Contributions and employer cost

Two very different things called “contributions”

Dutch payslips carry two kinds of premiums that are easy to confuse, and this page keeps them apart. The first are the national-insurance contributions (premies volksverzekeringen) — these belong to you but are already baked into the wage tax. The second are the employer levies (werkgeversheffingen) — these are paid by your employer, on top of your gross, and never come out of your net pay at all. The percentages on this page are those in force for 2026; nobody has signed them off.

National-insurance contributions: inside the first bracket

The national-insurance contributions fund three universal schemes: the state pension (AOW), survivor benefits (Anw) and long-term care (Wlz). Together they come to 27,65%, made up of 17,90% for AOW, 0,10% for Anw and 9,65% for Wlz. They are levied only on income up to € 38.883 — the top of the first tax bracket.

The crucial point: they are not a separate deduction. The first wage-tax bracket of 35,75% already contains them — that 35,75% is the 8,10% income-tax slice plus the 27,65% contributions added together. So this calculator does not subtract the contributions a second time; showing them as their own portion of the first bracket is a way of explaining where that 35,75% comes from, not an extra charge on your pay. This decomposition is corroborated (Accountancy Vanmorgen); the primary Staatscourant regeling is not quoted directly here.

Employer levies: a cost on top of your gross

Separately, your employer pays a set of levies calculated on your pay but charged to the employer — the werkgeversheffingen. For a standard permanent contract the usual set is the health-insurance contribution (Zvw, 6,10%), the unemployment fund at the low permanent-contract rate (AWf-laag, 2,74%), the disability fund (Aof-laag, 6,27%), the return-to-work fund (Whk, a sector-average 1,52%) and the childcare surcharge (Wko, 0,50%) — roughly 17,13% on top of gross for that default set. They are charged on pay up to a maximum contribution base of € 79.409 a year.

None of this reduces your net pay. It is the gap between what you cost your employer (your “total labour cost”) and your gross salary — which is why the calculator shows the employer cost as a separate row, never as a slice taken out of your take-home. These employer rates are intake-sourced and corroborated, and the UWV/Belastingdienst Nieuwsbrief Loonheffingen 2026 is named as their primary. The Whk in particular is differentiated per employer in practice — the sector average is shown for illustration only.

National insurance, employee insurance — and the words in between

Dutch law knows two families of social insurance, and the names explain most of the confusion. The volksverzekeringen (national insurance) are the AOW, Anw and Wlz above: you owe those yourself, and they sit inside the wage tax. The werknemersverzekeringen (employee insurance) provide cover against unemployment, sickness and incapacity — WW, ZW, WIA and WAO. Your employer owes those premiums, and by law may not recover them from you; the AWf, Aof and Whk rates above belong to that family. The Zvw levy and the childcare surcharge both sit outside it: the Zvw contribution comes from the Health Insurance Act, and the childcare surcharge is a surcharge on the Aof premium that funds the childcare allowance under the Childcare Act, not the Wfsv. So of the five rates above, three are employee insurance and two are not.

What people call “employer costs”, “employer contributions”, “social charges” or sociale lasten is usually just that employer-side total, added up. None of those phrases appears in the statutes governing these premiums, and different calculators put different items into the total — which is why the rates here are listed per item rather than as a single number. The figure a payslip calls the sv-loon is the wage base those employer premiums are charged on, capped per employer at the maximum contribution base named above.

Why it matters for your net

Keeping the two apart explains a common question: “where are my social contributions on the payslip?” For someone below the AOW age in ordinary employment, they are inside the wage tax, not a separate withholding — so the single loonheffing figure is genuinely the whole employee-side deduction. What the employer pays on top is real money, but it is the employer’s cost, not yours. See the wage-tax page for how the tax credits then reduce that combined figure.