Your employee asks whether the mileage allowance is going up. Or you are wrestling with it yourself: how much may you pay out tax-free, are you actually obliged to, and from how many kilometres does it apply? The travel allowance in 2026 is a maximum of € 0.25 per kilometre, and that amount changed halfway through the year.
In this article you will find what you may reimburse tax-free, when you are obliged to do so, how to calculate the allowance and what applies to the car, public transport, the bicycle and days working from home.
Update August 2026: the maximum tax-free mileage allowance was raised from € 0.23 to € 0.25 on 1 July 2026, with retroactive effect to 1 January 2026. Many sources still quote the old amount.
What is a travel allowance?
A travel allowance is the amount you pay an employee as an employer for the kilometres they travel for work. That covers commuting and business trips, for instance to a client or a supplier.
You decide how much you reimburse yourself, but the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration sets a limit on what you may pay out tax-free. That limit is called a specific exemption within the work-related costs scheme. Stay below it and no payroll tax is withheld on it and it does not use up any of your discretionary margin.
Go above it and the excess is simply salary. Travel costs are one type of tax-free allowance; the broader rules on what else you may reimburse tax-free are set out in expense allowances for your employees.
How much is the travel allowance in 2026?
In 2026 you may reimburse a maximum of € 0.25 per kilometre tax-free. That amount applies to both commuting and business trips, and it does not matter which means of transport your employee uses.
The increase from € 0.23 to € 0.25 took effect on 1 July 2026, but applies retroactively for the whole calendar year. Rising fuel prices were the reason.
The maximum mileage allowance per year
The amount stood still for years and has been raised in steps recently. This is how it ran:
Up to and including 2022: € 0.19 per kilometre
2023: € 0.21 per kilometre
2024 and 2025: € 0.23 per kilometre
2026: € 0.25 per kilometre
If you work with an allowance you set down years ago in a staff handbook or employment contract, chances are you are still on an old amount. That is allowed, but you are leaving tax-free room on the table.
Did you still reimburse € 0.23 in the first half of 2026?
Then you may still pay that € 0.02 per kilometre for the first months tax-free after the fact. Because the increase is retroactive to 1 January, that back payment falls entirely within the specific exemption.
So you do not have to withhold payroll tax on it. If you work with a payroll administrator, run through together which period the difference still covers and whether it will be processed in one go.
That back payment is not mandatory. The increase is a tax relaxation, not a pay rise. Whether your employee is entitled to the higher allowance depends on what you agreed.
If the employment contract says "the maximum tax-free allowance", it moves up with it. If it states a fixed amount of € 0.23, that continues to apply until you change it.
Is a travel allowance mandatory?
No, there is no statutory right to a travel allowance. As an employer you are not obliged to reimburse travel costs, and an employee cannot enforce it either if nothing has been agreed. That surprises many people, because it is so common in practice.
There are three places the obligation can arise from after all:
The collective labour agreement: many collective agreements arrange a travel allowance, sometimes with their own amount per kilometre and their own minimum distance. If you fall under a collective agreement, that takes precedence.
The employment contract: if you have set it down there, it is a term of employment and you cannot scrap it unilaterally.
The staff handbook or established practice: if you pay it out for years without reservation, an acquired right can arise.
Even if you are free not to do it, it remains worth considering. In a tight labour market the travel allowance is one of the first things candidates look at, and in tax terms it is one of the cheapest ways to give something extra: every euro reaches your employee net.
From how many kilometres do you get a travel allowance?
In tax terms there is no minimum distance. If someone lives two kilometres from the office, you may reimburse those two kilometres tax-free at € 0.25 per kilometre.
The Dutch Tax and Customs Administration sets neither a lower limit nor an upper limit on the number of kilometres. The reason so many people search for a minimum distance is the collective labour agreements. Those often do set a threshold, for instance that the allowance only starts from ten kilometres one way, or that a maximum number of kilometres is reimbursed.
So those limits come from the terms of employment, not from the tax rules. If you draw up your own scheme without a collective agreement, you set that threshold entirely yourself, or you leave it out.
Taxed or tax-free: what may you reimburse tax-free?
Up to € 0.25 per kilometre the allowance is tax-free. No payroll tax is withheld on it, it does not count as salary and it does not eat into the discretionary margin of the work-related costs scheme. So for your employee it is net.
If you reimburse more, for instance € 0.30 per kilometre, you have two options for the € 0.05 above the limit. You treat it as gross salary, after which payroll tax is simply withheld on it.
Or you designate it as final levy pay and place it in the discretionary margin of the work-related costs scheme, as long as there is room left. In that second case your employee notices nothing in their net pay.
A higher allowance is not unreasonable, because € 0.25 nowhere near covers the actual cost of running a car. If you count everything, so fuel, maintenance, insurance, road tax and depreciation, an average car comes out considerably higher than the tax allowance.
Calculating the travel allowance
The basic formula is simple: number of travel days times the return distance times the amount per kilometre. Note that you calculate with the return distance, because the allowance applies to all kilometres driven, not just the outward journey.
Take an employee who lives 25 kilometres from the office and comes in three days a week. Per travel day that is 50 kilometres, so 50 × € 0.25 = € 12.50 per day. If they work at the office 128 days a year, that comes to € 1,600 per year, or € 133.33 per month.
Fixed or variable: the 128-day rule
You can pay out per day travelled on the basis of an expense claim, or agree a fixed monthly amount. The latter is only allowed under conditions, and that is what the 128-day rule is for.
If an employee travels to a fixed workplace on at least 128 days in a calendar year, you may calculate the allowance as if they travel on 214 days. That 214 is the average number of working days per year after deducting weekends, holidays and public holidays.
If someone works part time or only comes in a few days a week, you calculate pro rata. At three days a week you use 3/5, so 3/5 of 214 is about 128 travel days, and the 128-day requirement then becomes 3/5 of 128, so about 77 days. That is how the worked example above came about.
The advantage of a fixed allowance is that you do not have to correct for illness, holidays or the occasional day working from home. That is already built into the method. One exception: if someone is absent for more than six consecutive weeks, you have to stop the fixed allowance.
Travel allowance per means of transport
The € 0.25 applies regardless of how someone travels. There are four situations with their own points to watch:
Car, motorcycle and moped: count the kilometres actually driven, return, at a maximum of € 0.25.
Public transport: you can choose between the actual costs or the per-kilometre rate.
Bicycle: you may also reimburse cycling kilometres at € 0.25 per kilometre.
Carpooling: who receives the allowance depends on who organises the carpool.
Car, motorcycle and moped
Nothing special applies here: you reimburse the kilometres actually driven. What you may not additionally reimburse tax-free is fuel, parking or toll charges for that same trip, because those are already built into the per-kilometre rate. If you reimburse those separately, that is salary.
If an employee drives a company car, you no longer reimburse kilometres. After all, they are already driving at the company’s expense, and an addition to taxable income applies for private use. The choice between a company car and a private car with a mileage allowance is a separate consideration with its own tax consequences.
Public transport
With public transport you can go two ways. You reimburse the costs actually incurred, so what the train ticket or the season ticket actually costs, and that may be entirely tax-free. Or you simply count the number of kilometres at a maximum of € 0.25. Usually the first route works out better for your employee, certainly over longer distances.
If you opt for the actual costs, you need evidence. Keep the travel tickets or an overview from the public transport card environment, so that you can demonstrate at an audit what the allowance was based on.
Bicycle
Cycling kilometres fall under the same scheme, so you may also reimburse them tax-free at € 0.25 per kilometre. For an employee who cycles ten kilometres there and back, that is € 2.50 per day.
An alternative is a company bicycle, but that is a separate scheme with its own addition to taxable income and therefore a different consideration.
Carpooling
If you organise the carpool yourself as an employer, you only reimburse the driver, at € 0.25 per kilometre including the kilometres they go out of their way to pick up colleagues.
If your employees arrange it among themselves, every passenger may have their own commuting kilometres reimbursed at € 0.25, but the driver’s detour kilometres cannot be reimbursed tax-free.
Travel costs and working from home
If someone works partly from home, the working-from-home allowance comes into play. In 2026 that is a maximum of € 2.45 per day working from home, against € 2.40 in 2025, and it is intended for extra costs at home such as heating and coffee. Like the travel allowance it is a specific exemption that does not use up any discretionary margin.
The main rule: on any one day you give either a travel allowance for commuting or a working-from-home allowance. Never both. If someone comes to the office in the morning and works from home in the afternoon, you have to choose.
What is allowed is reimbursing a business trip to a client on a work-from-home day on an expense-claim basis, because that is not commuting.
With hybrid working it is convenient to set down in writing at the start of the year how many days someone comes to the office and how many they work from home. Then you can apply the 128-day rule pro rata for both allowances and work with one fixed monthly amount, instead of having to work out every month who was where.
Mileage deduction for yourself as an entrepreneur
So far this has been about reimbursing employees. As an entrepreneur you have your own scheme, and that is often confused with the allowance paid to staff.
If you drive business kilometres in a means of transport that is privately yours, in 2026 you may deduct € 0.25 per business kilometre from your profit. That applies to entrepreneurs for income tax purposes, so freelancers, partners in a general partnership and partners in a professional partnership.
Three things go wrong here most often in practice:
Everything is included in that amount: you may not deduct fuel, insurance, maintenance, tolls and parking separately on top. They are already built into the € 0.25 per kilometre.
Commuting counts: for income tax purposes your trips to a fixed workplace count as business kilometres, unlike for employees.
Passing on costs is not the same as deducting: if you charge a client € 0.35 per kilometre, that is entirely turnover on which you charge 21% VAT, while you yourself still deduct a maximum of € 0.25.
To substantiate that deduction you need a mileage record. Note the date, the address, the number of kilometres and the business purpose for each trip. Without those records you cannot demonstrate at an audit what the deduction is based on.
Tracking your business trips without the hassle
Paying allowances to staff and deducting kilometres yourself both ask the same thing: records in which business and private are neatly separated.
If fuel stops, parking charges and train tickets run through your personal account, you will be sorting out what belongs where at every return, and you will have little to fall back on if the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration asks a question.
That is where GoDutch helps. GoDutch is not a bank, but a business account that brings your account, cards, invoices and expenses together in one app, with a connection to bookkeeping software such as Exact, Snelstart and Yuki.
If you pay on the road with your Debit Mastercard, the transaction appears in your expense overview immediately and you scan the receipt along with it in seconds. If your team needs their own cards for expenses and travel, you issue those with a limit on them, so you see in real time what is being spent.
Start with an account that keeps your books up to date
Want to separate your business travel costs from your private spending without losing time on it every month? You apply for a GoDutch business account in 3 minutes and have your IBAN and card within 1 day. From that moment your business trips, fuel stops and transport costs sit in one place and feed through to your bookkeeping automatically.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions about the travel allowance
How much is the travel allowance in 2026?
The travel allowance in 2026 is a maximum of € 0.25 per kilometre tax-free. That amount was raised from € 0.23 on 1 July 2026, with retroactive effect to 1 January 2026, and applies regardless of the means of transport.
Is an employer required to reimburse travel costs?
An employer is not legally obliged to reimburse travel costs. The obligation only arises if it is set down in the collective labour agreement, the employment contract or the staff handbook, or if it has been paid out for years without reservation.
From how many kilometres are you entitled to a travel allowance?
In tax terms there is no minimum distance: even two kilometres may be reimbursed tax-free. A minimum distance always comes from the collective labour agreement or your own travel expenses scheme, never from the tax rules.
Is the travel allowance for the return trip or only one way?
You calculate with the return distance, so there and back. The allowance applies to all kilometres actually travelled for work, and for commuting that is twice as many per day as the one-way trip.
Do you pay tax on a travel allowance?
You pay no tax on an allowance of up to € 0.25 per kilometre. Any amount you receive above that counts as salary and is taxed, unless the employer places it in the discretionary margin of the work-related costs scheme.
Can you receive a travel allowance and a working-from-home allowance on the same day?
You cannot receive both on the same day for commuting. Your employer chooses per day between the travel allowance and the working-from-home allowance of € 2.45. A business trip to a client may be reimbursed separately on a day working from home.
