Belgium Resignation Notice: How Much Notice You Owe as an Employee (2026)

When an employee resigns in Belgium, the opzegtermijn, or préavis in French, does not disappear just because the employee is the one ending the contract. A separate statutory scale sets how much notice a resigning employee owes: article 37/2 paragraph 2 of the wet van 3 juli 1978 betreffende de arbeidsovereenkomsten, the loi du 3 juillet 1978 relative aux contrats de travail. It produces a shorter, capped result than the notice an employer owes for the same seniority.

This page covers the employee side only: opzegtermijn ontslagnemer, or préavis démission. It also covers tegenopzeg, the contre-préavis rule that lets a resigning employee shorten their own notice after finding a new job during an employer's notice period, and the strict rules on how a resignation actually has to be delivered. For the employer's notice scale, and a calculator that applies both sides, see the Belgium employment law hub and the notice period calculator, which handles this resignation scale as well.

Information last verified on 22 July 2026. This page provides general legal information and does not constitute legal advice in an individual case.

How much notice you owe if you resign

Article 37/2 paragraph 2 sets a single scale based on seniority, and it applies regardless of when your contract started. That is a genuine difference from the employer's notice scale, which currently runs under four separate regimes depending on the contract's start date. The resignation scale has no equivalent split; the same table applies whether the contract began in 2015 or last month.

The 13-week figure at 8 years is a hard cap, not just the last row of a table. Unlike the employer's scale, which keeps growing by a week per year of seniority well past 20 years, the resignation scale stops accruing at 13 weeks no matter how many further years an employee stays.

The 1 August 2026 reform: the first six months become a flat week

The wet van 3 juni 2026 (NUMAC 2026201577), in force from 1 August 2026, rewrites article 37/2 for contracts starting on or after that date. It is easy to assume this reform only touches the employer's scale, since it is often discussed alongside the separate 52-week cap that took effect 1 June 2026. It does not: the 3 juni 2026 law changes all three scales in article 37/2, the employer's notice (paragraph 1), the resignation scale on this page (paragraph 2), and tegenopzeg (paragraph 3). For resignation notice specifically, it replaces the earlier 1 week and 2 week bands in the first six months with a single flat 1 week for the whole period.

This reform, like the separate 52-week employer cap, applies only to contracts that start on or after the change takes effect. A contract already running when 1 August 2026 arrives keeps using the earlier resignation scale, with its graduated 1 and 2 week bands, for the life of that contract.

Tegenopzeg: shortening your own notice for a new job

Tegenopzeg, contre-préavis in French, is a different situation from a straightforward resignation. It applies when your employer has already given you notice and you are working through that employer's notice period, but you find a new job before it ends. Article 37/2 paragraph 3 lets you shorten your own remaining notice on a separate, shorter scale, so you can start the new job sooner rather than waiting out the employer's full notice period.

This scale changes on the same date and in the same way as the resignation scale above. From 1 August 2026, for contracts starting on or after that date, the first two bands merge into a single flat week:

How to actually give your resignation

An employee has three valid ways to give notice: handing over a signed document (the employer's signature on your copy serves as proof of receipt), sending a registered letter, which takes effect on the third working day after it is sent, or using a bailiff's writ, a deurwaardersexploot or exploit d'huissier.

This is genuinely asymmetric. An employer may only use a registered letter or a bailiff's writ; simply handing an employee a letter is not valid notice from an employer, on pain of nullity. That restriction does not apply to an employee giving notice, which is why the handover method is listed above as an option for you but would not work the other way round.

Whichever method you use, keep proof of the date. That date, not the date the employer receives or reads it, is what the next section's Monday rule runs from.

When your notice period actually starts

Notice does not start the day after you resign. It starts on the Monday following the calendar week in which you gave notice, whichever day within that week you actually gave it. A resignation handed over on a Tuesday and one handed over on the following Sunday, in the same calendar week, both start their notice period on the same Monday.

Sector agreements can still change the picture

Everything above is the federal floor set by the wet van 3 juli 1978. Belgian employment is organised into sectors, each under a paritair comité, a commission paritaire, a joint body of employer and union representatives that can negotiate its own collective agreements. Where such an agreement is made generally binding by Royal Decree, it applies to every employer within that committee's scope. Whether one changes anything about resignation notice for a given sector is worth checking with the official committee lookup tool at public-search.werk.belgie.be before treating the statutory scale as the final word.

Use the calculator for your exact figure

Working out the right week count by hand means first identifying your exact seniority, then checking whether the 1 August 2026 reform applies to your contract, and, if you are serving out an employer's notice and have a new job lined up, applying the separate tegenopzeg scale on top. The Belgium notice period calculator runs all of this, including the resignation side covered on this page, so it works whether you are the one who was dismissed or the one who is resigning.

This page provides general information about Belgian resignation notice and does not constitute legal advice for an individual case. Confirm current rules against the wet van 3 juli 1978 and the FOD Werkgelegenheid / SPF Emploi before relying on them, and check whether a sectoral collective agreement changes anything for your employer.