EOR or SRL in Belgium? How to decide who employs your team

Whichever route you take, the person you hire costs the same to employ: Belgian pay and social security rules attach to the job, not to the type of employer. A white-collar hire under PC 200 is owed a 13th month, a holiday bonus worth 92% of one month and, in 2026, the €330.84 annual premium, and the employer pays 25.00% ONSS on ordinary pay with no ceiling.

Our 2026 worked example puts numbers on it. A €4,500 monthly salary in Brussels produces about €62,970 of gross pay over the year and an employer cost of about €78,400 before any fee. That figure does not shrink because you own the company, and it does not grow because an EOR holds the contract. Every line of that calculation appears in the guide to employer cost in Belgium.

Even the first-day formalities match: on either route the start must be declared through Dimona ahead of the first hour of work, and the employee receives work regulations and a payslip built on the same joint committee rules. So the real comparison sits elsewhere. It is about who carries the employer duties, what you spend on the structure around the salary, how quickly the first person can start, and how easily you can change course. Those four points decide most cases.

An SRL (société à responsabilité limitée), called a BV (besloten vennootschap) in Dutch, is the usual vehicle for a foreign group that wants its own Belgian employer. Since the Companies and Associations Code came into force on 1 May 2019, it has had no minimum capital. It still cannot be founded on nothing. Whoever sets it up has to put in starting equity that is adequate for the planned activity and draw up a financial plan, which the notary keeps on file.

The steps run in a fixed order:

• A notary passes the articles of association by notarial deed.
• An extract is published in the annexes to the Belgian Official Gazette (Moniteur belge / Belgisch Staatsblad).
• The new SRL appears in the BCE / KBO, the Crossroads Bank for Enterprises, which issues its enterprise number.
• Where the activity is subject to VAT or needs registration, an accredited business counter (guichet d’entreprises / ondernemingsloket) handles it.
• The beneficial owners are recorded in the UBO register kept by the FPS Finance.

Anyone can check an enterprise number afterwards through the public BCE search, which is also how your future customers and suppliers will look you up. Ask the notary and an accountant for written quotes and dates before you commit, because both depend on the shareholder structure and on how quickly a bank account can be opened.

A new SRL is not yet an employer. Before it can pay anyone, it must register as an employer, using the ONSS online identification service known as WIDE, to receive an employer number, and only then can it file a Dimona for its first recruit.

Around that registration sits a set of obligations that every Belgian employer carries, whatever its size. The company needs work regulations (règlement de travail / arbeidsreglement) that list working hours, pay methods, notice rules and sanctions. It needs work-accident insurance and membership of an external prevention service for occupational health. It has to check which joint committee covers its activity, because the committee sets minimum scales, bonuses and the timing of indexation. Most new employers appoint a social secretariat to calculate payroll, withhold the précompte professionnel (bedrijfsvoorheffing) and send the quarterly DmfA.

Then the company itself has to be kept alive. Its yearly accounts are filed with the National Bank, the corporate tax and VAT returns each run on a separate calendar, and the directors carry responsibility for all of it. None of this is unusual for a Belgian business. It is simply more structure than a single remote salesperson or engineer requires in the first year.

With an employer of record, nobody forms a company. The person you choose signs a Belgian contract with the EOR, which then acts as the legal employer in Belgium and takes on the filings described above under its own ONSS registration. That is the service Employer of Record Belgium provides. The employment contract is ours, and so are the Dimona, the DmfA, the withholding tax, the work regulations and the joint committee rules that come with it.

Salary costs are passed through, and our fee, starting at €599 per employee per month, sits on top. Multiply by twelve and each person adds €7,188 a year, set against the €78,400 employer cost in the worked example. The arrangement can begin as soon as the contract and the pre-start registrations are in place, and it involves no notary, no published articles and no annual accounts on your side.

What the EOR route does not do is suspend Belgian employment law. It also leaves you lighter if plans change. Should the Belgian market not work out, the contracts end under the normal notice rules and the EOR files the exit paperwork, but there is no company of yours to close, no final accounts to file and no directors to discharge. Notice still follows the statutory scale, sick pay is still due for the first 30 days, and the person still earns holiday pay on the Belgian calendar. If you want to understand the division of duties in detail, our explainer on EOR explained for Belgium sets out what moves to the EOR and what stays with you.

An SRL tends to win when the Belgian operation becomes a business in its own right rather than a few people working for a foreign one. Four situations point that way.

• You will sell in Belgium. If you plan to contract with and invoice Belgian customers, a company of your own, with its own enterprise number and VAT set-up, is usually the more natural base.
• The team is growing. An EOR fee scales with headcount, while the cost of running a company is largely fixed. Beyond a certain number of people the fixed structure becomes cheaper per head.
• Permits are central to the plan. Whoever employs the person in Belgium is the one who files for a single permit. Flanders goes further for the EU Blue Card, which it reserves for Belgian employers offering either an open-ended contract or one of six months or more. If you will recruit many non-EU specialists, controlling that employer relationship yourself may matter.
• You want your own Belgian rulebook. Owning the work regulations, the benefits policy and the choice of social secretariat lets you shape employment terms across a larger team.

A third option is worth knowing about. Your existing foreign company can itself sign up with the ONSS as an employer, even with no Belgian establishment, and hand the calculations to a social secretariat. Every employer duty then stays with you, but no new company is needed. Take tax advice before choosing it, because withholding-tax registration and permanent-establishment questions depend on what your people actually do in Belgium.

The cleanest way to decide is to put the two routes on one sheet, using your own quotes rather than anyone’s averages. On the EOR side the calculation is simple: €7,188 a year per person at the starting fee, multiplied by the headcount you expect. Two hires mean €14,376, four mean €28,752, six mean €43,128.

On the SRL side, list every cost that exists only because the company exists: the notary, the financial plan, publication, the business counter, accounting and the annual filings, the social secretariat, legal review of contracts and work regulations, and the time your own finance team spends on a new set of books. Add the months before the company can run its first payroll, priced as revenue or progress you would lose by waiting.

Be honest about the unknowns as well. If you are not yet sure the Belgian market will justify a second hire, the value of being able to stop without closing a company belongs in the comparison, even though it never appears on an invoice. Then look at the plan over three years, not one. A company that hires two people in year one and fifteen by year three may still be right to start with an EOR and switch later, because the first year carries the most uncertainty. A company that already knows it will open an office and sell locally often saves money by forming the SRL at the start. If the EOR route wins, the questions in choosing an EOR in Belgium will help you compare providers.

Plenty of foreign groups run the two routes one after the other, starting with an EOR for the first few Belgian hires and forming an SRL when the headcount justifies it. The move is manageable if it is planned as a change of employer, which is what it is.

Each employee ends one contract and signs another. The EOR files an exit Dimona and the SRL files a new one before the first working day. When the first contract ends, the outgoing employer settles the holiday pay earned so far, at 15.34% of gross pay for the year, which means the new employer’s first double holiday payment will be smaller, because the leave has already been paid for. Check how the 13th month will be handled in the transfer year too, since PC 200 ties it to six months’ seniority on the payment date.

Seniority deserves a written agreement. Belgian notice periods grow with service and depend on the contract’s start date, and the reasons owed under collective agreement no. 109 start at six months. Agree in each new contract how earlier service will be counted, so nobody loses rights in the move and nobody argues about them later. Done that way, the switch is a few weeks of paperwork rather than a reset of the relationship.