The right to disconnect in the Netherlands: what the law requires

There is no statutory right to disconnect in the Netherlands. The initiative bill on the subject, which would have obliged employers to discuss availability outside working hours with their staff, has not been adopted, and no Dutch statute gives an employee an enforceable right to be unreachable. What does apply is the Arbeidstijdenwet (Working Hours Act), which sets binding rest periods and regulates standby duty, the Arbeidsomstandighedenwet (Working Conditions Act), which obliges employers to prevent psychosocial workload, the duty of good employer conduct in article 7:611 of the Burgerlijk Wetboek, and whatever a collective agreement or works council arrangement adds to that.

Why the right to disconnect is not Dutch law

The phrase droit a la deconnexion comes from French labour law, where employers above a certain size must negotiate arrangements on disconnection. Belgium has introduced a comparable obligation. The Netherlands has not. An initiative bill was submitted in 2020 that would have amended the Working Conditions Act to require the employer to discuss availability outside working hours with the trade unions, the works council, a staff representation or, failing those, the employees themselves, and to develop policy where that availability turns out to be experienced as burdensome. Even that bill would not have created a right to be unreachable; it would have created a duty to talk about it. It never reached a vote and has not become law.

At European level the picture is similar. The European Parliament adopted a resolution in 2021 calling on the Commission to propose a directive on the right to disconnect, and the European social partners discussed the subject in the context of telework. No directive has been adopted. Employers operating in the Netherlands should therefore stop looking for a right to disconnect and start looking at the rules that do bind them, because those rules are considerably more concrete than the label suggests.

That matters for advice as well as for policy. An employee who tells a manager that Dutch law gives them a right to switch off is on weak ground. An employee who points out that answering messages in the evening eats into the daily rest period required by the Working Hours Act, or that the employer has no policy on psychosocial workload as the Working Conditions Act requires, is on much stronger ground. The practical protection exists; it simply sits under different headings. Our overview of employment law in the Netherlands sets out the wider framework these rules belong to.

What the Working Hours Act actually requires

The Arbeidstijdenwet is public law. It binds the employer regardless of what the employment contract says, it is enforced by the Nederlandse Arbeidsinspectie (Netherlands Labour Authority), and it cannot be contracted away to the employee disadvantage. Its core is not a limit on how hard people may work but a guarantee of rest.

An employee is entitled to an uninterrupted daily rest period of at least eleven hours in each period of twenty-four hours, which may be shortened to eight hours once in every period of seven times twenty-four hours where the nature of the work requires it. The weekly rest period is at least thirty-six consecutive hours in every period of seven times twenty-four hours, or at least seventy-two consecutive hours in every period of fourteen times twenty-four hours, which may be split into blocks of at least thirty-two hours. The Act also caps the length of a shift, the hours in a week, and the average over longer reference periods.

The consequence for after-hours contact follows directly. Time spent reading and answering work messages is working time. If it falls inside the rest period, the rest period has been interrupted, and the eleven or thirty-six hours must in principle start again. An employer who routinely expects a reply in the evening is not merely being inconsiderate; it is organising the work in a way the Act does not permit, and the Labour Authority can require it to stop.

Standby duty is a regulated category, not an informal expectation

Dutch working time law already has a name for a period in which an employee is not working but must remain reachable and able to start work: consignatie, standby duty. It is regulated. Standby duty may not be imposed in the hours immediately before and after a night shift, the Act limits how many periods of standby may be imposed and requires periods that are free of it, and a call-out during standby counts as working time.

The practical significance is large and widely missed. An employer who expects staff to monitor a channel in the evening has, in substance, put them on standby duty. Doing that without acknowledging it means the statutory limits are not applied, the time is not registered, and it is not paid. Employers who genuinely need out-of-hours cover should organise it as standby duty, with a roster, compensation and the statutory rest built in, rather than relying on an informal expectation that everyone keeps an eye on their phone.

The exception for high earners

One exception deserves to be named because it is regularly misstated in both directions. The Working Hours Decree provides that most of the Working Hours Act does not apply to employees who earn more than three times the statutory minimum wage, with the rules on night work as the main exception. That does not put senior staff outside the law: the duty of care under the Working Conditions Act and the standard of good employer conduct apply to them in full, and the compatibility of the exclusion with the European Working Time Directive is contested. It does mean that an argument based purely on the eleven-hour rest period may not be available for the best-paid part of the workforce.

The rules that do the work

The duty to prevent psychosocial workload

The Arbeidsomstandighedenwet obliges every employer to conduct a policy aimed at the best possible working conditions, and it names psychosociale arbeidsbelasting (psychosocial workload) as one of the risks that policy must address. Work pressure and work-related stress fall squarely within that definition. The obligation is not a general aspiration; it has a fixed shape.

It starts with the risk inventory and evaluation, the risico-inventarisatie en -evaluatie or RI and E, which every employer must have in writing and keep current. If the organisation works in a way that produces after-hours contact, the RI and E has to identify that as a risk, assess it, and be accompanied by a plan of action setting out the measures, the person responsible and the timeline. An RI and E that says nothing about availability in an organisation where messages arrive at all hours is incomplete, and the Labour Authority treats an incomplete or absent RI and E as an enforceable failure in itself.

Enforcement runs through the Nederlandse Arbeidsinspectie, which can issue a requirement to comply, impose a stop on the work, and impose administrative fines. It cannot enforce a right to disconnect, because none exists, but it can and does enforce the obligation to have a policy on psychosocial workload and to act on it. In practice the trigger is usually a complaint from the works council, a trade union or a group of employees rather than a routine inspection.

The Working Conditions Act also requires the employer to inform and instruct employees about the risks and about the measures taken. That is where a written availability policy earns its place: not as a document that creates rights, but as the discharge of a statutory duty to tell people what is expected of them and what is not.

Good employer conduct and what the contract can require

Article 7:611 of the Burgerlijk Wetboek requires the employer and the employee to behave as a good employer and a good employee. It is the open standard Dutch courts use to assess whether an instruction, a practice or a change in terms is acceptable, and it is the provision under which an expectation of constant availability is most often attacked.

The employer instruction right in article 7:660 BW allows the employer to give instructions about the performance of the work and about order in the undertaking, but only within the limits of the contract, the applicable rules and reasonableness. An instruction to remain reachable outside agreed working hours, without compensation and without a demonstrable need, does not survive that test. Conversely, an employee who has agreed to standby duty and is properly compensated for it cannot invoke good employer conduct to escape it.

Two statutory rules give employees a firmer footing than the open standard. Article 7:628b BW, introduced when the European directive on transparent and predictable working conditions was implemented, provides that where the work pattern is wholly or largely unpredictable, the employer must inform the employee of the reference days and hours within which they may be required to work, and that the employee may refuse work outside those reference days and hours and outside the minimum call-up period. Article 7:628a BW requires an on-call employee to be called up at least four days in advance and preserves the entitlement to pay where a call is cancelled late.

Alongside those sits the Wet flexibel werken, under which an employee who has been in service for at least twenty-six weeks may request a change to their working hours, working times or place of work, and, since the same implementation, a more predictable and secure work pattern. The employer must consider the request and give reasons for a refusal. These are the instruments through which a real dispute about availability is usually resolved.

Collective agreements and the works council

Because there is no statute, the most concrete rules on availability are usually found one level down. A collective labour agreement can regulate standby duty, compensation for it, response times and periods of guaranteed unavailability, and where it does, those provisions bind the employer directly and cannot be undercut by the individual contract. Whether a collective agreement applies to your organisation, and what it says about standby and rest, is the first question to ask; our guide to the role of the collective labour agreement explains how that is established.

The works council is the second route, and its powers here are stronger than employers often assume. Under article 27 of the Wet op de ondernemingsraden the works council has a right of consent for, among other things, a regulation on working hours and rest times and a regulation on working conditions and absenteeism policy. An availability or disconnection policy falls within that description, and a policy introduced without consent can be declared void by the works council. The council also has a right of initiative under article 23 of the same Act, which allows it to put a proposal on availability to the employer and to require a reasoned response.

For employers this is an argument for involving the works council early rather than presenting a finished document. A policy that has been through the council carries weight in a later dispute, because it shows that the employer identified the risk, consulted, and set a standard. A policy imposed without consent is worth less than no policy at all.

What a workable availability policy contains

A policy that works does four things. It states the working hours, including the core hours for staff on flexible schedules, so that there is a defined boundary to argue from. It states plainly that there is no expectation to read or answer work communications outside those hours and that not doing so has no consequences for assessment or promotion. It defines, narrowly, what counts as an emergency and through which channel contact is then made, so that the exception cannot swallow the rule. And it records what management will do differently, because a policy that regulates only the behaviour of employees changes nothing.

Two clauses are worth adapting rather than drafting from scratch.

Availability outside working hours. Employees are not expected to monitor, read or answer work-related communications, including email, instant messages and telephone calls, outside their agreed working hours. Postponing a response until the next working day has no consequences for assessment, remuneration or promotion.

Contact in an emergency. Where an emergency requires immediate action, contact is made by telephone by the direct manager. An emergency means a situation that would cause serious damage to persons, to the continuity of the business or to the security of data if it were not addressed before the next working day. A request that can wait until the next working day is not an emergency.

Where out-of-hours cover is genuinely necessary, do not solve it with a policy sentence. Organise it as standby duty, with a published roster, a defined response time, compensation, and the rest periods the Working Hours Act requires around it. Where staff work from home, the same boundaries apply and the employer duty of care extends to the home workstation; the practical obligations are set out in our guide to the legal rules for working from home.

What it costs to get this wrong

The financial exposure in the Netherlands does not come from a fine. It comes from sickness. Under article 7:629 of the Burgerlijk Wetboek an employer must continue to pay at least seventy per cent of the wage of an employee who is unable to work through illness, for up to one hundred and four weeks, with a floor at the statutory minimum wage during the first year and frequently a higher percentage under the collective agreement. Burnout is a common and long-running form of incapacity, and the employer carries the cost throughout.

On top of that comes the reintegration obligation under the Wet verbetering poortwachter. Employer and employee must follow a prescribed sequence of assessments, plans and evaluations, and if the UWV concludes at the end of the second year that the employer made insufficient reintegration efforts, it can extend the obligation to continue paying wages for up to a further fifty-two weeks. Dismissal is not available while that runs, because the prohibition on termination during illness applies.

There is a litigation dimension as well. Where an employee resigns or is dismissed after a period of untenable workload, the way the employer handled availability becomes evidence. A court that finds seriously culpable conduct on the part of the employer can award a fair compensation on top of the statutory transition payment, and the absence of any policy on psychosocial workload is exactly the kind of fact that supports such a finding. Employer liability for damage suffered in the performance of the work is a separate and harder route for the employee, but it exists, and the standard of care is high.

None of this requires a right to disconnect. Every element of it follows from obligations that are already in force, which is why the absence of a specific statute is a poor reason for inaction.

Questions that come up in practice

May an employer contact staff outside working hours in an emergency

Yes. Nothing in Dutch law prohibits contact outside working hours as such; what the law regulates is the systematic expectation of availability and the interruption of statutory rest. An incident that would cause serious harm before the next working day justifies a call. The risk lies in the definition. Where the emergency route is used for matters that could have waited, the practice becomes structural availability, the rest periods of the Working Hours Act are engaged, and the employer is on the wrong side of the duty to prevent psychosocial workload. Define the exception narrowly in writing, use a channel that is reserved for it, and log its use so that overuse becomes visible.

Does the same apply to senior staff

Largely, but not identically. Employees earning more than three times the statutory minimum wage fall outside most of the Working Hours Act under the Working Hours Decree, so the daily and weekly rest periods cannot be invoked in the same way. A clause providing that overtime is compensated by the salary is common at that level and is generally valid. What does not change is the duty of care under the Working Conditions Act, which applies to every employee, and the standard of good employer conduct. An employer that runs a director into a burnout has the same wage continuation obligation and the same exposure to a claim as it would for anyone else.

What can an employee do who is expected to be permanently available

Begin by recording the pattern: dates, times, sender and subject of out-of-hours contact, and any response time that was expected. A pattern is far more persuasive than an impression. Raise it with the manager and, if that does not resolve it, with HR, in writing, referring to the working hours agreed in the contract and to the employer duty to prevent psychosocial workload. Where the issue affects more than one person, the works council is the effective route, because it can require a policy and has a right of consent over one.

If none of that works, the individual instruments come into play: a request under the Wet flexibel werken, reliance on the reference days and hours where the work pattern is unpredictable, or, where the situation has become untenable, a claim before the subdistrict court. Resigning first weakens the position considerably, both for benefits and for any later claim, so take advice before taking that step.

Does a company policy create rights the law does not give

It can. A written availability policy that is applied consistently becomes part of the terms on which the employee works, and an employer that departs from its own policy without good reason will find that held against it. That is an argument for drafting the policy carefully rather than for not having one; a clear, realistic policy is easier to live with than an aspirational one that is contradicted in practice every week.

Dutch staff of foreign employers

For multinationals the recurring problem is a head office in another time zone whose norms conflict with Dutch rules. The starting point is that an expectation set elsewhere does not displace Dutch law. The Working Hours Act and the Working Conditions Act are public law rules that apply to work performed in the Netherlands whoever the employer is. Where the employment contract is governed by foreign law, the European rules on applicable law still give the employee the protection of the mandatory provisions of the country where the work is habitually carried out, so the Dutch floor remains.

The practical measures are unglamorous and effective. Give Dutch staff a local addendum to the global policy that states their working hours and their position on availability by reference to Dutch law. Train managers abroad who supervise Dutch employees, because the instruction that causes the problem is usually given in good faith by someone who does not know the rules. Use scheduled sending so that messages arrive in the recipient working day, rotate the timing of recurring calls across time zones instead of fixing them to head office hours, and record meetings for those who cannot attend. Where genuine cover across time zones is needed, roster it as standby duty and pay for it.

Where employment, contracting and jurisdiction interact across borders, the questions rarely stay within employment law; our article on how to avoid jurisdiction and enforcement issues deals with the wider international dimension.

Law and More advises employers on availability and standby arrangements, on works council consent for such policies, and on the employment and liability consequences when workload leads to long-term absence. We also act for employees and works councils confronted with an expectation of permanent availability. If you are drafting a policy, negotiating with a works council, or facing a dispute about after-hours work, our employment lawyers will tell you where the line runs under current Dutch law rather than under a bill that never passed.