Hours criterion: 1,225 hours you can make plausible

What is the hours criterion?

You need to work at least 1,225 hours a year on your business.¹ That is the urencriterium, the hours test the Belastingdienst applies to check whether you are entitled to some of the entrepreneur deductions². It is judged per calendar year. It applies to all the work you do across every business you run¹.

This page covers the hours test itself: which hours count, which do not and how you make them plausible. It also sets out the exceptions, from the pregnancy provision to specific partnership rules. It does not decide whether the Belastingdienst treats you as an entrepreneur for income tax. That is a separate question. The Belastingdienst weighs eight factors there, none of them an hour threshold⁴. Our page about being an entrepreneur for income tax works that test through.

Take Amira. She is an illustrator who registered her business halfway through the year. She still works three days a week for an agency. She wants to know whether her hours reach 1,225 and how she would show it. We follow her through the page.

Which conditions do you have to meet?

Two: the 1,225 hours and more time on the business than elsewhere.¹ The threshold is only half the test, which is where the trouble usually starts. Dutch tax law calls that second condition the grotendeelscriterium. It applies to anyone with a job alongside the business¹.

There is one way out of that second condition. Were you not an entrepreneur in one of the five preceding years? Then only the first condition applies to you¹. The Belastingdienst then looks at the 1,225 hours alone.

The table below sets both conditions beside the situations that change them.

Which hours count towards the 1,225?

Every hour you spend on the business, not only the hours you invoice.¹ So the conditions are clear. The question moves to which hours you may include. The Belastingdienst names writing quotations, doing your bookkeeping and building your business website¹.

That is wider than most people record. Travel to a client counts. So does the evening you spend on a proposal that never becomes an assignment. So does the course you follow to keep your trade current.

One category falls outside it. Being available is not the same as working.

How do you make your hours plausible?

You make them plausible with a record kept as you go.¹ The rule is not the hard part, the evidence is. The Belastingdienst asks you to make the time you spent plausible¹. That is a lower bar than proof.

Nobody has to prove 1,225 hours to the minute. You do have to show a record that hangs together with the rest of your year. Your diary, your quotations, your timesheets and your invoices are the material the Belastingdienst names¹.

Where does it go wrong in practice? Almost never on the hours themselves. It goes wrong when you write the record afterwards in one sitting. It tends to read that way too. Round numbers, no travel, no admin and no unbilled work is the pattern that draws questions. A week-by-week record with the dull hours in it is the pattern that does not.

Amira has her agency days in one calendar and her own work scattered across notes. Pulling both into a single weekly record is the whole job. It is the difference between a claim and a case.

What if you started midway through the year?

The full 1,225 hours still applies, with no reduction for a part year.¹ Your records matter most in a deviating year. That includes the year you start your business or take a job on the side. The Belastingdienst uses a business started on 1 July as its own example¹.

That is the trap Amira is in. She has six months, not twelve. The threshold has not been reduced. Roughly 47 hours a week over those six months is what 1,225 hours means for her. Whether that is realistic is a question about her year, not about the rule.

Her job makes it harder still. Three days a week at an agency is other work, so the second condition would normally apply. It does not, because she was not an entrepreneur in one of the five preceding years¹. So this year only the 1,225 hours count for her.

Pregnancy is the one interruption the rule makes room for.

When do your hours not count at all?

In two partnership set-ups that involve someone close to you.¹ They apply to a maatschap or a vof, the two common Dutch partnership forms¹.

The first is the connected-persons rule. Do you work in a partnership with someone close to you? The rule covers a housemate, a direct blood relative and a relative by marriage. Their housemates count too¹. Your hours then fall away on two conditions¹. You do 70% or more supporting work. And the partnership would be unusual between people who are not connected¹. The Belastingdienst uses a vof between a dentist and a dental assistant as its example¹.

The second is the ondermaatschap. Here the partnership supplies services to a business that you draw no profit from¹. A connected person does draw profit from it, so your hours fall away again¹.

Neither rule judges your work. Both target a structure. Both are worth reviewing before you file rather than after.

What does meeting the criterion get you?

Most of the ondernemersaftrek, the deductions for entrepreneurs.² So what actually depends on those 1,225 hours? The zelfstandigenaftrek, the startersaftrek and the meewerkaftrek all sit behind it². So does the deduction for research and development work (WBSO)².

Two reliefs people expect to find on that list are not on it. The mkb-winstvrijstelling, the small-business profit exemption, applies because you are an entrepreneur and asks nothing about your hours³. The stakingsaftrek, the relief when you stop, has no hours condition either⁵.

There is also a lower threshold. Do you qualify for the startersaftrek bij arbeidsongeschiktheid, the starter deduction for entrepreneurs who are unfit for work? Then a reduced criterion of at least 800 hours applies to you instead¹. That deduction also asks that you do not meet the ordinary criterion⁶. The reduced route therefore runs from 800 hours up to 1,225 and it opens that one deduction only.

The amounts change every year, so our page about the self-employed deduction and the ondernemersaftrek explains them.

The table below shows which reliefs need the criterion and which do not.

What does this mean for your year?

Start recording now, because you cannot reconstruct a year at the deadline.¹ The deductions are the reward, the record is the work. That is the whole of it.

Three things are worth settling before you file. Work out whether the second condition applies to you at all, because a starter is often free of it. Put every business hour in one place, including travel, admin and the work nobody paid for. And read your own record back as a stranger would, because that is who will read it.

Amira ends her first half year with a weekly record instead of a memory. Whether her hours reach 1,225 is a question about her year. Whether she can make them plausible is a question about her administration. That second one she has answered. Our page about income tax for the self-employed sets out how the rest of her return fits together. Our page about which business costs you can deduct covers what else comes off her profit.

What we take off your hands at filing time is on our page about the self-employed tax return.