Belgium taxes some of its residents on income they have not received. The rule that does it is formally the taxation of juridical constructions and universally called the Kaaimantaks, and it works by disregarding an entity and attributing what that entity earned to the Belgian person standing behind it. For a Belgian resident with a Dutch holding structure, the first question is not how the rule applies. It is whether it applies at all.
The answer, in the ordinary case, is that it does not. A Dutch BV subject to Dutch corporate income tax is not what the provision was written for, and saying so plainly is more useful than the hedging that usually surrounds the subject. But the boundary is drawn by categories and exclusions rather than by labels, and there are configurations in which a Dutch entity does fall inside. What follows is where the line runs, and what a Belgian resident should have in the file on either side of it.
What the look-through actually does
The mechanism is attribution. Article 5/1 of the Income Tax Code 1992, inserted by the programme law of 10 August 2015, taxes income received by a juridical construction in the hands of the resident founder as if he had received it directly, split between several founders in proportion to their contribution or, for holders of rights in a company, to their economic rights. Treated as received directly, the income keeps its category. Interest is taxed as interest, dividends as dividends, rental income as rental income.
That last point is the one most often lost. The look-through creates no new head of charge and no penal rate; it removes the entity from the picture and applies the ordinary Belgian rules to what remains. Dividends and interest attributed this way stay movable income and meet the rate of 30 per cent that the programme law of 25 December 2016 wrote into article 171, 3° and into article 269, § 1, 1° with effect from 1 January 2017. Income that is taxed globally rather than separately meets the scale of article 130, whose indexed bands for income year 2026, assessment year 2027, run at 25 per cent to 16,720 euro, 40 per cent to 29,510 euro, 45 per cent to 51,070 euro and 50 per cent above that.
There is also a charge on distribution. Where a construction pays out, article 18, first paragraph, 3° can tax the payment as a dividend, and article 21, first paragraph, 12° relieves it so the same income does not bear tax twice. The relief works, but it works on evidence: the taxpayer has to show that what was distributed is made of income that already went through its Belgian treatment, which means it has to have been declared in the first place.
The three categories, and which one can reach a company
The definition of juridische constructie sits in article 2, § 1, 13° of the Income Tax Code 1992 and has three limbs. The first, at point a, covers a legal relationship set up by the founder or by a court, in which assets pass under the control of an administrator for the benefit of beneficiaries or for a defined purpose. The second, at point b, covers a company, association, establishment, institution or entity with legal personality. The third, at point c, added in December 2017, covers a contract paying out, against premiums, income or rights derived from the first two.
Only the second limb can reach a Dutch BV, because only the second limb is about entities with legal personality carrying on business in the ordinary way. A BV is not a trust and not a contract. The whole analysis for a Dutch holding structure therefore turns on point b and on the exclusions from it, which are held separately in article 2, § 1, 13°/1.
Point b does not catch every foreign entity. In its general form it catches entities not subject to income tax, or bearing less than 15 per cent of the income as that income would have been determined under Belgian rules. For an entity established in the European Economic Area the second paragraph of point b, rewritten by the programme law of 22 December 2023 for income received from 1 January 2024, narrows this sharply: such an entity is outside the definition altogether unless it is a case caught by the second to fourth paragraphs of article 2, § 1, 13°/1, which pull the collective investment exclusion back where more than half the rights are held by one person or by connected persons, or a company whose income its own state taxes in the hands of its members and whose members bear less than 1 per cent of their share of the taxable income computed under Belgian rules, or an entity with legal personality that is untaxed or bears less than 1 per cent on that same base. The test is comparative and computational rather than nominal. It asks what the entity actually bore against a Belgian-style base, not what its jurisdiction’s headline rate happens to be.
Why an ordinary Dutch BV falls outside
A BV carrying on a holding or operating business is subject to Dutch corporate income tax at 19 per cent on the first 200,000 euro of profit and 25.8 per cent above that, in the rates article 22 of the Wet op de vennootschapsbelasting 1969 carries for 2026. Those are not low rates by any measure Belgium applies.
The comparison that matters, though, is the entity’s actual computation rather than the statute book. A BV whose income is largely exempt in the Netherlands is the case worth thinking about, because a pure holding company whose only receipts are participation dividends covered by the deelnemingsvrijstelling of article 13 may pay very little Dutch corporate income tax in a given year.
This is where the analysis needs care. A participation exemption is a feature of a normal corporate tax system rather than a low-tax regime, and Belgium has its own in the DBI deduction. An entity fully within the scope of a normal corporate tax whose particular receipts happen to be relieved is not an entity outside the scope of tax. But the point b test is applied on the numbers, so the argument needs the computation in hand rather than the rate card. For a Dutch entity the figure to clear is the 1 per cent floor, not the general 15 per cent.
Where a Dutch entity can fall inside anyway
Two configurations deserve attention.
The first is the transparent vehicle. Not everything Dutch is a BV. A partnership arrangement, a fund for joint account or a comparable vehicle not itself subject to Dutch corporate income tax is a different proposition. It may fall into the second of the European Economic Area cases above, the company taxed at the level of its members. It may equally fall outside point b altogether, because the first paragraph of point b reaches only entities with legal personality, which a vehicle of that kind may well lack. Transparency for Dutch purposes is not by itself decisive either way, since the second case falls away once the tax levied under the law of the vehicle’s own state on its members reaches 1 per cent of the member’s share on a Belgian base, but it is the fact that makes the question live.
The second is the entity that is Dutch in form and something else in substance. A BV whose place of effective management has drifted outside the Netherlands may not be taxed as a Dutch resident at all. The Belgian test then applies to what the entity actually bears, which may be very little, and a group discovers that a question it had filed under substance and treaty residence is also a question about the Kaaimantaks.
The founder, and why the label reaches further than it sounds
The rule attributes income to a founder, defined in article 2, § 1, 14° of the Income Tax Code 1992. The word suggests the person who set the structure up. It does mean that, and it means more.
The category extends beyond the original settlor to whoever put assets and rights into the construction and, for entities within point b, to the holders of the legal or economic rights in the shares or of the economic rights in the assets and capital it holds, a limb the 2023 reform widened to holders who reach the construction indirectly through a chain of intermediate entities. It also reaches heirs. That last extension matters, because a Belgian resident can become the founder of a structure created by somebody else, in another country, at a time when there was no Belgian connection at all.
This is the practical trap. Families meet the Kaaimantaks not when they build something but when they inherit it, usually with several years of unfiled annexes behind them. A Belgian resident joining a family structure should be asking the question on arrival rather than being given the answer afterwards.
The declaration, which runs whether or not tax is due
Separate from the charge is the reporting. A Belgian resident who is the founder of a juridical construction, or who received a dividend or any other benefit from one during the year, must say so in box XIII, section C of the return form fixed for assessment year 2026, and attach an annex 276 CJC for each construction.
Two things about this deserve underlining. The question is put as an alternative, so being a founder triggers it on its own: a construction that distributes nothing and generates no attributed income still has to be declared. And the annex is not a document held available for inspection. The form says it goes with the return, which is the drafter’s way of saying that the administration intends to read it.
Where a Dutch structure falls outside the definition, none of this applies, and a defensive filing is neither required nor appropriate. But that conclusion should exist in writing, dated, with the computation behind it. The cost of being wrong is not the tax, which would have been due in any event. It is the penalty regime attached to an omitted declaration and the extended assessment period of article 354, which the 2023 reform tied to the return having to mention a construction at all.
What the look-through does not reach
The rule is narrower than its reputation, and its limits are worth stating.
It does not reach a construction whose founder clears any one of the four alternative routes out of article 5/1, § 3. The best known is the substance route at point b, and it stacks conditions rather than posing one: the founder declares it in the annual return and shows on request that the construction sits in a state bound to Belgium by a double tax treaty or another instrument allowing exchange of information in tax matters, that it carries on a genuine economic activity supported by personnel, equipment, assets and premises from which it mainly draws its income, and that the activity is not aimed at managing the founder’s private wealth. The statutory gloss on what counts as an economic activity no longer helps, because the Constitutional Court annulled it in judgment 117/2025 of 18 September 2025. The other three routes are a charge of at least 15 per cent on the construction measured on a Belgian base, taxation of its income in a Belgian company under the controlled foreign company rules, which the Constitutional Court has opened to an equivalent foreign charge, and taxation of the same income in the hands of another founder. Nor does the rule reach income that has already borne Belgian tax by another route, since the mechanism is attribution rather than duplication. And it reaches individuals and, through article 220/1, bodies within the legal entities tax; a Belgian company taxed on its profits sits in the DBI regime, not in the Kaaimantaks.
There is a fourth limit, more practical than legal, and it has a hole in it. The attribution reaches income the construction received, not unrealized appreciation. But for income from 1 January 2024 article 18, first paragraph, 3°/1 treats undistributed profit as attributed to the founder at the moment the construction’s economic rights, shares or assets are put into another construction or into another legal person, or moved out of Belgium, or the founder moves his residence or seat of fortune abroad, or a founder within the legal entities tax moves its main establishment or its seat of management abroad. That charge falls away for a construction excluded by article 5/1, § 3, and the Constitutional Court took out of it the profit realised before the founder was Belgian. So a holding company that holds and does not receive gives the ordinary attribution very little to work with, which is a description of the ordinary European holding rather than a planning idea, but the departure is the moment the accumulated reserve becomes visible.
Building a structure that never raises the question
The way to stay outside the definition is not to hunt for an exclusion. It is to build an entity the definition was never aimed at, and the requirements for that are the same requirements a Dutch holding needs for every other reason.
A BV within the ordinary scope of Dutch corporate income tax, with a board that meets and decides in the Netherlands, minutes recording deliberation rather than ratification, accounts filed on time and transfer pricing documentation matched to the functions performed, is not a juridical construction and does not become one because a Belgian resident owns it. The Dutch ruling policy in force since 1 July 2019, amended since, asks for an economic nexus with the Netherlands, and an entity meeting that standard is a long way from the entity the Belgian rule was written to find.
In one mandate we reviewed a Belgian family’s Dutch holding after a change of residence brought it within scope of the Belgian rules. The holding was solid and the conclusion was that it fell outside the definition. What was missing was the file: nobody had written the conclusion down, and the computation supporting it had to be reconstructed from three years of Dutch returns.
The Kaaimantaks is a rule about entities that are not really taxed anywhere, applied to the people standing behind them. A Dutch holding taxed in the Netherlands, managed in the Netherlands and documented in the Netherlands is not that entity. The reason to understand the rule is not that it usually applies. It is that establishing that it does not apply is a piece of work with a date on it, and the moment for that work is when the structure is built, not when the question is finally asked.
This article is informational and does not constitute tax or legal advice. The treatment of any structure depends on its facts and on the law of each jurisdiction involved. Each engagement is subject to scope and applicable regulation.