Fed up with Belgium

This is not my usual post; it has none of the usual GraphQL, signals, or front-end material. This one is about the country I live in, work in, and pay into, because after a decade of doing exactly that... I'm fed up.

Let me get one thing out of the way first: this isn't a "taxes are theft" rant. I've spent a large chunk of my career happily in the highest tax bracket and I honestly didn't mind. We have healthcare that doesn't bankrupt you, roads that mostly work, public transport, schools, a safety net. For years I looked at the line on my payslip that disappeared and told myself that's the deal, and I believed in the deal. What I've slowly realised is that the deal keeps changing, and it only ever changes in one direction.

The hole we dug

Belgium is structurally broke. Public debt sits at roughly 107% of GDP, about €692 billion, and the projections have it drifting up towards 113% by 2027, not down. We spend around 2.2% of GDP every year just servicing the interest. That money builds nothing and helps nobody; it pays for spending we've already done.

So what's the plan to fill the hole? As far as I can tell, it's two ideas on a loop:

• Raise the taxes we already have.
• Invent taxes we didn't have.

As far as I can tell, the strategy is to keep finding the next taxable thing. The conversation rarely seems to be about spending less, making the machine smaller, or making it easier to build something here.

The most taxed labour on the planet

Belgium already starts from the wrong end of the table. Per the OECD's own Taxing Wages numbers, we have the most heavily taxed labour market in the developed world, year after year. The tax wedge for a single worker on average pay is about 52.5%, the highest of all 38 OECD countries, against an OECD average of ~35%. That means less than €50 of every €100 in employer cost reaches an average Belgian worker's bank account, compared with about €65 across the OECD. The 50% marginal bracket also starts biting at a salary a mid-career engineer clears without trying.

Tax Policy Associates has a useful visual for this, using OECD data from 2022. It plots effective income tax and social-security rates against gross wages as a multiple of average earnings, which makes the Belgian curve hard to miss.

Source: Tax Policy Associates, OECD personal tax rates, October 2022.

I was in that top bracket for about five of my employed years. I want to be clear again, I made my peace with that. But you have to understand the starting point here before anyone in Brussels opens their mouth about people "not contributing their fair share". We were already number one. There was no headroom being left on the table.

Meanwhile, on the spending side

Where this turns into actual anger for me is the spending side. We're paying the highest labour taxes on earth into a system with a lot of duplicated machinery.

We are a country of ~twelve million people with six governments and, famously, nine ministers of health, almost one health minister per million inhabitants. Every one of those governments is a full set of ministers, cabinets, advisors and salaries, for a country you can drive across in two hours.

At the same time, we have a huge inactivity problem. Unemployment in Brussels runs north of 12%, Wallonia around 8%, and Statbel puts the 20-64 employment rate at 63.9% in Brussels and 67.9% in Wallonia. More than a third of working-age people in Brussels are not working. In 2025, we were the last country in the EU to end unlimited-in-time unemployment benefits.

The companies that actually generate the wealth to pay for all of it? They're leaving. Audi Brussels shut its doors in February 2025 after more than 75 years, around 3,000 direct and indirect jobs gone. Van Hool collapsed the year before, another ~1,850 jobs. Volvo in Ghent is now the last major car plant standing in the whole country, and even that one needs a government task force to keep it here. We are actively watching our industrial base walk out the door, and the response is to reach deeper into the pockets of whoever's left.

And now, capital gains

This year we finally got a capital gains tax, a 10% "solidarity contribution" on financial assets, live since 1 January 2026, with a €10,000 yearly exemption. And look, 10% is objectively low compared to plenty of other countries, I'm not going to pretend it's confiscatory.

What bothers me is what it taxes: the money you managed not to spend after payroll taxes had already taken their share. If that already-taxed money grows, there's now a fresh hand out for it too, and the direction of travel is hard to miss. Every remaining pocket of "someone here has a bit of money" gets a new line item. "Solidarity" is a wonderful word for it, isn't it.

My actual story

For me, it started with an EOR problem.

I was a regular employee for eight years. Top bracket, no complaints, covered above. Then I moved to a company where an EOR arrangement wasn't on the table, so if I wanted the role I had to go freelance. Fine. I registered as a sole trader, an eenmanszaak, which meant staying in the highest bracket, now paying it personally on business income.

Then I went looking for one of the genuinely nice things this country still offers the self-employed: buying a car through your business. To actually use that in any sensible way, you form a company, a BV (LLC). So I did.

Nobody tells you until you're inside it that a BV (LLC) isn't just about the car. Once you're a company, the structure genuinely lets you do more. Your effective rate can drop, you can leave money in the company and reinvest it, you can pay yourself out over time in more efficient ways. I was actually excited discovering this. For the first time in my working life it felt like the system had a door in it that opened towards building something, rather than just a meter that ran while I worked.

A few years later, the rules started moving again.

Going after the people who stayed

It turns out the government has decided that people like me forming a BV (LLC) is a problem to be solved, with the structure treated less like something worth encouraging and more like lost revenue. If your tax drops because you are using legal paths, that's apparently revenue they would rather have back. So the Arizona-coalition measures come for exactly that structure, from several directions at once:

• The minimum director's salary you must pay yourself to keep the reduced 20% corporate rate goes from €45,000 to €50,000, indexed upward every year from here.
• Benefits in kind can now make up at most 20% of that remuneration, which quietly guts the one benefit that sent me down this road in the first place, the car.
• The liquidation reserve, the mechanism for eventually getting your own money out, becomes less attractive: the reduced withholding that used to be 5% is moving through 6.5% and then to 9.8%.
• The favourable withholding on dividends (VVPRbis) goes from 15% to 18%, and the intermediate rate disappears entirely for new contributions.

Read the justification behind it in plain language and it's almost refreshing in its honesty: the goal is to "curb tax optimisation through management companies", aimed squarely at "management companies and SMEs where the director takes an insufficient salary", a bureaucrat's way of describing people like me: one person, one or two clients, no employees, a laptop and an invoice.

In practice this lands on people like me, while the multinational with a Luxembourg holding and a floor full of tax lawyers will be fine, they're always fine. I'm talking about the freelancer who finally found the one legal, government-designed door that pointed towards building, and walked through it a little too visibly.

The part they never say out loud

Go read r/BEFreelance and you'll find a whole community that saw this coming. One thing someone wrote there stuck with me: none of the coverage even tries to show both sides. There is endless talk about the freelancer's lower effective rate, and total silence on the risk they carry to earn it. No paid holiday, no sick pay, no notice period, no unemployment safety net, you eat the gap between contracts yourself, you carry the liability yourself.

And the whole crackdown rests on an assumption that falls apart the second you poke it: that if a freelancer billing €137k a year is pushed off this structure, they simply become an employee earning €137k a year, and the treasury collects the difference. But that job at that number frequently doesn't exist on payroll, so best case the state collects far less than it imagined, and worst case it collects nothing, because the person just... leaves.

We're already seeing the reaction, higher earners are doing the maths, chasing international clients so their income no longer depends on this place at all, or quietly looking at where to move. They are looking at places with more opportunity, higher rates, lower taxes, and a government that isn't redesigning its rules every eighteen months specifically to catch them. When your most productive, most mobile people start treating your country as a problem to route around, the country should probably pay attention.

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I want to end where I started, because I don't want this to read like it came from someone who never wanted to pay in. For the better part of a decade, I did pay in at the highest labour-tax rates in the developed world, and I genuinely believed in the trade. I still believe healthcare, education and a floor under people are worth funding. I am not trying to opt out of that.

But you cannot run the most expensive labour market on earth, staff six governments and nine health ministers on top of it, watch your factories close one by one, and then decide the real problem, the pocket that finally needs emptying, is the one-person company with a laptop and two clients. Calling that solidarity doesn't make much sense to me. It feels like eating the seed corn and calling it a harvest.

The hole is real and it does need filling; chasing off the last people still willing to build something here is a strange way to do it. More of us are noticing that the cheapest way to stop being the target... is to stop being here.

I wish I could dismiss this as a bad mood, but the maths keeps pointing in the same direction.