How overtime works in the Netherlands

In the Netherlands, the core statute governing working time is the Arbeidstijdenwet(the “ATW”, Working Hours Act). It is essential to understand what the ATW does and does not regulate: it sets limits on how long people may work — a per-shift cap, a weekly ceiling with rolling averages, rest periods, and Sunday-work restrictions — to protect health and safety. It says nothing about a premium rate for the hours worked within or beyond those limits.

The figures below are the standaardregeling (standard regulation) — the default statutory rules that apply unless an employer and employees agree a collectieve regeling (via a CAO or works council) or an overlegregeling (individual consultation) that adjusts them within the ATW's outer bounds:

If you are arriving from a country with a national overtime multiplier, this is the single most important sentence in this guide: Dutch law mandates no statutory overtime premium at all. There is no legal “time-and-a-half”, no statutory 25% or 50% loading for working extra hours. The ATW limits how much you may work and how much rest you are owed; it does not set a higher rate for the hours you do work.

Whether overtime is paid at all, and at what rate, is a matter of what the CAO (collectieve arbeidsovereenkomst — collective labour agreement) or the individual employment contract says — not the statute book. Two employers in the same city, same industry, can lawfully pay very different overtime — or none at all.

Because there is no statutory floor for a premium, the numbers come from the contractual layer. In practice a Dutch overtime premium is set by one of:

There is one genuine statutory floor in play, but it is a floor on average pay across all hours worked, not on the premium: average hourly pay for the hours actually worked — including any unpaid or under-paid overtime — must not fall below the wettelijk minimumloon(statutory minimum wage) for the worker's age band, set under the Wet minimumloon en minimumvakantiebijslag. Since 1 January 2024 the statutory minimum has been a single hourly rate rather than a fixed monthly amount, and it is indexed twice a year, so cite the current schedule rather than a single figure that goes stale:

Because there is no statutory premium to tabulate, this worked example works differently: the real constraints are the ATW time and restrules, and any pay premium is whatever this employee's CAO or contract happens to say. Take a week where someone works long days on a contract that sets an illustrative +25% overtime supplement for hours beyond an agreed 40-hour week. The 25% here is illustrative and contractual — not a statutory rate, and not representative of any specific CAO. Dutch CAOs vary heavily by sector: some pay more, some pay less, and some set none at all.

The week totals exactly 48 hours— the ATW's headline figure. But that 48-hour number is an average over a 16-week reference period (and 55 hours over a 4-week period), not a hard weekly ceiling, and the true absolute per-week ceiling is 60 hours — so this single week is comfortably lawful on its own. Only if weeks like this recur often enough to push the rolling 4-week or 16-week averages over 55 or 48 hours would the averaging test (art. 5:7) — not a pay rate — become the binding constraint.

On this employee's contract, 40 hours are ordinary and the 8 hours beyond 40 attract the illustrative +25% supplement. Nothing in the statute produced that 25% — the contract did:

Because Dutch overtime premiums are set by CAO or individual contract rather than statute, In A Tick does not ship a fixed Dutch rate set — there is no built-in Netherlands ruleset in the product today. Instead you configure your own premiums — whatever your CAO or contracts set — as custom region rules, and the overtime calculation engine buckets and stacks them deterministically. The same timesheet always produces the same result: pay is never left to guesswork or to AI.

What In A Tick enforces regardless of what your premiums are: accurate capture of the hours actually worked from real clock times, a complete audit trail of how every figure was reached, and a deterministic, payroll-ready calculation you can hand to whoever runs pay. Those matter even where the law sets no premium floor — the numbers still have to be right, and defensible. We expect to help teams track the ATW's working-time averaging and rest entitlements themselves down the line.