Your first hire in Belgium: a step-by-step plan for 2026

Your first hire in Belgium starts with a job description that a Belgian payroll can read: white-collar or blue-collar, full-time or part-time, which joint committee, and which region the person will work from. Each answer changes a rule further down the line, so settle them before anyone talks to a candidate.

The white-collar or blue-collar split is more than a label. White-collar staff receive their holiday pay from the employer, whereas manual workers get theirs from the national holiday office (ONVA/RJV), funded by computing their contributions on a base of 108% of pay. Most first hires for foreign companies are office roles, such as a sales lead, an engineer or a country manager, and fall on the white-collar side.

The joint committee (commission paritaire / paritair comité, PC) follows the employer’s activity. Office staff of an employer without a dedicated committee fall into PC 200, which sorts jobs into classes A to D, sets a 38-hour average week and fixes the bonus rules. Write the class into the job description now; the minimum salary depends on it.

Working time belongs in the description too. Belgian rules allow 8 hours in a normal day and 40 in a normal week, require the year to average out at 38 weekly hours, and restrict work between 20:00 and 06:00 to cases with a legal basis. A role that involves regular evening calls with another continent should say how those hours fit inside the limits, rather than leaving the employee and the manager to improvise.

Finally, note where the person will live and work. The region decides which administration handles a work permit (Flanders, Brussels, Wallonia, or the German-speaking Community on its own territory), and with three official languages in the country it also affects whether your contract and work regulations are drafted in French or Dutch.

A Belgian salary offer has to pass several minimums at once, and the highest one that applies is the one that counts. The national minimum (RMMMG), which covers adults working full-time, stands at €2,233.61 a month since 1 July 2026. PC 200 then sets its own starting points from January 2026, €2,242.80 for the lowest class and €2,555.72 for the highest, with steps for experience.

If the candidate needs a single permit, a third floor appears: the regional salary threshold. Brussels sets the bar for a highly qualified worker at €3,703.44 gross monthly; Wallonia sets €53,220 a year for the same category in 2026. And if you plan a non-compete clause, remember that a clause binding someone who leaves on €44,447 a year or below is worthless.

Once the monthly figure is fixed, translate it into a year before you budget. A white-collar salary under PC 200 is paid roughly 13.92 times: twelve salaries, one more in December, and 0.92 of a salary as the holiday bonus, with the €330.84 June premium on top in 2026. The employer then adds 25.00% ONSS on ordinary pay. Our page on the minimum wage in Belgium for 2026 covers the floors in more depth; for scale, a €4,500 salary works out at an employer cost of about €78,400 for 2026.

Before the offer goes out, someone has to be in a position to sign it as the Belgian employer. A foreign company has three options, and the right one depends on headcount, timing and whether you will trade in Belgium.

• Form your own SRL (BV in Dutch), register it with the ONSS as an employer and appoint a social secretariat.
• Let your foreign company become a Belgian employer in its own name through ONSS registration, outsourcing the payroll to a social secretariat once your tax advisers have cleared the withholding and permanent-establishment questions.
• Hire through an employer of record: the selection and the day-to-day work stay yours, and the EOR holds the Belgian contract and pays the salary.

For a single first hire, the third option usually moves fastest: you form nothing and register nothing as an employer in your own name. Employer of Record Belgium works this way: your recruit goes onto our Belgian payroll as our employee, while the work and the reporting line stay with you. The trade-offs against forming a company are set out in EOR or SRL in Belgium, and if you want to know exactly what the EOR takes on, start with EOR explained for Belgium.

An open-ended contract is the default in Belgium, and it is the right choice for most first hires. It does not legally need to be in writing, but every employer puts it in writing because the Law of 7 October 2022 obliges the employer to set out the essential working conditions on paper or electronically in any case.

A fixed-term contract is possible, with strict limits. It must be signed in writing by the first working day at the latest, or it counts as open-ended. A chain of them stays fixed-term only within set bounds: no more than four, none shorter than three months, two years in all. If the labour inspectorate signs off beforehand, the chain can stretch to three years provided each link lasts six months or more. Part-time contracts must also be written.

Do not copy a probation clause from another country’s template. Belgian law treats it as if it had never been written. Any trial period in a contract concluded since 1 January 2014 is void. What the law does provide, for employment that starts in August 2026 or later, is a short exit: seven days’ notice from the employer at any point before six months of service.

Three clauses deserve attention in a first contract: an intellectual property assignment and a confidentiality clause, since ownership of an employee’s work does not pass to the employer by default across the board, and a non-compete only if the salary and the role allow one. Spell all three out in the contract itself rather than relying on general wording.

Check nationality before you agree a start date. A non-EU candidate who does not already hold a right to work in Belgium will need the combined work and residence authorisation known as the single permit (permis unique / gecombineerde vergunning), and the timetable of that procedure, not your recruiting plan, then sets the first day.

It is the Belgian employer that applies. The work side is judged by the region of the workplace and the residence side by the federal Immigration Office (DOFI / DVZ); Flemish cases now start in the Uniek Loket, the region’s single digital entry point. No employer can promise the outcome or the date, so make the offer conditional on the permit and keep the start date open until it arrives.

For an EU Blue Card, Flanders adds two conditions worth knowing at the offer stage: the employer must be Belgian, and the contract must be open-ended or last at least six months. The Immigration Office website lists the residence side of the procedure.

Most of the formal work for a first hire happens in the last fortnight before day one, and a few items have hard deadlines. The Dimona, the electronic declaration of employment to the ONSS, must be filed before the person starts work. It is the item inspectors check most easily, so it should never wait until the morning of the start.

• Give the new starter a copy of the employer’s rulebook, the règlement de travail (arbeidsreglement), which no Belgian employer is too small to need.
• Add the new name to the work-accident policy and to the external prevention service that handles occupational health.
• Collect bank details and family situation, because household status drives both the précompte and the special contribution.
• If the person will work from home at least one day a week on a structural basis, sign a telework agreement under collective agreement no. 85 and decide on the home-office allowance, which can reach €164.21 a month without tax or ONSS from 1 September 2026.
• Decide on optional benefits such as meal vouchers, which stay free of tax and ONSS with an employer share of at most €8.91 and an employee share of at least €1.09.

One date is easy to miss in a first year. When a public holiday lands on a Sunday or another day the person does not work, they get a replacement day, and the list of those days must be posted by mid-December for the year ahead. Assumption Day 2027 is a Sunday, so a first-year employer needs that notice up before 15 December 2026.

The employment relationship changes shape at fixed points in the first year, and a manager should know them in advance. The first six months run on one-week notice for contracts started from 1 August 2026. On the six-month anniversary, three things change together: employer notice jumps to 6 weeks, the employee gains the right under collective agreement no. 109 to ask for the reasons for a dismissal, and, under PC 200, the 13th month becomes due in December, pro rata if they joined during the year.

Holiday works differently from what many foreign managers expect. Twenty days is the full-time entitlement where the week has five working days, but the days are earned by working in the year before, so a person in their first Belgian job may have little paid leave in year one. Supplementary leave can bridge it; the employer pays it now and recovers it from the next year’s double holiday pay. Explain this at the offer stage; it avoids a difficult conversation in the summer.

Sickness is the other early event to plan for. A month of illness costs the employer a full salary: for its first 30 days, an office employee hired with no end date is paid as normal, and only from day 31 does the sickness insurance fund step in. Then January arrives with automatic indexation of PC 200 salaries, which applies to actual pay and not only to the scales. For the paperwork side of the first months, our guide to the EOR process in Belgium follows the first payslip line by line.