A quiet rule change with a loud price tag
If your company places contractors or temporary staff in the Netherlands through an agency, the way you pay them changed on 1 January 2026 — and the change is bigger than the modest press coverage suggests. The new Collective Labour Agreement (CLA) for temporary agency workers runs for three years, through the end of 2028, and it quietly retires the system most hirers have budgeted around for years.
For an international business, the headache is rarely the Dutch rule in isolation. It is that the Netherlands has just moved to a “total-package equivalence” model while the country next door still runs on something completely different. If you manage a workforce across several European markets, this is one more line in a growing list of national rulebooks that no longer rhyme with each other.
This article explains what actually changed, where the hidden costs sit, and what an international hirer should do before the first invoice of 2026 lands looking unfamiliar.
From “matching a few items” to “matching the whole package”
Until the end of 2025, agency pay in the Netherlands was governed by inlenersbeloning — often shortened to BRI. In practice it meant the agency had to replicate a defined list of pay elements from the client: the applicable wage, certain allowances, periodic increases, and a handful of other items. It was a checklist. If you matched the listed items, you were compliant.
That checklist is gone. From 2026 the standard is equivalent remuneration, and the logic is fundamentally different. An agency worker is now entitled to a package of employment conditions whose total value is at least equivalent to what a comparable directly-employed colleague receives for the same or a similar role.
The word doing the heavy lifting is equivalent, not equal. Individual components do not have to be identical line-for-line. What matters is that the values add up. A slightly leaner allowance here can be offset by a more generous one there — within limits we will get to in a moment.
The part most summaries skip: the two-test structure
Here is the detail that separates a useful briefing from a vague one. The new Article 21 of the ABU CLA does not run one comparison — it runs two, and they stack.
First, employment conditions are split into two buckets:
- Essential conditions — wages and allowances, working hours including overtime, rest periods and breaks, night work, holiday duration, and public-holiday arrangements.
- Non-essential conditions — effectively everything else in the package.
Then two tests apply. The total of the essential conditions must be at least equivalent to the hirer’s own employees. And separately, the total of all conditions — essential plus non-essential combined — must also be at least equivalent.
There is one asymmetry worth circling in red. You cannot plug a gap in an essential condition by overpaying on a non-essential one. The reverse is allowed: a surplus in an essential condition can help cover a non-essential shortfall, but never the other way around. In plain terms, you can’t underpay the core wage and “make it up” with a nicer perk. That single rule quietly removes a lot of the flexibility hirers might assume the word “equivalent” hands them.
Pension stops being a footnote
Under the new arrangement, pension is treated as part of the value comparison rather than a separate side-calculation, and a refreshed StiPP arrangement applies from 2026.
The mechanics are intuitive once you see them. If your in-house pension scheme is more favourable than the StiPP baseline, that extra value counts toward the package the agency worker is owed. If your scheme is less favourable, the agency has to compensate the worker to close the gap. To keep comparisons consistent across thousands of hirers, the sector uses a standardised gross pension premium as a benchmark — unless your own employer contribution sits higher, in which case the higher figure is what counts.
The practical consequence: pension data you may never have shared with an agency before is now part of what determines a compliant rate.
The phase system is shifting too — but on a different clock
The CLA also signals changes to the ABU phase system in anticipation of the upcoming Wet meer zekerheid flexwerkers (the “More Security for Flexible Workers” act): Phase B compressing from three years to two, and the interruption period that resets a worker’s accrued history stretching dramatically.
Two cautions here. First, these phase changes are tied to that new law and take effect when it is formally introduced — they are on a separate timeline from equivalent pay. Second, and this is the point hirers most often get wrong: equivalent remuneration does not wait for any new law. It applies from 1 January 2026, full stop. Do not let the “pending legislation” framing lull you into treating the whole package as a future problem.
Why this is not only an agency problem — it is a hirer liability
It is tempting to read all of this as the agency’s compliance burden. The law disagrees.
The change anticipates an amendment to Article 8 of the Waadi (the Dutch act governing the hiring-out of workers), itself driven by European Court of Justice case law under the Temporary Agency Work Directive — which is why the chance of it quietly disappearing is slim. And critically, under Article 7:616a of the Dutch Civil Code, the hirer can be held jointly and severally liable alongside the agency for wages owed to the worker.
Translation for the client side: if the worker is underpaid because the agency was working from incomplete information, the worker can come after you too. The accuracy of the pay data you hand over is not a courtesy. It is the thing standing between you and a liability claim.
What an international hirer actually has to do
Because equivalence is calculated from your internal benchmarks, the agency cannot produce a compliant rate without a genuine picture of how you pay comparable staff. Expect to provide:
- Salary structures, bands, and how increases are applied
- Holiday entitlement and holiday-pay rules
- Sick-pay arrangements
- Bonuses and the full range of allowances — travel, shift, overtime, home-working, mobility
- Any sustainable-employability or vitality schemes
- Pension scheme design, the pensionable-salary basis, and the employer contribution
This is the information the sector platform Wijzerbelonen.nl, built by ABU and NBBU, exists to help structure. Supplying it is part of the disclosure obligation now sitting on hirers — incomplete data is the fast route to an incorrect rate and the liability that follows it.
The cross-border angle most local guides miss
Here is where an internationally-operating business feels something a purely Dutch agency does not.
The Netherlands has just raised the floor on what agency labour costs and how transparently it has to be priced. Hiring through an agency will no longer be “hourly wage plus a margin” — it will be the full value of the employment package, which for many roles means a higher and less predictable number than 2025. That alone reshapes budgets.
But the deeper issue is fragmentation. If you run flexible workforces across multiple European countries, the Dutch equivalence model now diverges further from the rules in your other markets. Each country defines “fair pay for contingent labour” differently, indexes it differently, and assigns liability differently. Managing that country by country, agency by agency, is exactly where errors — and the joint-liability exposure that comes with them — creep in.
This is the structural case for consolidating contractor and temporary engagements under a single compliant employment partner rather than a patchwork of local arrangements. An Employer of Record or agency-of-record model absorbs the per-country rule changes — the Dutch equivalence calculation, the next country’s equivalent, and the one after that — into one accountable relationship, instead of leaving you to reconcile six rulebooks and hope each local agency got it right.
A short readiness checklist before your next Dutch invoice
- Name one internal owner for CLA coordination — usually someone bridging HR, Comp & Benefits, and payroll.
- Build a complete inventory of employment conditions for every role you fill via agencies.
- Gather pension documentation: scheme design, pensionable-salary basis, employer contribution.
- Pressure-test whether your HR and payroll systems can actually surface this data on request — many can’t, cleanly.
- Set up a way to flag changes to conditions as they happen, not once a year. Equivalence is a living comparison.
- For multi-country operations, map where the Dutch model now sits relative to your other markets, and decide whether a consolidated EOR/AOR arrangement reduces your liability surface.
The bottom line
The 2026 CLA is being sold as fairness and transparency for agency workers, and on its own terms it delivers that. For hirers, the honest framing is different: it converts a simple checklist into a data-driven, value-based comparison, attaches real joint liability to getting it wrong, and does so on a Dutch clock that no longer matches your other markets.
The companies that handle this well will treat it as a workforce-data exercise, not a year-end surprise — and the ones operating across borders will ask whether they really want to manage this country by country at all.
About Access Financial
Access Financial helps companies engage contractors and temporary staff compliantly across 60+ countries, absorbing changes like the Dutch 2026 CLA into a single, accountable arrangement.
