A director who moves from Belgium to the Netherlands changes two things at once, and they do not change on the same day. Personal residence shifts when the facts shift. The tax treatment of the remuneration paid for directing a company shifts according to where that company is resident, which may not move at all. The gap between those two propositions is where most of the difficulty in this move lives.
The move itself is common enough. A Belgian resident directs a company, the family relocates, and the assumption is that everything follows across the border. Some of it does. Remuneration for directing a Belgian company does not, and the year of the move is taxed by both countries under rules that decline to divide it neatly in half. What follows is the sequence in which these questions actually arise.
Residence is a fact, not a form
Both countries determine residence on facts rather than on registration. Deregistering from a Belgian commune and registering with a Dutch municipality is evidence both administrations will look at, but neither act decides the question.
The Netherlands asks where a person’s durable ties of a personal nature lie. Belgium asks where the taxpayer’s home and the seat of their wealth are found. The two enquiries overlap heavily and they are answered by the same kinds of fact: where the household lives, where the children go to school, where the doctor is, where the car is insured, where the days are spent.
Because both tests are factual, both can be satisfied at once. That is not a drafting failure. It is the situation the tie-breaker in article 4, paragraph 2 of the treaty exists to resolve, and it resolves it in order: permanent home available, then centre of vital interests, then habitual abode, then nationality, then agreement between the competent authorities. A director who keeps a Belgian house available while establishing a Dutch one has simplified nothing. They have moved the analysis to the second step, where it turns on evidence they may not have kept.
What the treaty does with directing a company
Article 16 of the 2001 Netherlands Belgium treaty deals with remuneration for directing a company, and it does something the employment article does not. It allocates the taxing right by reference to where the company is resident, not by reference to where the work is performed.
For a resident of one state who is a board member, manager or holder of a similar position in a company resident in the other state, the remuneration for that function may be taxed in the state where the company is resident. The article reaches directing and management functions and activities carried on outside an employment relationship, which is why it also captures arrangements that would otherwise be characterized as self-employment or as a management fee.
The consequence for our director is direct. After the move, remuneration for directing a Belgian company remains taxable in Belgium under article 16, notwithstanding that the director now lives, and may now work, in the Netherlands. The Netherlands as the new state of residence gives relief, but the Belgian charge is the primary one and it does not disappear because the household did.
The treaty that applies, and the one that does not yet
This is a point on which circulating advice is frequently out of date, so it is worth stating precisely.
The treaty in force between the Netherlands and Belgium is the one signed at Luxembourg on 5 June 2001, published in the Dutch statute database in the version applicable since 1 September 2013. A new treaty between the two states was signed at Brussels on 21 June 2023. It is not in force. The Dutch official text of the 2023 treaty carries the note that it enters into force on a date still to be determined.
A move planned now is therefore planned against the 2001 treaty. Advice quoting the 2023 provisions as current law describes a future that has not arrived. This matters practically as well as technically, because entry into force will attach to periods rather than to people: a director moving now will very likely have years under both instruments, which is a reason to keep the file properly rather than a reason to wait.
The overlap year, and why it is not a half year
The year of the move generates most of the work, and the reason is that neither country simply halves it.
Belgium taxes a departing resident on the income of the period during which they were resident, and closes that period with an assessment. The Belgian scale applies to that partial-year income in the ordinary way, running on the Belgian brackets set for income year 2026, which is assessment year 2027, 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, with a personal tax allowance of 11,180 euro. Those brackets and that allowance are annual figures, which is one reason a departure early in the year is arithmetically different from a departure late in it.
The Netherlands taxes the arriving resident from the date of arrival, applying the box 1 rates published for 2026, which run at 35.75 per cent to 38,883 euro, 37.56 per cent to 78,426 euro and 49.50 per cent above that. The thresholds are annual figures applied to the period of Dutch residence, so the progression restarts rather than continues.
Two consequences follow. Income can meet the lower brackets twice, once in each country, which is an artefact to model rather than an opportunity to pursue. And income allocated to Belgium under article 16 stays Belgian throughout, so a director’s fee running across the move does not split at the border. It splits according to the article that governs it.
The customary salary the Netherlands will expect
A director who also holds a substantial interest in a company meets a Dutch rule with no Belgian equivalent. The gebruikelijkloonregeling requires the salary drawn from that company to be set at a customary level rather than at whatever level suits the shareholder.
Under the Dutch customary salary rule for 2026, the salary must be the highest of three amounts: the salary from the most comparable employment, the salary of the highest-earning employee of the company or a connected company, and a statutory minimum, which for 2026 is 58,000 euro. A director-shareholder who has been drawing a modest salary and taking the balance as dividend, which is unremarkable in a Belgian setting, arrives in a system that will impute the customary figure whether or not it was paid.
The rule attaches to the Dutch employment relationship, so the analysis is about what the director does for which company, not simply about where the director now lives. It should be settled before the move rather than discovered in the first Dutch payroll, because the imputation operates within the year and the cash to fund it may already have been distributed.
The expat scheme, and whether a director qualifies
Incoming employees can qualify for the Dutch expat scheme for extraterritorial costs, under which up to 30 per cent of salary including the allowance may be paid free of tax as a targeted exemption, without further proof of the costs. For 2026 the maximum tax-free allowance is 78,600 euro, reached at a salary of 262,000 euro or more where the scheme runs for a full year.
The scheme carries an expertise requirement expressed as a salary floor, reset each year. Under the expertise condition published for 2026, the taxable annual salary must be more than 48,013 euro excluding the targeted exemption, or 36,497 euro for an employee under 30 holding a Dutch academic master’s degree or an equivalent foreign qualification.
Whether a director qualifies is a real question, not a formality. The scheme is built for employees recruited from abroad. There is also a geographical condition that decides Belgian cases on its own: for more than 16 of the 24 months before the first Dutch working day, the employee must have lived more than 150 kilometres from the Dutch border. On that condition the Dutch tax authority excludes Belgian employees, and Luxembourg residents with them, so a director arriving from Belgium never reaches the salary tests. A director-shareholder relocating their own company sits differently from an executive hired by an unrelated Dutch employer.
What happens to the shares
Moving the person does not move the company, and the shares are where the largest numbers sit.
Where the director holds a substantial interest, the change of residence engages the substantial-interest rules of both states. The Netherlands taxes substantial-interest income in box 2 at 24.5 per cent on the first 68,843 euro and 31 per cent above that, on the box 2 rates applying for 2026. Arriving rather than leaving raises the question of the value at which the Netherlands takes the shares onto its books.
That step-up question deserves attention, because it is settled by valuation evidence built at the date of arrival or not at all. A director who arrives without a defensible valuation of an unlisted holding has not avoided the issue. They have deferred it to a moment when the company is worth more and the evidence has gone cold.
The company’s own position is a separate matter again. A Belgian company directed from the Netherlands raises a question about its place of effective management, and therefore about where it is resident and which state taxes its profits. Article 4, paragraph 3 of the treaty settles that question for a company resident in both states by reference to the place of effective management alone. A director who moves without moving the board has usually done the right thing. A director who moves and takes the decision-making along, without deciding to, has changed the company’s tax position by accident.
Sequencing the move
The order of operations matters more than any individual element, and it is not the order these things usually happen in.
The valuation comes first, before residence changes, because it is the only item that cannot be reconstructed afterwards. The remuneration structure comes second, because the customary salary rule and article 16 between them determine what should be paid by which company from which date. The residence change comes third, and it should be clean: a departure with the Belgian ties genuinely released rather than kept available, so that the tie-breaker is never reached at all. The board arrangements come last and then continuously, because where a company is managed from is decided every quarter, not once.
In one mandate we handled a relocation where the director moved in October and the Belgian company carried on paying the same monthly fee. Nothing was wrong with the payment. What was missing was the article 16 analysis, so a Belgian-taxable item had been reported as though it followed residence, and the correction ran through two returns in two countries. The tax was the same at the end; the work was several times what sequencing it properly would have cost.
A move from Belgium to the Netherlands is not a difficult one. Both systems are transparent, the treaty is settled, and nothing here calls for an aggressive position. What it calls for is accepting that the person, the remuneration, the shares and the company each move on their own schedule, and that treating them as a single event is what produces the assessments nobody expected.
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.