For agency workers, a small payroll line depends on accurate terms, locations and handovers.
A cleaner starts before sunrise at a client site far from home. Recruitment knows the address. The planner knows the location. The client knows which employment conditions apply. Payroll sees hours, a worker number and perhaps a travel code.
Everyone holds part of the truth. Nobody necessarily holds the whole of it.
That ordinary scene explains why travel reimbursement deserves more attention than its modest place on a payslip suggests. Dutch equal-treatment rules require agency workers to receive the applicable employment conditions of comparable employees at the hirer. Rijksoverheid includes travel reimbursement among the allowances that can form part of those conditions.
A kilometre payment may look minor beside wages. Yet it depends on several facts meeting at the right moment: the worker’s address, the work location, the travel arrangement, the applicable conditions and the payroll setup.
One worker, several organisations
Agency work divides responsibility across a chain. The agency employs and pays the worker. The hirer directs the work. A recruiter may collect personal details, while a planner manages sites and shifts. An external payroll office may process the final figures.
Dutch law places an important control point near the beginning. Before placement, the hirer must provide the applicable employment conditions to the agency in writing or electronically. That information can include allowances that form part of equal treatment.
Smaller businesses can misread the task here. Sending the name of a collective agreement rarely makes payroll work. Someone still needs the current rule, its effective period, the relevant role or location, and the facts required for the calculation.
Imagine a worker who starts at one site and later covers weekends elsewhere. The planner updates the roster by message. Payroll keeps the original location. The wage run completes without an error warning because the system has processed exactly what it received.
The payslip may add up perfectly while resting on the wrong working reality.
This is an information problem before it becomes a pay dispute. Payroll is usually the last station in the chain, not the source of every decision passing through it.
The payslip is only the visible result
Article 7:655 of the Dutch Civil Code requires employers to provide written or electronic employment particulars. These include the parties’ places of residence, the work location or locations, the role, start date and pay.
Those details are not administrative decoration. When an allowance depends on distance, location or assignment, they form part of the calculation. If an address lives only in recruitment messages, or a site change remains in a planner’s phone, the business creates a gap between daily work and payroll.
A 2025 study by the Nederlandse Arbeidsinspectie examined selected employment conditions in the cleaning sector through Polisadministratie data. The study looked at items including pay and holiday allowance. Agency work requires additional assignment information because the applicable employment package follows the hirer.
A payroll export records what was paid. The underlying record should explain why that amount was due. Travel method, actual site, assignment history and the hirer’s applicable conditions may each sit in a different place.
The cleaner from the opening scene experiences one job. The business may have split that job across five systems and three organisations. That can work well, provided each handover has an owner.
Entitlement and tax are different questions
Travel reimbursement attracts a familiar shortcut. People reach for the tax-free kilometre figure and treat it as the employment rule.
For 2026, the Belastingdienst sets the tax-free maximum for qualifying travel at €0.25 per kilometre, effective from 1 January. Qualifying reimbursements can fall under a targeted exemption within the work-related costs scheme, rather than using the employer’s discretionary WKR allowance.
That settles a tax treatment question. It does not settle whether the worker is entitled to reimbursement, which journeys qualify under the applicable employment conditions, or which calculation method applies. Those answers may follow from the hirer’s conditions, the employment contract or a collective agreement.
A company can therefore process an allowance correctly for tax while applying the wrong employment term. The reverse can happen too. The entitlement is correctly identified, but payroll uses the wrong fiscal treatment.
Keeping those decisions separate makes later correction easier. One record explains why the worker receives the payment. Another records how payroll and the wage tax return handle it.
A small check before a large correction
For a small agency or hirer, the useful response is not a vast compliance project. A focused sample often reveals enough. Take several active placements involving changing sites or meaningful commuting distances. Compare the hirer’s conditions with the worker’s recorded address, role, location, roster and payroll treatment.
The practical question is simple: could another competent person reconstruct the allowance without relying on memory?
Client contracts deserve the same attention. If a correction becomes necessary, the agency needs to know whether the hirer supplied complete information and whether commercial terms address changed conditions. The hirer needs confidence that changes reached the agency before the next payslip.
A missed recurring allowance can return as one concentrated cash demand. It can also disturb client invoicing, agency margin, payroll reconciliation and employee trust. The issue is rarely the kilometre figure alone. It is the chain that produced it.
The lesson is modest but firm. A travel allowance is not merely a number attached to kilometres. It is the point where employment terms, real working life and payroll must agree. When those three remain connected, the payslip needs very little drama. It simply tells the truth on time.
If travel allowances depend on information spread across several parties or systems, we can help you review the handovers before small gaps become costly corrections.
The data, sourcing, and analysis behind this article were conducted by Linda Pavan Geraedts. 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 Geraedts before publication.
References
- Nederlandse Arbeidsinspectie - Gelijke behandeling van arbeidskrachten
- Rijksoverheid - Welke arbeidsvoorwaarden heb ik als uitzendkracht?
- Nederlandse Arbeidsinspectie - Cao-naleving in de schoonmaak en glazenwassersbranche
- Wettenbank - Burgerlijk Wetboek Boek 7, artikel 655
- Belastingdienst - Werkkostenregeling
- Nederlandse Arbeidsinspectie - Inhuren en uitlenen van arbeidskrachten
- Wettenbank - Wet allocatie arbeidskrachten door intermediairs
