Dutch law now presumes employment under 38 euros an hour, and the company carries the proof

The 38 euro line is a pay test standing in for a work test, which is what makes it awkward to administer. At 40 hours a week across 52 weeks it comes to roughly 79,000 euros a year ^[9], so the presumption reaches well past the bottom of the market and into ordinary mid-level work bought by the hour.

With the burden reversed, the company's defence is whatever it can show about how the work is actually done. The questions every European misclassification test asks are about conduct: who decides when and how the work happens, whether the person has other clients, whose equipment they use, whether they can send a substitute, who absorbs the loss when the work is bad, and whether they sit inside the company's teams and management structure ^[5]. None of them look at the agreement ^[5]. The in-house version TNW proposes is to describe someone's working week to an outsider with the words contractor and employee removed, then ask which one they heard, on the argument that an auditor will land on the same answer ^[6].

The cheapest triage before any of that is the calendar. Work with an end date, a defined scope and a deliverable behaves like a contract; if nobody can name the date the engagement ends, it is not a project ^[7]. The case that fails is the stopgap contractor still in place two years later, which TNW calls an employment relationship nobody converted and the profile enforcement goes looking for ^[8].

Read the source for what it is: a structural argument, not a compliance brief. It gives the year the Netherlands resumed enforcing its false self-employment rules and the year penalties returned ^[3], and the month the senate passed the presumption ^[2], but no penalty schedule and no commencement date ^[17]. Exposure cannot be priced off this material. What can be settled internally is which side of the test each engagement sits on, which is the part no vendor can do for you.

The four models are stages rather than rivals, and most companies pass through several in the same market inside five years ^[12]. A contractor of record contracts the freelancer, absorbs the classification assessment and takes the misclassification liability ^[13]. An employer of record already holds the local entity, runs payroll and withholding, and holds the contract while you direct the work ^[14]. Your own entity puts the liability back with you, along with payroll registration, statutory filings and local accounting ^[15]. Sequencing is the real decision, and the ordering is usually wrong: TNW notes that the passport question removes the choice more often than duration or working pattern do, and that companies tend to discover it last ^[18].