, which decisions were reallocated and to whom, and the date. Details about the relationship itself do not belong in a personnel file at all; the next section explains why.
Unwanted conduct: harassment, discrimination and the employer’s duty of care
An employer must pursue a policy aimed at preventing psychosocial workload at work, and where that is not possible at limiting it. That obligation is laid down in article 3 paragraph 2 of the Working Conditions Act (Arbeidsomstandighedenwet). The Act defines psychosocial workload as the factors in the working situation that cause stress, and it names them: direct and indirect discrimination, sexual harassment, aggression and violence, bullying, and work pressure.
Two duties follow. The risks must be identified in the risk inventory and evaluation that article 5 of the Working Conditions Act requires, together with a plan of action, and the employer must be able to show what it actually did. Alongside this runs the employer’s duty of care for a safe working environment under article 7:658 BW, which is also the basis on which an employee can claim damages if the employer knew about persistent unwanted conduct and failed to intervene.
Where advances continue after they have been declined, the conduct moves from awkward to unlawful. Sexual harassment is treated as direct discrimination on grounds of sex under article 7:646 BW, and harassment on grounds such as race, religion, belief, sexual orientation, nationality or disability falls under the equal treatment legislation, including the Equal Treatment Act (Algemene wet gelijke behandeling). An employee can put the matter to the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights (College voor de Rechten van de Mens) for a non-binding opinion, or take it straight to the subdistrict court. Detrimental treatment of someone who declined advances or reported them is itself a breach of these rules, and our page on harassment at work sets out how a complaint is handled.
An employer that receives a report has to act on it. The usual structure is a complaints procedure and a confidential counsellor (vertrouwenspersoon) who sits outside the reporting line, followed where necessary by a factual investigation with hearing of both sides. Interim measures such as separating the two people or granting leave on full pay are permissible where they are neutral and temporary; presenting one party as guilty before the investigation is complete is not. Employers with at least fifty employees must in any event have an internal reporting procedure under the Whistleblower Protection Act (Wet bescherming klokkenluiders), and a report made through it is protected against reprisals.
Privacy: what an employer may investigate, and what it may not
Every step an employer takes to establish or document a relationship is processing of personal data and needs a lawful basis under article 6 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR, in Dutch the AVG). In the employment context consent is rarely a valid basis, because the dependence between employer and employee means it is seldom freely given. That leaves the legitimate interest of the employer, which only holds if the purpose is concrete, the means are the least intrusive available, and the employee’s interests do not outweigh it.
Data about a relationship can also touch article 9 of the GDPR, which prohibits the processing of special categories of personal data, including data concerning a person’s sex life or sexual orientation, save in narrowly defined situations. That is a strong reason to record the reallocation of decisions rather than the relationship itself. Data minimisation under article 5 of the GDPR points the same way: a single line in a conflict register does the job that a file of screenshots does not.
Reading an employee’s messages is the point at which employers most often go wrong. The fact that a device or an account belongs to the company does not remove the employee’s right to privacy: the European Court of Human Rights has confirmed under article 8 of the Convention that correspondence at work enjoys protection and that any monitoring must be announced in advance, limited in scope and justified by a specific reason. Systematically searching a mailbox, opening private chats or tracing badge data to reconstruct who spent time together will in almost every case be disproportionate, and evidence obtained that way weakens rather than strengthens an employer’s position.
The works council has a formal role here. Under article 27 of the Works Councils Act (Wet op de ondernemingsraden) the council’s consent is required for, among other things, arrangements on working conditions, arrangements for the processing of employees’ personal data, and any facility aimed at observing or monitoring the presence, conduct or performance of employees. A relationship or monitoring policy adopted without that consent can be invalidated, so the council should be involved before the rule is published rather than after the first incident.
When the relationship ends: dismissal routes and settlement
A break-up is not in itself a ground for dismissal. Dutch law works with a closed list of grounds in article 7:669 paragraph 3 BW, and the employer must show that one of them is fully met and that redeployment within a reasonable period is not possible. In practice three grounds are relevant after a relationship at work has ended.
- Ground e, culpable acts or omissions by the employee, for example ignoring a lawful instruction to withdraw from decisions, or misusing company systems to follow a former partner.
- Ground g, a disturbed working relationship of such a nature that continuation cannot reasonably be required, which is the ground employers most often invoke and courts most often test strictly.
- Ground h, other circumstances that make continuation unreasonable, and ground i, a combination of grounds that are each incomplete, in which case the court may award additional compensation.
The route depends on the ground. Dismissal on grounds e, g, h and i runs through the subdistrict court, which is asked to dissolve the employment contract under article 7:671b BW; only dismissal for business-economic reasons or long-term incapacity goes to the Employee Insurance Agency (UWV). Summary dismissal for an urgent cause under articles 7:677 and 7:678 BW is reserved for serious cases such as assault or a grave breach of confidentiality, must be given without delay, and is regularly overturned where the employer took weeks to act; our article on immediate dismissal explains the conditions in detail.
Many of these files are settled rather than litigated. A settlement agreement (vaststellingsovereenkomst) records the termination date, the notice period, the financial settlement, confidentiality and a neutral reference, and it should confirm that the employee is not to blame so that entitlement to unemployment benefit is preserved. The employee has a statutory reflection period of fourteen days to cancel the agreement in writing. Statutory transition payment (transitievergoeding) accrues from the first day of employment and is calculated under article 7:673 BW; the background is set out in our piece on the transition payment.
Where the end of a relationship turns into persistent following, unwanted contact or unannounced visits at work, the employer may deny access to its premises and the person affected can seek an injunction from the civil court, including a no-contact and no-approach order with a penalty for breach. Stalking is a criminal offence under article 285b of the Criminal Code (Wetboek van Strafrecht) and is prosecuted only on complaint by the victim. Since 1 July 2024 the Sexual Offences Act (Wet seksuele misdrijven) has widened criminal liability for sexual offences, so a report to the police is a realistic step and not a last resort.
When the relationship reaches beyond the employment contract
Sometimes the two people involved are not only colleagues. They may be shareholders in the same company, they may run a business that has been in one family for generations, or they may live in accommodation that the employer provides. Each of those adds a separate body of law to the employment question, and each is best arranged before it is needed rather than during a break-up.
Where both partners hold shares, the articles of association and the shareholders’ agreement decide what happens on a split: vesting, good leaver and bad leaver provisions, a valuation mechanism and a share transfer clause. Without them the company can be locked into a deadlock that only the Enterprise Chamber (Ondernemingskamer) or a dispute procedure under the rules on compulsory transfer of shares can break, which is slow and public. In a family business the same issue appears as succession: who takes over, on what terms, and how relatives who work in the business are paid and appraised on objective criteria.
If the couple marry or enter into a registered partnership, the matrimonial property regime determines what belongs to whom. For marriages entered into on or after 1 January 2018 the statutory regime is a limited community of property: assets each spouse already owned before the marriage, and gifts and inheritances, stay outside the community, while what is built up during the marriage falls inside it. Prenuptial or partnership conditions can depart from this, and shares in a company are the classic reason to draw them up; the consequences are set out in our article on property within and after marriage.
Housing supplied by the employer needs its own paragraph in writing. Record whether the occupancy is part of the employment or a separate lease, who the tenant is, what happens if one of the two leaves, and what notice applies. For rentals, check the lease before a partner moves in, because many agreements require the landlord to consent to an additional occupant, and a service tenancy tied to the job ends differently from an ordinary residential lease.
What to do now
For employers the sequence is short. Write a proportionate relationship and conflict-of-interest clause, put it to the works council where its consent is needed, communicate it to everyone rather than to the couple, and record decisions instead of details. Keep the confidential counsellor and the complaints procedure genuinely accessible, and never let an interim measure double as a sanction.
For employees the sequence is equally short. Report a conflict of interest in writing before someone else does, ask for the reallocation of decisions to be confirmed on paper, decline any instruction that reaches into your private life and say why, and keep a dated, factual note of what happens if conduct becomes unwelcome. Seek advice before you sign anything that ends the employment.
Law & More advises employers, works councils and employees on relationships in the workplace: drafting codes of conduct and monitoring policies, conducting or reviewing internal investigations, handling complaints about undesirable conduct, and dealing with the employment and corporate consequences when a relationship ends. Our employment lawyers work in Dutch, English and other languages and act for both sides of the employment relationship. If you would like to discuss a situation in confidence, please contact Law & More.
