An event rarely runs on employees. The lighting engineer invoices through a one-person company, security is hired in, the photographer bills by the day, the bar coordinator is that friend with a company registration, and everyone else is a volunteer. That has been the normal state of affairs in the events industry for decades.
Since 1 January 2025 the Dutch tax authority has been looking at that again. And since 1 January 2026 a fine can come with it.
Updated on 5 October 2026: the Self-Employment Act is no longer an announcement but a concrete draft — the cabinet opened the bill for public consultation on 1 October 2026, with a self-employment test and a working-relationship test. Earlier addition (21 September 2026): the presumption of an employment contract at an hourly rate below roughly € 38 is no longer a plan but law, and takes effect on 31 December 2026.
This article covers Dutch rules. If you organise events elsewhere in the EU, the pattern will look familiar — most member states have tightened worker-classification enforcement in the past few years — but the thresholds, schemes and dates below are specific to the Netherlands.
What actually changed
The Dutch DBA Act has been in force since 2016, but for years an enforcement moratorium applied: the tax authority could establish false self-employment, but would not correct it. That moratorium ended on 1 January 2025. Since then the ordinary rules apply again: if misclassification is established, a correction obligation or an additional payroll tax assessment follows.
What 2025 did not include was fines. That year was meant as a run-up. This year is different. The tax authority puts it plainly on its enforcement page: from 1 January 2026 it can impose offence penalties, and it is still not imposing default penalties in 2026.
Two things to know alongside that:
- Assessments do not reach back further than 1 January 2025. The exception is deliberate abuse, or ignoring an earlier formal instruction. Then the authority can go back up to five years.
- The bill lands with you, not with the person you hired. Payroll taxes are the client's obligation. For an event that means the foundation or association organising it — the same legal entity that applies for the permit and sells the tickets.
An offence penalty is not a fixed amount either, but a percentage of the tax assessed, applied where there is intent or gross negligence. For a village festival it will rarely come to that. For a festival that hires in half a production team, it is the kind of amount you would rather not discover in the same year you have a funding application for 2027 running.
What the tax authority looks at
The three classic features of employment are work, pay and authority. But the tax authority states explicitly that those three on their own are not enough: all facts and circumstances of the relationship count. Since the Supreme Court's Deliveroo ruling this has become a weighing of the whole picture, not the ticking of a list.
In practice, for an event it comes down to four questions.
Is the work embedded in your organisation? Does the person do the same work as people you actually employ, or work that touches the core of what you do? A caterer running their own food truck is not embedded. A bar coordinator running your bar, using your till system and directing your staff, is.
Could you give them the same instructions as an employee? This is the authority question, and the tax authority calls a "yes" a strong indication of an employment relationship. Prescribing working hours, making a crew briefing mandatory, deciding the order in which work happens — that is direction.
Does it have to be them personally? Can the person send a replacement without asking you, or do you specifically want that individual? Note that free substitution on paper no longer helps the way it once did. Approval of model agreements that relied on it was withdrawn after Deliveroo, and since 6 September 2024 no new model agreements are issued at all.
Do they behave like a business? Multiple clients, own equipment, own rate, own liability insurance, own risk of a bad year. That is the counterweight.
None of the four decides the matter on its own. Together they draw the picture an inspector looks at.
Three groups on your site, three regimes
The confusing thing about an event is that three different tax regimes sit side by side on one field.
Hired crew
Technical, security, first aid, production, photography. Everything above applies in full. The biggest risk is not the specialist you hire for a single day who spends the rest of the season working for others — that is a business. The risk sits with the core: the people who are there every year, who are in the run sheet, who effectively form your production team and only send invoices on paper.
Artists
Performances have their own scheme: the artists and professional sportspeople scheme. If you hire a band or artist who does not work through an agency that withholds tax, you as the organiser may be obliged to withhold payroll taxes on the fee and file a return. There is a fee declaration form for this, which the artist completes and hands to you before you pay out. This is not a misclassification question but a separate obligation — and it is the step associations skip most often.
Volunteers
The volunteer scheme is the safe harbour, as long as you stay within the limits. For 2026 the tax authority sets those at € 5.75 per hour for someone aged 21 or over (€ 3.40 below that), capped at € 220 per month and € 2,200 per year. Benefits in kind count towards it — the free weekend ticket, the drink tokens, the gift voucher afterwards.
The trap is the volunteer who is really crew. Someone who spends three weeks full-time on the build and receives "an allowance" above those amounts is no longer a volunteer. So keep your volunteer hours as tidy as the paperwork that backs up your permit and evacuation record.
What is coming
The legislation here has not settled yet, and it is fair to say so. In March 2026 the cabinet announced that the clarification part of the VBAR bill would be dropped — according to minister Aartsen there was too little support and too much unrest. In its place comes a Zelfstandigenwet, a Self-Employment Act, which KVK lists as intended to take effect on 1 January 2028.
That act now has a text. On 1 October 2026 the cabinet opened the draft for public consultation (in Dutch); responses are open until 29 October via internetconsultatie.nl. The proposal works with two tests. The self-employment test looks at the contractor: do they invoice themselves, are they registered with the Chamber of Commerce (KVK), how many clients do they have, and have they made provisions against entrepreneurial risk? The working-relationship test looks at the job: is the contractor free to organise the work themselves, and do they carry it out at their own expense and risk? As a client, the second test is the one that concerns you most — it is about how you set up the assignment, not about what is on someone's KVK extract. It remains a draft: after the consultation it still has to pass the Council of State and both houses of parliament, and the content can change along the way. If you have a view on how this works out for casual event crew, now is the time to give it.
One element is arriving sooner: a legal presumption for low rates. The Dutch Senate passed that law on 16 June 2026, and it takes effect on 31 December 2026. If someone works for you at an hourly rate below roughly € 38 (reference date 1 January 2026, indexed annually with the minimum wage), they can invoke a presumed employment contract, and it falls to you to show there is none. For a festival with bar staff, parking marshals and hosts on a modest hourly rate, that is the provision to watch.
Beyond that, nothing changes about what applies now until the Self-Employment Act arrives. Enforcement is running, the fine has been possible since January, and the law meant to make the assessment easier is not here yet. So review your rates for bar, parking and host crew before the end of this year.
What you can do this autumn
No panic measures. Three things that cost little:
- List everyone you pay. Note the regime (employee, freelancer, artist, volunteer), how many days a year, and whether that person also works elsewhere. You will see the core group at a glance.
- Look at practice, not at the contract. For each person in the core, ask: could I direct them like an employee? May they send a replacement? Do they bring their own equipment? Where the answer is uncomfortable, that is your exposure.
- Sort out artist fee declarations before you pay. Fixing it afterwards costs more effort than having the form filled in up front.
And do not be afraid to simply offer someone a contract. A bar rota of three weekends a year works fine as a temporary employment contract. It costs you employer charges, but it does not cost you an argument after the fact.
What it comes down to with this kind of subject is that your administration has to be able to tell the story: who did what, how much, and why. That holds for your hired crew as much as it does for your permit and your raffle or bingo licence.
At MijnEvent we make sure the ticketing side of that adds up: every order, every payout and every invoice is named and traceable, without a separate set of books alongside it. See what that costs or create an account and set up your first event — then at least that part of the paperwork is in order.
Legislation changes and tariffs are revised annually. We do our best to keep this article current and link to the source where we can, but we cannot guarantee everything still holds at the moment you read it. If a decision carries financial or legal consequences, check with the authority itself or put it to a lawyer or adviser. See also our general disclaimer.
