Belgium's expat tax regime: 35% of pay off the tax base, if you earn more than €70,000

By Skyler Bissell · September 9, 2026 · 9 min read

A person hired into Brussels from abroad on a €100,000 package keeps €71,734 of it under Belgium's inbound regime. The same person on the same package without the regime keeps €53,046. The gap is €18,688 a year, about $21,654, and it comes from a single move: 35% of the package is paid as a reimbursement of costs and never enters the income tax base. The effective rate on the whole package drops from 47.0% to 28.3%.

How 35% of your pay leaves the tax base, and why social security does not move

Belgium taxes salary hard and early. The federal ladder reaches its 50% bracket at a little under €50,000 of taxable income, each commune adds a surcharge on top of the federal bill, and the employee's social security contribution of 13.07% comes off gross before any of that. A €100,000 package in Brussels carries an ordinary effective rate of 47.0% in our engine, which is the steepest of any regime city we compare.

The inbound regime works on the base rather than the rate. The employer pays part of the package, up to 35% of gross remuneration, as a reimbursement of costs proper to the employer. That payment is not salary in the eyes of the income tax code, so the 65% that remains is what the ladder is applied to. The circular is specific that the reimbursement must be paid on top of the agreed salary rather than carved out of it, which is why Belgian offer letters under the regime split the package into a base and an allowance. Our engine reads the figure you enter as the whole package and excludes 35% of it, so a €100,000 entry is a €65,000 taxable salary plus a €35,000 allowance.

What does not change is the social security line. At €100,000 the employee contribution is €13,070 without the regime and €13,070 with it, because we keep the 13.07% on the full package on both sides. That is a deliberately conservative reading. The social security authorities accepted the original 30% as free of contributions, and have not so far accepted the extra five points, so the real position sits somewhere between our figure and a full exemption. The income tax bill is where the movement happens: the standard professional-expense deduction and the tax-free allowance both still apply, and the ladder is run on the smaller base.

Two dates matter. The regime replaced the old special status for foreign executives on 1 January 2022, at 30% with a ceiling of €90,000 a year and a salary floor of €75,000. The law of 18 December 2025 raised the share to 35%, removed the ceiling and cut the floor to €70,000, all with effect for remuneration paid from 1 January 2025. The tax administration's circular 2026/C/51 of 1 April 2026 sets out the amended text. Every figure on this page is on the 2025 rules.

The door: more than €70,000 a year, tested on the whole year

The floor is written as gross remuneration for services in Belgium of more than €70,000 per calendar year, before social security is deducted. Bonuses that are part of the agreed remuneration count. The reimbursement itself does not, since it is a cost payment rather than salary, so the test is on the agreed pay under the allowance rather than on the whole package.

Here is one Brussels salary either side of that line, with the regime applied for in both cases. Our engine grants it from €70,000 and refuses it at €69,999, which is one euro more generous than the statute's "more than", and the footnote says so.

Single filer, no children, renting, 2026 rates, employee social security kept on the full package. The statute reads "more than €70,000"; our engine opens the door at €70,000 exactly, a one-euro difference in the reader's favour.

The first row is the one to stare at. At €69,999 the person has applied, been refused on the salary test alone, and pays €29,015 in tax and contributions. At €70,000 the same person pays €16,809. One euro of gross pay carries €12,207 of take-home across the step. Someone negotiating a Brussels offer that lands in the high sixties is not negotiating a small raise. They are deciding whether 35% of five years of pay is taxed.

Sweden's expert tax has the same shape, a salary line with nothing below it, and the SEK 88,801 line that decides Swedish expert tax is worked both ways there. Belgium's line is lower in euros and the swing at it is larger, because the Belgian rate it removes is so much higher.

Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent: the municipal surcharge changes the value

Belgian communes levy a surcharge as a percentage of the federal income tax bill, and the regime shrinks the federal bill, so the exemption is worth a little more wherever the surcharge is higher. On the same €100,000 package the regime is worth €18,688 in Brussels, €18,601 in Antwerp and €18,583 in Ghent, and the effective rate under it lands at 28.3%, 28.2% and 28.2%. The spread is about a hundred euros a year, which is small beside the regime itself and worth knowing only because it runs the opposite way from rent: Brussels taxes the package hardest and hands the most back.

The value climbs with salary, and faster than the salary does, because the exclusion comes off the top of the ladder where the 50% bracket sits. At the €70,000 floor it is worth €12,207, about $14,144. At €150,000 it is worth €28,219, about $32,698, or 18.8% of the package, and the effective rate moves from 51.2% to 32.4%. Before 2025 the €90,000 ceiling would have started to bite at a package of about €257,000; there is no ceiling now, so the share stays at 35% however high the package goes.

Five years, and the three after them

The regime runs for the duration of the Belgian employment up to a maximum of five years. The employer can request a three-year extension, no later than three months after the first five years end, provided the conditions are still met, which makes eight years the ceiling. Our data carries the initial 5 years, and the engine never spreads the value across a stay, because it models one steady-state year rather than a career. A reader planning on the full eight can multiply for themselves: at €100,000 held flat that is about €150,000 of income tax over the term, and about €93,000 on the five years that are granted without a further application.

Where the Belgian clock sits against the Dutch five, the Swedish seven and the Portuguese ten is the subject of every regime's duration, ranked.

The conditions our engine does not test

Our engine tests one thing: whether the package clears €70,000. Everything else in the regime sits outside the calculation, and four of those conditions do most of the work in practice.

• Recruited from abroad, or seconded within a group. The regime is for people brought to Belgium, either hired directly from outside the country or transferred from a group company abroad. Someone already in Belgium who finds a Belgian job is outside it.
• The 150 km and 60-month rule. In the 60 months before starting, the person must not have been a Belgian resident, must not have been taxed in Belgium as a non-resident on professional income, and must not have lived within 150 km of the Belgian border. That last clause removes most of the Netherlands, Luxembourg, northern France and the German Rhineland from the pool, and it is the condition that surprises people who have been living in Amsterdam or Cologne.
• The employer files, within three months. The application is the employer's, made electronically within three months of the start of the Belgian employment. Miss the window and the regime is gone for that employment.
• The allowance sits on top of the salary. The reimbursement has to be paid in addition to the agreed remuneration. An employer cannot relabel a third of an existing salary as costs. In practice packages are designed around the regime from the start, which is why the total package is the number to negotiate.

There is a second regime beside this one for inbound researchers, under article 32/2. It carries the same 35% and the same durations, and it has no salary floor at all. In its place is a qualification test: a doctorate or master's degree in a listed scientific field, or at least ten years of relevant experience, with research taking at least 80% of working time. Our engine does not model it, so a researcher on €60,000 who qualifies will see no relief in our Brussels figures, and their real position is better than we show.

What our figures model, and how to run your own

The Belgian numbers on this page are a single filer with no children on the 2026 federal ladder, the communal surcharge of the named city, the 13.07% employee contribution on the full package, the standard professional-expense deduction and the tax-free allowance credited at the bottom rate, with the regime applied as a 35% exclusion from the taxable base wherever the package clears €70,000. Spouses in Belgium are taxed separately on their own earned income, and the regime is granted per person, so a two-earner household is two of these calculations rather than one.

Belgium sits in the group of countries whose inbound relief our engine can price at all. Several regimes turn on facts no calculator holds, and we carry those as notes rather than pretending to compute them; the split is explained in expat tax breaks, decoded, and countries with tax breaks for expats, ranked by the door puts the €70,000 floor beside every other regime's entry test. What the same regime leaves you against Amsterdam, Madrid and Stockholm on one salary is the subject of every expat tax regime ranked by take-home, where Belgium hands back the third-largest sum and still finishes sixth, because its ordinary rate is the steepest in the set. Where that ordinary layer sits country by country is in take-home pay by country.

If a Brussels offer is in front of you, put your own package and household into the calculator with Brussels selected, then switch the regime toggle on and off. The difference between the two runs is what the regime is worth to you, at your package, in your commune, on this year's rules.

FAQ

Sources. The regime and its conditions: FPS Finance, inpatriate taxpayers and researchers. The 2025 amendments (35%, the removed ceiling, the €70,000 floor, effective 1 January 2025): the law of 18 December 2025 as set out in FPS Finance circular 2026/C/51 of 1 April 2026, reproduced by the OECCBB. The founding rules, the researcher variant, the extension procedure and the requirement that the allowance be paid on top of salary: FPS Finance circular 2022/C/47, reproduced by Forum for the Future. The social security treatment of the additional five points is reported by Grant Thornton Belgium, a firm summary rather than a primary source. All pages retrieved 9 September 2026. Belgian tax figures are computed by cityparity's engine; per-field provenance is in data/_meta.json, and our price lines split between official and crowdsourced sources as described in the methodology.

Equivalent salaries solve for equal net cash after tax, housing, childcare, healthcare and the cash value of statutory benefits, and they are the salary an offer has to clear rather than a salary any employer is obliged to pay. See the methodology.