Netherlands: Follow-up on the Impact of the Fall of the Government on Dutch Employment Law

As mentioned in the previous edition of this blog, the government fell on 3 June 2025. The government will remain in office in a caretaker capacity and can deal with current affairs until a new government is formed, insofar as the current legislative proposals have not been declared controversial. On 8 July, the House of Representatives voted on this matter. None of the legislative proposals relating to employment law was declared controversial. This means that all considerations for the bills can continue in normal fashion. The most important laws currently pending before the House of Representatives are as follows:

 

Act on Clarification of the Assessment of Employment Relationships and Legal Presumption

The bill aims to provide greater legal certainty between employees  and self-employed persons to combat false self-employment more effectively and improve enforcement. To this end, the bill introduces:

• a civil law presumption of an employment contract. If a worker earns less than €36 per hour (this amount is adjusted in accordance with the Minimum Wage and Minimum Holiday Allowance Act), it is presumed that an employment contract exists. It is then up to the provider of work to prove that this is not the case.
• an assessment framework to determine whether a worker is classified as an employee or a self-employed person.

The intended date of entry into force of this Act is 1 July 2026.

 

Act on more certainty for flexible workers

The bill aims to provide employees with flexible employment contracts (such as agency workers, temporary workers, and on-call workers) with greater certainty, both in terms of their work and their income. To achieve this:

• The current on-call contracts (including zero-hours and min-max contracts) will be abolished and replaced by a basic contract that guarantees a fixed minimum number of paid hours per week.
• Agency workers will gain quicker access to permanent contracts, as the maximum period they can work through an agency will be reduced from five and a half years to three years.
• Rules around temporary contracts will also become stricter, with the break period required to reset the chain of contracts being extended from six months to five years.

Certain exceptions will continue to apply, particularly for seasonal work, students, and young people under the age of 18.The intended date of entry into force of this Act is 1 January 2027.

 

Equal Pay Act

The bill aims to end unequal pay between men and women. Measures included in this proposal include requiring companies with more than fifty employees to provide information on pay differences between women and men in comparable positions to the works council and in the annual report. In addition, a certification system will be introduced, making it mandatory to provide figures on employee salaries every three years. The intended date of entry into force is 7 June 2026, as this is the deadline for transposing the European Pay Transparency Directive into national law, on which the bill is based.

Key Points for HR

• Note that none of the bills concerning employment law have been declared controversial, meaning that, in principle, all considerations for the bills can proceed as scheduled.
• We will inform you if one of the proposed bills will come into effect.