Belgium: what it costs and how it is taxed

This article applies to Belgium.

What you pay per bike

Bike	Per month (excl. VAT)	Per month (incl. VAT)
Deluxe 7	€18.10	€21.90
Power 1	€53.64	€64.90
Power 7	€57.77	€69.90

We invoice you for the full amount, whatever you decide to contribute. The subscription is 100% tax deductible for your business.

Three ways to offer it

You invest. You cover the full cost, so your employees pay nothing. A strong benefit for attracting and keeping people.
You share it. You set the split, either a fixed amount or a percentage. Your employee covers the rest through gross salary exchange.
You facilitate it. Your employee covers the full cost through gross salary exchange, so the scheme is cost-neutral for you.

How gross salary exchange works

Your employee pays for the subscription out of gross salary. That portion is exempt from RSZ and bedrijfsvoorheffing, so instead of losing part of it to tax, the full amount goes towards the bike.

In practice this makes a Swapfiets around 40% cheaper for your employee than paying for it themselves out of net salary.

The exchange can run through monthly gross salary, the end-of-year premium, a bonus, or a cafeteria plan, whichever suits how you already handle flexible pay.

Worth mentioning to your team: a lower gross salary slightly affects anything calculated from it, including holiday pay, the end-of-year premium, pension accrual and group insurance. The effect is small, but better said upfront than discovered later.

Do your employees pay tax on the bike?

No. Unlike a company car, a bike costs your employee nothing in voordeel alle aard, provided they use it regularly for commuting. That applies to every model, including e-bikes.

The law doesn't define "regularly". Most employers set 20% of working days, roughly one day in five across the year, and write that into their bike policy. Partial journeys count, so cycling to the station and taking the train from there still counts as commuting by bike.

Worth setting the figure explicitly in your policy, since a bike used purely privately with no commuting at all would create a taxable VAA.

What does it cost your organisation?

Less than the invoice suggests. You pay no RSZ contributions on a lease bike, and none on the portion of gross salary your employee exchanges for it.

Most employers give that saving back as a contribution towards the bike. It costs you nothing you weren't already saving, and it's what makes the scheme genuinely budget-neutral: your employees get free choice of bike, and your organisation carries no extra cost.

Other cycling costs are fully deductible too, including changing rooms, showers and bike parking.

The bike allowance

Most employers in Belgium already pay one. Since May 2023 a bike allowance has been mandatory for private sector employees not covered by a sectoral or company agreement, at a minimum of €0.30 per kilometre in 2026, up to 40km round trip per day.

You can pay up to €0.37 per kilometre free of tax and RSZ, with an annual ceiling of €3,700 per employee. Anything above either limit is taxed as normal salary.

Your employees can put that allowance towards their subscription. Someone cycling 10km each way, 4 days a week, builds up around €30 a month at the maximum rate, which covers a Deluxe 7 outright.

That's the combination worth showing your team: with the allowance feeding back into the subscription, a bike can end up costing them nothing at all.

The mobility budget

If you offer company cars, employees can swap their car, or their right to one, for a budget across three pillars:

Pillar 1 — an environmentally friendly company car. From 1 January 2026, only zero-emission vehicles qualify.
Pillar 2 — sustainable mobility and housing. Bikes sit here, alongside public transport, shared mobility and housing costs within 10km of work.
Pillar 3 — the remaining balance in cash, subject to a 38.07% employee contribution.

You have to offer at least one option in pillar 2, and a bike subscription is the simplest way to meet that.

The mobility budget and flexible pay work well side by side. If your aim is the biggest financial benefit for your employees, gross salary exchange usually beats routing it through the mobility budget. Plenty of companies do both.

What happens at the end?

Nothing to settle. The subscription is monthly, the bike stays ours, and there's no buyout.

That's the main practical difference from a lease scheme here, where contracts usually run 3 or 4 years and end with a buyout of 16% to 20% of the catalogue price. Your employee either pays it or hands the bike back. With us, nobody has to make that decision and nobody is committed for years.