Freelancing (ZZP) After the DBA Crackdown: The 2026 Guide

The tax office is enforcing the rules on sham self-employment again, and 2026 is the first year fines are on the table. Here's what actually gets freelancers reclassified, how to stay on the right side of it, and what the €38-an-hour law will change.

For most of a decade, freelancing in the Netherlands ran on a polite fiction: the law against disguised employment existed, but nobody enforced it. That era is over. Since January 2025 the Belastingdienst (tax office) has been checking working relationships again, and since January 2026 it can fine the worst cases. If you're a zzp'er — zelfstandige zonder personeel, a self-employed person without staff — or thinking of becoming one, this is the year to understand how the rules actually work rather than how everyone assumed they worked. The honest news up front: if you genuinely run a business, with multiple clients and control over your own work, very little of this should keep you up at night. The people with a real problem are the ones working like employees with an invoice template.

What changed, and the timeline from here

The Wet DBA (Deregulering Beoordeling Arbeidsrelaties) has governed the employee-versus-freelancer question since 2016, but a long enforcement moratorium meant the Belastingdienst mostly looked the other way. That moratorium ended on 1 January 2025. From that date, the tax office can reclassify a working relationship and claw back unpaid payroll taxes — retroactively, but only back to January 2025, not into the moratorium years.

2025 was billed as a "soft landing": corrections, yes, fines, mostly no. In December 2025 the cabinet extended part of that softness into 2026, so the current picture looks like this:

One structural point that shapes everything else: the financial risk of reclassification sits mostly with your client, because they're the ones who owe the back payroll taxes. That's why clients — not freelancers — have been the nervous party since 2025, pushing shorter engagements, ending long-running contracts, or moving people onto payroll. Understanding their fear helps you negotiate with it.

The test: what makes you an employee in disguise

The legal term is schijnzelfstandigheid — sham self-employment — and the framework comes from the Hoge Raad (Supreme Court) in its Deliveroo ruling. There's no single checkbox. A tax inspector or judge weighs the whole pattern of how you actually work, with a few factors carrying most of the weight:

Authority (gezag). Does the client direct how, when and where you work, the way a boss would? Fixed hours set by them, a manager assigning your tasks, mandatory attendance at their stand-ups — all of it points toward employment.

Organisational embedding. Is your work structurally part of the client's normal operations, indistinguishable from what their employees do? A developer slotted into a client's product team for a year looks embedded. A specialist brought in to deliver a defined migration project looks like an outside service.

Personal labour. Are you required to show up personally, or could you send a qualified substitute? Employees can't delegate their job. Entrepreneurs, at least in principle, can.

Payment and risk. Do you set your own prices, invoice for results, and carry the downside if a job goes wrong? Or does money arrive monthly like a salary, with no financial exposure on your side?

None of these decides the question alone. But if you're working full-time hours for one client, under their day-to-day direction, on their laptop, for a year straight — that pattern reads as employment regardless of what the contract is titled. Paperwork doesn't override reality; the Belastingdienst looks at the working relationship as it actually exists.

Staying DBA-proof in practice

The defensible position isn't a clever contract — it's a working life that visibly looks like a business. Concretely:

A note on model agreements (modelovereenkomsten), since older advice still floats around: these were never a safe harbour if your day-to-day practice looked like employment, and they're being phased out as an instrument. Don't build your defence on one.

The €38-an-hour line — passed, not yet in force

A new law creates a presumption of employment below a rate threshold: if you charge under €38 an hour, and the relationship is challenged, your client has to prove you're genuinely self-employed rather than the challenger having to prove you're not. It passed both chambers of parliament in 2026 and is expected to take effect in January 2027 — which means that as of today it is not yet law in force, whatever some client procurement departments have started claiming.

Treat it as a floor with a signal attached. Above €38 nothing is presumed either way; below it, from 2027, every engagement starts on the back foot. If your current rate sits under that line, the rate conversation below is overdue for more reasons than one.

The rate math nobody does until year two

Work backward from what you need to keep, not forward from what feels polite to ask. On the cost side of being your own employer:

Then divide by billable hours, not calendar hours. Most freelancers manage 1,000 to 1,300 billable hours a year once admin, acquisition, holidays and sick days come out of roughly 1,800 working hours. Run that arithmetic and your hourly rate lands well above what an equivalent employee earns per hour — which is correct, not greedy. You're covering benefits an employer would otherwise fund on top of a salary. Clients who understand the Dutch market know this; the ones who compare your rate to a payroll hourly wage are telling you something about how they'd treat you as a supplier.

KOR and the EU-KOR: small-turnover VAT relief

The KOR (kleineondernemersregeling) is a VAT exemption for anyone with annual turnover under €20,000 excluding VAT — and since 2025 you must also have stayed under that threshold in the previous calendar year to opt in. Inside the scheme you charge no VAT and file no VAT returns, which is genuinely pleasant admin. The cost: you can't reclaim VAT on your own business purchases, which stings if you're buying equipment or software with real VAT attached.

Since 2025 there's also the EU-KOR, extending the exemption to sales in other EU countries, capped at €100,000 in combined EU turnover. And leaving the scheme is less of a trap than it was: opting out used to lock you out for three years; now it's the rest of the current calendar year plus the next one.

Whether it's worth it depends on your clients. If they're VAT-registered businesses, they reclaim your VAT anyway, so KOR saves them nothing and costs you your input-VAT deduction. It shines for small income streams sold to consumers with low costs on your side.

AOV today, BAZ someday

Disability insurance for the self-employed is still voluntary as of 2026. The long-promised mandatory scheme — the Wet BAZ — went to parliament earlier in 2026 but isn't expected to take effect before 2030, and it's still in committee. The proposed shape so far: a premium around 5.4% of profit, capped near €171 a month, with a two-year waiting period before it pays out.

Until then you have two realistic options. Private AOV, priced on your age, profession and chosen waiting period. Or a broodfonds ("bread fund"): a small group of self-employed people who each pay into a shared pool monthly and support whoever gets sick, run on mutual trust rather than an insurance contract. It's usually cheaper than commercial AOV if you're younger and healthy — but it isn't regulated insurance, and what you can draw is capped by what the group has saved. Plenty of freelancers combine a broodfonds for the first year or two of illness with a cheaper AOV that kicks in later.

Freelancing on a non-EU passport

Your passport decides how hard this is. Most non-EU nationals need the zelfstandigenregeling, the self-employed residence permit, assessed on a points system across three areas — personal experience, business plan, and added value to the Dutch economy — each scored out of 100 by the RVO (Netherlands Enterprise Agency). You generally need at least 30 points in each area, or 45-plus in the first two if your added-value score comes in lower. It's a genuine hurdle: the business plan is read critically, and thin plans fail.

Americans get a famous shortcut. The Dutch-American Friendship Treaty (DAFT) requires only KvK registration and a €4,500 minimum deposit in a Dutch business account — no points, no business-plan scoring. The catch is that you're then restricted to working through that self-employed business; employee-style side jobs aren't covered. You'll need a Dutch business account to park the deposit in, which is its own small adventure — see opening a Dutch bank account for how that works without much history here.

And one trap for people already in the country: a kennismigrant (highly skilled migrant) permit is tied to your sponsoring employer. You generally can't freelance on the side, even part-time, without separate authorisation or your own permit. "It's just a small project" is not a recognised legal category.

Getting registered

The mechanics of starting are the easy part: a KvK (Chamber of Commerce) appointment, ID, a one-time fee of around €85 in 2026, and a btw-id (VAT ID) that follows automatically within days. We've covered the registration process, and what to sort before it, in a separate Q&A on the site, so it's not repeated here. If you've only just arrived, the groundwork underneath all of this — BSN, address, bank account — comes first: the first 30 days checklist covers that sequence, starting with registering at the gemeente for your BSN.

FAQ

If I'm reclassified, who pays — me or my client? Mostly your client: they owe the back payroll taxes, which can run from January 2025 onward, plus — since 2026 — fines if the Belastingdienst finds intent or gross negligence. Your own tax position can be revisited too, but the reason clients are the jumpy ones is that the big bill lands on their side.

Does having one big client automatically make me a sham freelancer? No. No single factor decides it — the inspector weighs the whole pattern. But one client plus their direction plus their tools plus full-time hours is exactly the pattern that gets reclassified, so if that's you, change at least some of those variables.

Is €38 an hour now the legal minimum freelance rate? No. It's a presumption threshold in a law expected to take effect in January 2027 — below it, your client would have to prove you're genuinely self-employed if challenged. It's not in force yet and it's not a minimum wage; it's a line below which engagements become legally uncomfortable for clients.

Should I opt into the KOR in my first year? Only if your turnover will stay under €20,000, your business costs are low, and your clients are mostly consumers. If you invoice VAT-registered businesses, the KOR usually just costs you your own VAT deduction while saving your clients nothing.