The zelfstandigenaftrek explained: who qualifies and how much you save
One deduction turns on a single number: the hours you can show you spent on the business. Here's what actually counts.
Once a year, at income-tax time, one deduction does more for a ZZP'er's bill than almost anything else: . It's a fixed amount subtracted from your profit before tax is calculated, and it's yours only if you clear one bar first.
That bar is the . At least 1.225 hours in the year, spent on the business: client work, admin, invoicing, acquisition, even the courses that keep you employable. If you can't show the hours, the deduction doesn't apply, no matter how real the business is.
On top of the 1.225 hours, most people also need to spend more time on the business than on anything else (salaried work included). Just started? The starters' exception waives that second test for a few years, so the hours themselves are usually what to track first.
What counts toward the hours
Time spent actually delivering the work counts, obviously, but so does time most freelancers forget to log: quoting, invoicing, bookkeeping, chasing payment, building the website nobody visits yet, and travel between clients. What doesn't count is time spent purely on your own study for its own sake, or on activities a tax inspector could reasonably call a hobby. A simple weekly log, even a rough one, is worth more than a confident guess in April.
Take a concrete year: a profit of €45.000 before deductions, 1.400 logged hours, and the criterion cleared. The zelfstandigenaftrek (a figure of €1.200 for tax year 2026, as the deduction has been shrinking each year) comes straight off the top, before the tax brackets ever see the number.
Read the glossary entries for zelfstandigenaftrek, urencriterium, and startersaftrek before you file your annual return.
The deduction is shrinking
Unlike most of the return, this figure isn't stable year to year: the government has been stepping it down on a published schedule, so the amount worth roughly €5.000 a few years ago is a smaller number now and will be smaller again next year. Kwartaal shows the figure for the current tax year with the estimate label attached; the exact amount for your return always comes from Mijn Belastingdienst, not from memory of last year's number.
Tracking hours and watching a shrinking deduction change every year is exactly the kind of bookkeeping that is easy to get wrong from memory. Kwartaal guides you through this automatically.