A German resident works for a small Dutch company. Her contract allows occasional home working, her manager trusts her, and the team has never treated location as a daily concern. Then payroll asks how many days she has worked in Germany that year. Nobody has a complete answer.
That ordinary scene gained sharper consequences on 3 August 2026. The Belastingdienst Knowledge Group clarified how the new teleworking thresholds in the Netherlands-Germany tax treaty apply.
Since 1 January 2026, qualifying work outside the normal work country may take place on up to 34 days in a calendar year. Within that limit, the treaty allocation of taxing rights over the full salary remains unchanged.
The arrangement offers useful flexibility. It does not create a broad right to follow any hybrid pattern without payroll consequences.
The promise and the calendar
The first HR lesson is simple. A flexible-work promise and a tax threshold are not the same thing.
An employer may agree that someone can work from home regularly. The treaty then asks where that work happened, on which days, and for how long. Under the treaty protocol, a qualifying day counts when the relevant work lasts at least 30 minutes.
The threshold can also cover work in third countries. It reaches further than the familiar image of someone working from a kitchen table in Germany.
A conference, client visit or short secondment can therefore matter. The Knowledge Group also confirms that the Article 14 threshold applies per taxpayer, rather than separately to each employment relationship.
Where an employee has several relevant cross-border employments, the qualifying days are added together. A Dutch employer may see only part of the picture. Another relevant employment can affect the same employee's annual position.
That changes the employer's view. One company may believe an employee has used only twenty home-working days. Another relevant employment may have added fifteen qualifying days. Neither employer holds the whole calendar alone, while each may need accurate information for payroll treatment.
This is an HR responsibility before it becomes a tax calculation. The employment conversation must make room for facts that once felt private or incidental. Where was the work done? Was another relevant employment involved? Did a business trip include work in a third country?
These are no longer merely diary details.
Two systems, two clocks
The 34-day threshold concerns the allocation of taxing rights under the treaty. Social security follows separate European rules. Both systems look at cross-border work, but they use different tests and procedures.
Under the general social-security coordination test, work in the country of residence is substantial when it reaches at least 25 percent of contractual working time or remuneration.
A separate cross-border telework framework may, subject to its conditions, allow telework from the residence country for up to 50 percent of total working time without changing the applicable social-security system. The employer or employee must apply to the SVB.
An employee may therefore fit within one route and not the other. A stable one-day-a-week home-working pattern can remain below a social-security percentage while steadily moving towards the treaty's annual day limit.
A two-day-a-week arrangement will usually consume 34 days long before December.
This is where a friendly hybrid policy can mislead. The employee hears permission. The manager hears flexibility. Payroll needs dates, percentages and treaty facts.
When those three understandings do not meet, the correction arrives after the working pattern has settled into family life and team routines.
The record should match real work
The Belastingdienst handbook asks cross-border employees to keep a calendar showing where they worked each day. For a small employer, that calendar becomes more useful when it can be compared with ordinary business records.
Rosters, travel claims, client appointments, access logs and approved leave all help establish the working pattern. The point is not surveillance. It is a shared account of work that affects pay and statutory treatment.
A location calendar held only in an employee's private notes may reach payroll too late. A payroll code entered without a supporting work pattern is equally fragile.
Return to our German resident. By September, she remembers most home-working days but not every short Friday. Her manager recalls a conference in Cologne and a client visit in Belgium. Payroll sees only Dutch salary payments.
Each person holds part of the truth, yet no one can confidently reconstruct the year.
A modest monthly check would change that conversation. It could show early whether the original work agreement still works in practice. The aim is not to count people obsessively.
It is to prevent an attractive employment promise from producing a salary split, corrected wage records or an unexpected employee tax question.
Flexibility needs an owner
Small companies often place cross-border work somewhere between HR, payroll and the external adviser. That arrangement works until a threshold approaches. Then everyone can explain one part, but nobody owns the calendar.
Clear ownership matters more than a thick policy. Someone needs the authority to connect the employee's agreed pattern with payroll and social-security questions.
Managers also need to understand that an incidental workday abroad may count, even when nobody called it home working. Employees deserve that explanation before their location data becomes urgent at year-end.
The Netherlands and Germany introduced the 34-day arrangement to reduce fragmented taxing rights for limited telework. That is valuable. The Dutch government also recognised that the arrangement does not cover every structurally hybrid working pattern.
Occasional flexibility and a permanent weekly routine are different business choices. They should be discussed as such.
The calm response is not to withdraw cross-border flexibility. It is to make the promise precise enough to survive contact with payroll.
When employer and employee can see the same calendar, discuss the same threshold and separate tax from social security, hybrid work remains human. It also remains manageable.
We can help you keep clear work-location records for contracts, payroll and cross-border staff
The data, sourcing, and analysis behind this article were conducted by Linda Pavan. AI was not used to identify sources, build the factual basis, or produce the analytical judgment contained here. AI was used only as a drafting aid. The final English text was personally reviewed, edited, and approved by Linda Pavan before publication.
