The Dutch Tax Authority Is Enforcing False Self-Employment Rules: What It Means for Software Hiring

For years, hiring freelance developers in the Netherlands was virtually risk-free: the DBA Act existed, but the tax authority did not enforce it. That era is over. The enforcement moratorium was lifted on January 1, 2025, and since January 1, 2026 the tax office can also impose penalty fines in cases of intent or gross negligence. The soft landing has been partially extended to the end of 2026, but anyone who thinks nothing is happening is misreading the parliamentary letters.

For companies having software built, this is more directly relevant than it seems. The long-term freelance developer working full-time in your team is exactly the profile where the risks pile up. In this article we lay out what actually applies in 2026, why software hiring is particularly vulnerable, and what the alternatives are.

Since January 1, 2025, the Dutch tax authority applies the normal rules again when assessing working relationships. If the tax office establishes false self-employment, correction obligations and additional payroll tax assessments can follow immediately, retroactive to January 1, 2025. The tax authority's enforcement page describes the current approach.

For 2026, the so-called soft landing has been partially extended after considerable political and public pressure. Concretely: no default penalties this year, and inspections in principle start with an informative company visit rather than a full audit. But penalty fines for intent or gross negligence have been possible since January 1, 2026, and they can run up to 100 percent of the additional assessment. The extension postpones the lighter fines; it does not postpone supervision.

Since the Deliveroo ruling, assessing whether someone is genuinely self-employed revolves around the actual situation: is there authority, is the work embedded in the organization, does the worker carry entrepreneurial risk, can they arrange a substitute? Hold those criteria next to the average freelance developer spending forty hours a week with the same client, and the picture gets uncomfortable.

That developer often works in the same team for months or years, joins the stand-ups, gets tasks assigned by the client's product owner, works on the client's laptop and in the client's repository, and in practice cannot be substituted. Each of those elements points toward employment. The hourly rate of 90 or 110 euros changes nothing: it is about authority and embedding, not the size of the invoice.

Suppose the tax authority determines during a 2027 audit that your regular freelance developer has effectively been an employee since early 2025. You are then looking at back payroll taxes over multiple years, plus the risk of a penalty fine if the tax office considers intent or gross negligence plausible, for instance because an earlier warning was ignored. For a developer billing over a hundred thousand a year, that quickly runs into tens of thousands of euros.

Then there is the employment law side: a worker classified as falsely self-employed can retroactively claim employee rights, from holiday pay and pension to dismissal protection. The financial risk therefore sits not only with the tax office, but also in the relationship with the worker themselves.

The employment classification discussion is about individuals performing labor under authority. It is not about companies delivering a result. If you outsource a software project to an agency that decides itself who works on it, organizes the work and is responsible for delivering working software, there is no DBA question. There is no personal obligation to perform labor between the client and an individual worker.

That is not a legal trick but a fundamentally different model. With us, you do not work with a hired hand you have to manage yourself, but with a team that delivers an agreed result: a working portal, a dashboard, an integration. We carry the entrepreneurial risk, arrange cover during illness and are accountable for quality. How that works contractually and practically is covered in our article on choosing a development partner.

If you work with long-term freelance developers, review the actual situation rather than the contract. Who decides what gets built and when? Who directs the work? Does the developer function in your team like a colleague? Can they genuinely be substituted? The more answers point to you as the client, the greater the risk that the relationship qualifies as employment.

There are roughly three routes: making the relationship genuinely independent with result-based agreements and the freelancer's own tooling, employing the developer, or outsourcing the work to a party that delivers on results. Which route fits depends on how structural the work is. For ongoing development of your own product, employment is often the logical answer; for projects with a beginning and an end, outsourcing is usually the simplest and safest choice. To see what outsourcing costs, our calculator gives a range within two minutes.

The days when the DBA Act was a paper tiger are over. Enforcement is back, fines are getting sharper step by step, and assessments look straight through contracts at actual practice. The full-time freelance developer who effectively functions as a colleague is one of the most obvious risk profiles.

Unsure whether your current setup will hold, or considering structuring your next project differently? Get in touch. We are happy to show you what result-based work looks like in practice, including what it costs and what you get in return.