Belgium Severance Pay: How the Ontslagvergoeding / Indemnité de Rupture Is Calculated

When a Belgian employer or an employee ends a contract of indefinite duration and the notice period is not worked in full, the law does not leave the amount owed open to negotiation. The payment is called the ontslagvergoeding in Dutch and the indemnité de rupture in French, and article 39 of the wet van 3 juli 1978 betreffende de arbeidsovereenkomsten (the loi du 3 juillet 1978 relative aux contrats de travail) fixes what it covers and how it is calculated.

The figure that drives everything is not on this page: it is the notice period that would otherwise have applied, set out in the federal notice scale, with a calculator. This page assumes that number is already known and covers what happens next: which pay counts toward the calculation, what CAO nr. 109 / CCT 109 adds on top of an unreasonable dismissal, the penalty for not explaining a dismissal on request, and how severance interacts with unemployment benefit from the RVA / ONEM.

Information last verified on 21 July 2026. This page provides general legal information and does not constitute legal advice in an individual case.

Protected categories: the general rules above may not apply to you

The severance calculation described on this page is the general rule for a typical dismissal. It does not apply as described to a worker who falls into one of the protected categories below. Each carries its own fixed indemnity, and in some cases its own procedure, in place of the general severance rule.

• Pregnant workers. Under article 40 of the arbeidswet van 16 maart 1971, protection runs from the moment the employer is informed of the pregnancy until one month after the end of the postnatal rest period. An unjustified dismissal within that window carries a fixed indemnity of six months' gross pay.
• Union delegates and candidates in social elections. Under the wet van 19 maart 1991, the fixed indemnity is set by seniority: two years' pay under 10 years of seniority, three years' pay from 10 to under 20 years, and four years' pay from 20 years onward. Where reinstatement is requested and refused within 30 days, the employer owes that amount plus wages for the remaining time until the end of the electoral mandate.
• Prevention advisers. Under article 10 of the wet van 20 december 2002, the indemnity is two years' pay under 15 years of service as prevention adviser, and three years' pay from 15 years onward. A special procedure applies before any dismissal: the employer must notify the adviser and seek the prior agreement of the CPBW / CPPT committee, and where that agreement is refused or not given in time, the employer must obtain the labour inspector's advice before proceeding.
• Time credit (tijdskrediet). Under article 21 of CAO nr. 103, protection starts three months before the requested start date where the employer has more than 20 staff, or six months before where it has 20 or fewer, and ends three months after the credit period ends. A violation carries an indemnity of six months' pay.
• Thematic leave (parental leave, leave for medical assistance, palliative care leave). This rests on a separate instrument from time credit above: under article 101 of the herstelwet van 22 januari 1985, protection runs from the day the leave is agreed or requested until three months after it ends. A violation carries an indemnity of six months' gross pay.

These protection indemnities do not stack with each other or with ordinary severance. Where a protected category applies, its own indemnity replaces the general rule described above rather than adding to it.

How the indemnity is set: the notice period drives the amount

Belgian notice law offers two routes to end a contract of indefinite duration: dismissal with notice, where the contract keeps running through the notice period, or dismissal with immediate effect against payment of an indemnity. This page covers the second route.

The rule in article 39 is direct. The indemnity equals the current pay corresponding to the length of notice that would have applied, or to whatever part of that notice remains if some was already worked. One figure carries the whole calculation: the number of weeks generated by the seniority-based notice scale. That scale, and the two 2026 reforms changing it for contracts starting from 1 June and 1 August 2026, are set out on the Belgium law hub and are not repeated here, because getting the weeks right is a calculation exercise in its own right, and the wrong number makes every later step wrong too.

Once the number of weeks is fixed, the indemnity is produced by converting that many weeks of pay, as defined below, into a lump sum.

What counts as pay for the calculation

Article 39 does not simply mean gross monthly salary. The base is what the statute calls lopend loon, current pay, plus every benefit already acquired under the contract.

Included in the base:

• Fixed gross monthly salary.
• Shift and production premiums that form a regular part of pay.
• Overtime pay that recurs regularly enough to count as normal remuneration rather than a one-off.
• Any benefit owed under the contract itself, a statute, a CCT (collectieve arbeidsovereenkomst / convention collective de travail) applicable to the employer, custom (gewoonte / usage), or a unilateral employer commitment, for example a company car, meal vouchers, group insurance, or a bonus scheme the employer has bound itself to.

Excluded from the base:

• Gifts and liberalities: payments the employer made voluntarily, without being bound to repeat them.
• Costs belonging to the employer rather than to the employee's pay, such as a phone provided solely for professional use. Reimbursing a genuine business expense is not remuneration, even where it appears on a payslip.

Two further rules apply. Variable pay, meaning anything not a fixed amount month to month such as commission or variable premiums, is averaged over the 12 months immediately before the dismissal rather than taken from a single unusually high or low month. And where a monthly figure needs to become a weekly one, because the notice scale is expressed in weeks, the statutory conversion is to multiply the monthly salary by 3 and divide by 13, not to divide by an approximate weeks-per-month figure.

Eindejaarspremie, vakantiegeld, and employer RSZ contributions

Three items come up in almost every real severance calculation, and they resolve differently.

Eindejaarspremie (year-end bonus): included. The governing test under article 39 is that any benefit the employee has a right to, whether through the contract itself, a statute, a CCT, custom, or a unilateral employer commitment, forms part of the base; only a genuine gift or liberality is excluded. A year-end bonus owed under a CCT or established custom is included in the severance base by direct application of that test.

Employer social security contributions (patronale RSZ): not part of the employee's payout. The indemnity is treated as ordinary pay, and the employer's RSZ contributions on that pay are a separate statutory liability the employer owes to the RSZ. They are never an amount added to what the employee receives.

Vakantiegeld (holiday pay): a narrower caveat remains. The same general benefit test applies to holiday pay as to any other benefit. What is not resolved by the sources relied on for this page is the more granular split: how the single and double holiday pay components are each treated, and how that treatment differs between an arbeider and a bediende. That narrower question, not whether holiday pay counts at all, is the part to confirm against the applicable paritair comité / commission paritaire, or with the FOD Werkgelegenheid / SPF Emploi, before relying on a specific figure.

When a dismissal is kennelijk onredelijk: CAO nr. 109 / CCT 109

Ordinary severance compensates for notice that was not worked. It says nothing about whether the dismissal itself was reasonable. That question is answered separately, by Collectieve Arbeidsovereenkomst nr. 109 (Convention Collective de Travail n° 109), concluded within the Nationale Arbeidsraad / Conseil National du Travail and generally referred to as CAO 109 or CCT 109.

Under CAO nr. 109, a dismissal is kennelijk onredelijk, manifestly unreasonable, where it rests on grounds unconnected to the employee's fitness or conduct and not dictated by the business's operational needs, of a kind no normal and reasonable employer would ever have decided on. Where a court reaches that conclusion, it can order an indemnity of 3 to 17 weeks' pay, scaled to how far the dismissal departs from what a reasonable employer would do, in addition to the ordinary severance above.

CAO nr. 109 applies to private-sector employees with at least 6 months' seniority with the employer. Successive contracts in the same role, including fixed-term or temporary-agency placements, count toward that threshold.

The agreement carries a full list of exclusions. It does not apply to:

• Temporary agency workers, for the duration of their agency assignment.
• Employees under a student contract.
• Dismissals connected to the SWT/RCC early-unemployment scheme (formerly brugpensioen).
• Dismissals given once the employee has reached statutory pension age and pension entitlement.
• Closures and collective or multiple dismissals, governed by their own separate rules.
• Dismissals already subject to a specific statutory or CCT procedure, such as for social-election-protected staff representatives or prevention advisers.
• Dismissal for urgent cause, but only for the right-to-know-the-reasons chapter next. It can still, separately, be tested for whether it was in fact justified.

Collective dismissals follow a separate information-and-consultation procedure under the Wet van 13 februari 1998 (known as the Wet Renault), with the step-by-step procedure set by CAO nr. 24, rather than the individual rules described on this page.

The right to know why you were dismissed

CAO nr. 109 also creates a right to be told the concrete reasons for a dismissal, separate from whether that dismissal turns out to be reasonable.

A dismissed employee can request those reasons in writing within 2 months of the contract ending, where it ended immediately, or, where notice was given, within 6 months of the notice being given, capped at 2 months after the contract actually ends. Once requested, the employer has 2 months to answer with the concrete reasons.

An employer that fails to answer within that window, or answers without actually giving the concrete reasons, faces a flat civil penalty of 2 weeks' pay, owed regardless of the actual harm caused. This 2-week penalty is cumulable with any indemnity awarded for a manifestly unreasonable dismissal above; the two are assessed separately, and both can apply to the same dismissal.

The two mechanisms answer different questions. The reasons-request procedure asks only whether the employer explained itself properly and on time. The kennelijk onredelijk test asks whether the underlying decision was one a reasonable employer would ever have made.

How severance affects unemployment benefit: the RVA / ONEM

Severance and unemployment benefit do not run side by side. Under the rules administered by the RVA (Rijksdienst voor Arbeidsvoorziening) or ONEM (Office National de l'Emploi) in French-speaking Belgium, no unemployment benefit is payable for the period already covered by a termination indemnity. The weeks of pay in the ontslagvergoeding are treated as though the employee were still earning wages, and benefit only starts once that covered period has run out.

Where the employer has not actually paid the indemnity it owes, provisional unemployment benefits can be made available under conditions. That provisional payment is not free-standing: the RVA / ONEM steps into the employee's position against the employer for the amount advanced, a subrogation mechanism, and the relevant forms (C4.2 / C4.2bis) start a process with a one-year deadline to pursue the claim.

The C4 form the employer issues on the last working day lets the RVA / ONEM work out how much of the severance period is already covered, so an incomplete or late C4 is a common reason a claim stalls.

Outplacement: two regimes, not two layers

Belgian law provides outplacement counselling on dismissal, but the general regime and the 45-plus regime are mutually exclusive alternatives, not layers that stack on top of each other.

General regime (articles 11/1 and 11/5 of the wet van 5 september 2001) applies where the notice period or indemnity is at least 30 weeks. It provides 60 hours of counselling, valued at one twelfth of annual pay, with a floor of 1,800 euro and a ceiling of 5,500 euro, both prorated for part-time work. That floor and ceiling apply only to an indemnity-based dismissal, not to a dismissal where notice is actually worked. The employer's offer must come within 4 weeks of the notice period starting, or within 15 days of the contract ending for an indemnity-based dismissal; the worker then has 4 weeks to respond, and silence counts as acceptance.

The 45-plus regime (the wet van 5 september 2001 together with CAO nr. 82) applies instead of the general regime where the notice period or indemnity is under 30 weeks, the worker is 45 or older, has at least one year of uninterrupted seniority, and works in the private sector. It provides 60 hours of counselling across three phases of at least 20 hours each, within a 12-month cap. The offer deadline is 15 days, and the worker has one month to accept.

The 1,800 euro and 5,500 euro figures are flat statutory amounts. They are not indexed and do not change annually.

Sector agreements can improve on all of this

Everything above is the federal floor set by the wet van 3 juli 1978 and by CAO nr. 109, not necessarily the ceiling. Belgian employment is organised into sectors, each under a paritair comité (commission paritaire), a joint body of employer and union representatives that negotiates its own CCTs on pay, bonuses, and supplementary dismissal terms. Where an agreement is made generally binding by Royal Decree (algemeen verbindend verklaring), it binds every employer within that committee's scope, member of an employers' federation or not. Check whether the paritair comité / commission paritaire covering a given employer has agreed anything better. Where the paritair comité covering an employer is not already known, the official lookup tool at public-search.werk.belgie.be allows a search by a committee number or name already known, or browsing the full list; it is not a wizard that identifies a committee from a description of the work performed. Where the committee genuinely cannot be identified this way, the official route is a written advisory request to the Labour Law Inspection, which takes at least four months and produces non-binding advice, since only the labour courts can settle the question definitively.

The deadline that ends every claim

Article 15 of the wet van 3 juli 1978 time-bars claims arising from an employment contract at the earlier of two points: one year after the contract ends, or five years after the fact giving rise to the claim, whichever comes first. The five-year branch is itself capped so that it can never run past one year after the contract ends. The scope is broad, covering actions arising from the contract in general, which includes both a claim for unpaid severance and a challenge to a dismissal.

Where severance is paid in instalments under article 39bis, a separate sub-rule applies: the one-year period runs from the last monthly instalment actually paid by the employer, not from the date the contract ended.

This deadline does not pause while a claim is negotiated informally, and it does not pause while a dispute with the RVA / ONEM is working its way to a resolution.

This page provides general information about Belgian severance pay and does not constitute legal advice for an individual case. Confirm current rules against the wet van 3 juli 1978, CAO nr. 109, and the FOD Werkgelegenheid / SPF Emploi or RVA / ONEM before relying on them.