Working from home allowance in the Netherlands

What is the working from home allowance in the Netherlands?

Your employer may pay you €2.45 untaxed for each day you work at home.

That is the amount for 2026. The table further down shows the current figure and the year it applies to. The allowance covers the extra costs a day at home brings.¹ It is your employer's to pay. You do not claim it on your own tax return.

This page keeps three situations apart. You are an employee whose employer pays the allowance. You are an employee wondering what you may deduct yourself. Or your home-working days fall on the other side of a border.

Two things fall outside this page. The workspace test for the self-employed is a different test on a different page. Read Deductible business costs for that one. The rules for travelling to a fixed workplace belong to Travel costs and your tax return.

Selma works five days a week for an employer in Utrecht. Two of those days she works from her flat in Amersfoort. On the other three she travels 20 km each way to the office. We follow her through all three situations, starting with the essentials below. Selma moved to the Netherlands three years ago and her mother still lives in Kleve.

Which rules decide whether you get the allowance on a day?

Two rules decide it: where you worked that day and whether you also travelled.

So the daily amount is not automatic. The day itself is what counts.

The first rule is generous. Your employer may apply the exemption even when you work only part of the day at home. A morning at your kitchen table and an afternoon at the office still make it a home day.

The second rule catches most people out. Your employer may not apply both exemptions on the same working day. The home-working exemption and the travel allowance for a fixed workplace exclude each other. The block reaches further than a train ticket. Do you have a mobility card or app, a public transport subscription, a company car or a company bicycle? If you actually use it for the trip to your fixed workplace, your employer loses the home-working exemption that day.

A fixed workplace is not a vague idea. Work at the same place on more than 40 days in a calendar year and that place counts as your fixed workplace.¹

There is one exception to the same-day rule.

What else can your employer give you untaxed for working at home?

Your employer can also cover your chair, your screen glasses and your work equipment.

The daily amount is the smallest part of what the rules allow.

Compulsory health-and-safety provisions for a workspace at home stay untaxed under a gerichte vrijstelling, a targeted exemption. An ergonomically sound office chair or screen glasses can come to you untaxed. So can the tools you genuinely need for the job: a laptop, a smartphone and an internet or telephony subscription.²

The Belastingdienst values other provisions in your home workspace at nil. That only holds where the room also counts as a workplace in the legal sense, a werkplek. Three conditions must all hold. The room is a self-contained part of your home, with its own entrance or access and its own sanitary facilities. There is a real rental agreement at arm's length under which only your employer has the use of the room. And you actually work in that room.¹

There is a budget behind all of this. Your employer may spend a percentage of the wage bill untaxed on staff. That percentage has a name: the vrije ruimte, the free space in the work-related costs scheme (WKR). Above it your employer pays a final levy. That is why an employer sometimes says there is no room this year.²

The daily amount rests on research by the Nibud, the Dutch budget institute. It rises every year with the tabelcorrectiefactor, the general inflation adjustment in tax law. The figures behind all these rules move, so the table sets out where they stand now. Does your employer pay more than €2.45 a day? Then the extra counts as taxable pay, unless your employer puts it in the free space. The free space figures come from the WKR page consulted on 20 August 2026.

Can you deduct working from home costs on your tax return?

No, working from home costs are not on the Belastingdienst's deduction list.

The overview of deductions for private individuals lists four items. They are mortgage interest relief, the personal deduction, public transport commuting costs and annuity premiums.³ A desk, a chair, a second monitor or a higher energy bill do not appear on that list. That is why the allowance exists at all: your employer compensates the cost, the tax return does not. Selma's second monitor for her Amersfoort flat is not deductible either.

Are you self-employed? Then a different test applies to you. A zzp'er may deduct a workspace in the home only in narrow circumstances. It has to be a self-contained workspace. Read Deductible business costs for the full test, including the income condition. The employer test above is a payroll test. The self-employed test is an income-tax test.

Our advisors hear the same sentence every spring.

How does a fixed monthly working from home allowance work?

From 128 home days a year your employer may pay a fixed monthly amount.

That saves everyone a day-by-day count.

Where you work at home on at least 128 days in a calendar year, your employer may pay a fixed amount. The calculation is then based on a count of 214 home days. Your commute follows the same rule, with the same 128 and 214 days.¹

Work at home or travel to work on fewer than five days a week? Then both numbers drop in proportion to those days. That proportion applies separately to your home days and your commuting days. When more than two months pass without home-working or without the trip, the fixed calculation stops applying. The test runs per cause and per calendar year.¹

Take Selma's week from the start of this page. She works at home two days a week. Two-fifths of 128 days is 51.2, so her threshold becomes 51 days. She travels three days a week. Three-fifths of 128 days is 76.8, so that threshold becomes 77 days. Her fixed pattern, two home days and three office days a week, clears both thresholds. Her employer may therefore apply the fixed rule to both halves of her week. On the fixed count she gets two-fifths of 214 days, rounded to 86 home days. The arithmetic runs like this.

What if your working from home days are in another country?

Home-working days abroad can move both your tax country and your social-security country.

Selma's week stays inside the Netherlands. Not every week does.

Social security follows the country where you actually work. Work in more than one country and you stay insured in the Netherlands only if a substantial part happens here. At least 25% of your contractual working time or of your pay counts as substantial.¹

Since 1 July 2023 a European framework agreement covers regular cross-border teleworking for social security. It does not decide which country taxes your salary. You may telework up to 50% of your total working time from the country you live in. At least half of the work must physically happen in your employer's country. You and your employer file a joint application with the SVB, the Dutch social insurance bank.¹

A new protocol to the treaty with Germany sets a hard number. Do you live in one country and work in the other? You may then work at home up to 34 days per calendar year. Your salary stays taxable in the country of work. Above 34 days, your country of residence taxes the pay for every home day. The 34 days count per person, even with more than one employer. It applies once that protocol is in force. For this German rule, a home-working day is any day on which you work more than 30 minutes at home. Do your days run across a border? Then keep a calendar showing where you worked each day.¹

Belgium has its own arrangement. The Dutch and Belgian governments agreed practical guidance on home-working across that border, applying from 8 December 2023.¹ It clarifies when a home workplace creates a permanent establishment for the employer.

Two further rules decide the rest of your situation. Which country may tax your salary usually turns on the treaty's 183-day article. Read The 183-day rule for how that article works. An A1 certificate proves your social-security position. Read The A1 certificate for what that document does and how you apply for it.

Suppose Selma works one of her two home days at her mother's house in Kleve. Your employer's country of payroll decides whether the untaxed allowance applies to that day. Her payroll is Dutch, so Dutch payroll rules apply to the Kleve day. She agrees with her employer up front whether a day at her mother's house counts as a home day. Which country taxes her salary for that day follows from the 183-day article. She works far fewer than 183 days a year in Germany, for an employer in the Netherlands. The Netherlands therefore keeps taxing her whole salary. She still works four of her five days in the Netherlands, so she stays insured here. Is your employer based outside the Netherlands? Then ask us which payroll rules reach your home days.

What should you check on your own payslip?

Check whether your employer pays anything for your home days at all.

The rules above only help once you know which of them your employer applies.

No law obliges your employer to pay the allowance. A collective labour agreement or your employment contract can make it obligatory. Start there, because that is where the answer usually sits.

Working from home is not a legal right either. Under the Flexible Working Act you may send your employer a written request.⁴ Your employer needs a good reason to refuse it. Employers with under ten employees fall outside that Act.

How the Dutch tax system treats what you earn is on our overview of work and income. Want us to do it for you? See how we handle your Dutch tax return.

Take the payslip you have now. Look for a line covering your home days. Compare the number of home days it assumes with the number you actually work. If your week runs across a border, that is the point to ask an advisor rather than a payroll system. Selma checks her own payslip for the two allowances side by side. The questions below cover what people ask us most.