€95 an hour is not €95: what an IT contractor in the Netherlands actually nets

Start with the hours you cannot invoice

The rate applies only to billable hours. Acquisition, admin, your own tooling, unpaid holidays, sick days and the weeks between assignments are all real hours that no client pays for. A contractor working something like a normal year still bills far fewer hours than they work — which is why comparing a freelance rate to a salary by multiplying by 2,080 produces a number that never arrives.

The table

A zzp’er at €95 an hour with €8,000 of business costs, computed on modelled 2026 rules. Net is what reaches your pocket; the last column divides that net by 1,800 hours actually worked, billable or not.

• 1,000 billable hours — €95,000 invoiced · €63,599 net · 66.9% kept · €64 per billable hour · €35 per hour worked
• 1,225 billable hours — €116,375 invoiced · €74,644 net · 64.1% kept · €61 per billable hour · €41 per hour worked
• 1,400 billable hours — €133,000 invoiced · €83,002 net · 62.4% kept · €59 per billable hour · €46 per hour worked
• 1,600 billable hours — €152,000 invoiced · €93,276 net · 61.4% kept · €58 per billable hour · €52 per hour worked

The 1,225-hour line

The urencriterium — 1,225 hours a year spent on your business — gates the zelfstandigenaftrek and several other entrepreneur deductions. Note that it counts hours worked on the business, not billable hours, so acquisition and admin count toward it. It is a cliff, not a slope: 1,224 hours and you get nothing.

What has changed is how much is riding on it. The zelfstandigenaftrek is €1,200 for 2026, down from €2,470 in 2025 and heading to €900 in 2027. It used to be a substantial reason to structure your year around the criterion. It is now a modest amount that is still worth having, and worth logging your hours for, but no longer worth distorting a business around.

The largest lever, and its catch

At 1,400 billable hours, the optimizer’s biggest single finding on this profile is pension: €31,748 of jaarruimte available, worth €15,715 in tax on that year’s income. That dwarfs anything else on the list, and it is the main reason a zzp’er’s effective tax bill can differ so much from a colleague’s on the same rate.

The catch is that this is not cash. Money into a lijfrente is money you cannot touch until retirement, and it is taxed when it comes out — the benefit is the rate difference and the deferral, not an exemption. It is the right lever for someone genuinely building a pension and the wrong one for someone who needs the liquidity within a few years.

What to do with a rate offer

Before you accept or counter, work out the number that actually matters: expected billable hours × rate, minus costs, run through tax, divided by the hours you expect to work. A €5 increase on the rate is worth roughly €7,000 gross a year at 1,400 hours — but so is billing 75 more hours, or moving your pension contribution, and those may be easier to negotiate with yourself than with a client.