There is one question I get more than any other from foreign head offices, and it always comes about three weeks too late.
“How many sick days does she have left?”
None. That is not how it works here. You will be paying her salary for up to two years, and for those two years you cannot dismiss her.
I have had that conversation with an American software company, with an Asian gaming firm setting up its European base in Amsterdam, and with a logistics business running a Dutch warehouse from an office three time zones away. The pause on the other end of the line is always about the same length. By the time I am on the call, one or two things have usually already gone wrong.
Sick leave here is a liability, not a balance
Dutch employment law does not recognise a pot of sick days. From the first day of absence, the employer owes wage payment for up to 104 weeks. The legal minimum is 70 percent of salary, with a floor at the statutory minimum wage during the first year, but most collective agreements and contracts push that to full pay in year one and 70 percent in year two.
Two years, whatever the size of your company, and whether or not the illness has anything to do with the job. On top of that there is a statutory ban on dismissal for the duration.
Dutch employers budget for this. They insure it. Foreign parent companies read it off a spreadsheet and assume someone has made a mistake. I have been asked more than once whether we could simply transition the person out, and the answer is no. Not lawfully, not during illness, and attempting it anyway is a reliable way to turn a forty thousand euro problem into a two hundred thousand euro one.
This is also not a rare event. Just over half of Dutch employees called in sick at least once during 2025. National absence ran at 5.4 percent for the year, and 5.8 percent in the first quarter of 2026, against a long-run average of 5 percent since 1996. For employers with more than a hundred staff the figure sits nearer 6 percent. If you employ people in the Netherlands, you will use this system sooner or later.
You are not allowed to know what is wrong
This one produces real friction, especially with managers used to a doctor’s note as standard practice.
You may not ask an employee about the nature of the illness, the symptoms, the diagnosis or the treatment. If they tell you anyway, you may not write it down. What you may ask is when they expect to return, whether the work played a part, how to reach them, and whether there is anything they can still do.
The managers who get into trouble here are almost never being difficult. They are being kind. They ask how the operation went, they follow up on a hospital appointment, they mention it in a team meeting so colleagues know. All of that is a data protection breach, and the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens has fined employers for exactly this.
The fix is a fifteen minute briefing for line managers on the four questions they are allowed to ask, and a rule that anything medical goes to the company doctor and nowhere else.
The bedrijfsarts decides. You do not, and neither does the GP
The bedrijfsarts, the company doctor, is the only party who assesses what someone can and cannot do. Not HR, not the manager, and not the employee’s own physician, who has no role in this process whatsoever.
Every employer in the Netherlands is required to have a basic contract with a certified occupational health service. International companies tend to find this out during their first long absence case, when they discover they either never arranged one or bought a package that does not include case management. That discovery normally lands around week six, which is the week a statutory deadline was already due.
The clock starts on day one
Reintegration in the Netherlands runs on a fixed timetable, set out in the Wet verbetering poortwachter. Miss the deadlines and the UWV can extend your wage payment obligation by up to another 52 weeks. A third year of salary, because the file was thin.
| When | What has to happen |
|---|---|
| Day 1 | Employee reports sick, registered with the arbodienst within a week |
| Week 6 | Company doctor issues the problem analysis |
| Week 8 | Written plan of action agreed with the employee |
| Every 6 weeks | Documented progress evaluation |
| Week 42 | Long-term absence notified to UWV |
| Week 52 | First-year evaluation, and the moment to look seriously at work outside your own organisation |
| Week 88 | Final evaluation and reintegration file completed |
| Week 93 | Employee applies to UWV for disability benefit |
| Week 104 | Wage payment obligation ends, unless a sanction says otherwise |
The costliest mistake I come across is the wait-and-see period at the start. Head office hears that someone is off sick, decides to give it time, and nobody opens a file. Eight months later there is no problem analysis, no plan of action, three evaluations that never happened, and a UWV assessor who is not remotely interested in the explanation that the parent company was unfamiliar with Dutch procedure.
When the employee will not cooperate
Employers are not without options. If someone skips company doctor appointments, refuses suitable work or cannot be reached, wage payment can be suspended or stopped. But loonopschorting and loonstop apply in different situations, and picking the wrong one, or applying either without a written warning first, usually means paying the money out in the end anyway.
If you disagree with the company doctor, or the employee does, either side can ask the UWV for an expert opinion, a deskundigenoordeel. It costs very little and it settles a surprising number of standoffs before a lawyer gets involved.
What the companies who handle this well actually do
They sort out the occupational health contract before they need it, with case management included rather than the bare legal minimum. They treat absence as a line management job rather than something HR administers, because regular documented contact with the employee shortens absence more than anything else on this list. They put the Poortwachter dates in the diary on the day someone reports sick, all of them, and let the absence system trigger the reminders. And they explain the two-year liability to head office in a quiet quarter, not in the middle of a live case, because that conversation is much harder when there is a name attached to it.
None of this is complicated once you have been through it a few times. It is just different from almost everywhere else, it costs real money when the paperwork slips, and unfamiliarity is not a defence anyone at the UWV accepts.
Dealing with a long absence and not sure your file would survive a UWV review? HRhelp works with international employers in the Netherlands on absence management, reintegration files and occupational health arrangements. Get in touch via hrhelp.nl.
