ZZP vs employment: what it means for your tax and security

ZZP vs employment: why the hourly rate is the wrong first question

The honest comparison is about certainty, not the rate you charge. Self-employed work (zzp) often pays more per hour. It also means giving up paid sick leave, unemployment cover and a pension your employer helps build. On top of that, the Wet DBA (the law on employment relationships) now limits when a zzp construction is even allowed.

This guide weighs three things: what you give up, whether the construction is legal in 2026 and how the tax breaks change the maths. The urencriterium hours test, the exact deduction amounts and the BV route each live on their own page.

Meet Lucas. He moved to the Netherlands three years ago. He is a marketing specialist at an Amsterdam scale-up, offered a contractor (zzp) construction instead of a payroll contract. We follow his choice through this guide. This guide does not cover the 30% ruling or residence permits. If either applies to you, check the effect of a switch before you decide. A switch can also affect a residence permit that is tied to your employment contract.

What do you give up when you leave employment?

You carry every risk yourself as a zzp'er. A payroll job comes with cover you rarely notice until you need it. Self-employment hands each of those safeguards back to you.

If you fall ill, an employer keeps paying you, up to 104 weeks. A zzp'er has no such cover and arranges disability insurance (AOV) alone. The government wants to make basic disability cover compulsory for the self-employed. That is not law yet.² If the employment ends, an employee can usually claim WW unemployment benefit. A zzp'er leans on their own buffer.

Lucas earns €55,000 on payroll today. His scale-up offers €70 an hour as a zzp'er. The higher rate has to cover his own sick pay, disability insurance, pension and the weeks he cannot bill. Only what is left after all of that is a fair comparison.

Is your zzp construction even legal in 2026?

It is legal only if you truly work as an entrepreneur, not a disguised employee. The enforcement pause ended on 1 January 2025, so the Belastingdienst applies the normal rules again.¹

Employment has three marks. The client can exercise employer authority. You owe the work personally. You are paid for it.¹

Those three alone do not settle it. The Belastingdienst weighs your whole situation. It looks at how far your work forms part of the client's organisation and whether you must do it yourself. It looks at how your pay is set, what commercial risk you carry and how far you act as an entrepreneur.¹

Authority is the sharpest question. Can the client decide how, when, where and with whom you work? How many hours or days a week? Can it give you the same instructions as its own staff? One yes already points hard at employment.¹ That gap between the contract and the practice is schijnzelfstandigheid.

Where the Belastingdienst establishes this, a correction obligation and a back-assessment (naheffing) on the payroll taxes follow at once.¹ Normally it cannot reach back past 1 January 2025, when enforcement resumed. Bad faith or an ignored instruction lifts that limit. Then the ordinary five-year term applies, reaching further back than 2025.¹ It levies no verzuimboete (default penalty) in 2026. Vergrijpboetes (intent-based penalties), which need intent or gross negligence, have been possible since 1 January 2026.¹

Model agreements approved before 6 September 2024 run through 31 December 2029. The Belastingdienst assesses no new ones.¹ Separately, a legal presumption of employment now applies below an hourly rate of €38. Under that rate your client has to prove there is no employment contract. We unpack the whole test on our page about false self-employment.

Working for a client outside the Netherlands? How you actually work still decides it. Whether Dutch payroll taxes follow depends on your client's position here. We check that for you in the call.

For Lucas this is the first real question. Daily direction from one team points hard at employment. The Belastingdienst then weighs all his facts together, not his rate alone. Whether your own work qualifies is exactly what we check in the call.

Do the tax breaks make up for it?

Partly, but less than they used to. The self-employed deductions are real. But they shrank for 2026 and no longer reach the highest earners in full.

The zelfstandigenaftrek is €1,200 for 2026, down from €2,470 in 2025.³ You need 1,225 hours in your business to claim it. On top of that, a 12.7% profit exemption (MKB-winstvrijstelling) lowers your taxable profit.³ Both only count against income tax at 37.56% at most.³ That is the maximum rate for deductions, not your tax rate. So a higher earner keeps less of the benefit than the headline suggests. Income tax itself runs from 35.75% in the first bracket to 49.50% at the top.³ The full amounts and who qualifies sit on our zelfstandigenaftrek guide. How you pay income tax as a zzp'er and which business costs you can deduct each have their own guide.

As a rough indication, a zzp'er often needs a net income around 20% to 30% higher than a salary. That gap covers sick pay, pension and buffers. That comparison is net against net. This is an indication, not a calculation. For Lucas, €70 an hour and €55,000 a year are both gross. He has to work both back to net before he compares them. After his own cover and the shrunken deductions, the gap narrows fast. Whether it still pays for him is a sum worth doing properly. That is where we come in. Lucas checks whether the construction is allowed before he signs anything.