More than 50% of self-employed workers pay over 20.5% in social contributions

Got a tax question? We’ll answer for free by email.

Bitte gib eine gültige E-Mail-Adresse ein

Ask your question

Ask any self-employed person how much they pay in social contributions, and you'll almost always get the same answer: "20.5% of my profit." That's the official rate, and it's what you read everywhere.

But when we analysed our own anonymised data, 14,671 valid self-employed years from Belgian sole proprietorships, it turned out that for a large group this figure isn't a realistic guideline: more than half of self-employed workers pay more than the official rate of 20.5%. And among those with an annual profit below €10,000, nearly one in three hands over more than half of that profit in social contributions. And that's before personal income tax, VAT administration or accounting costs.

In this article we summarise what we found, and what we believe needs to change.
See the full data study here.

Social contributions: the experiences of real self-employed workers

Every week we hear the same story from different self-employed people: contributions that have nothing to do with what they earned.

Ante Vriens, beauty specialist and owner of Skin-First: "After my baby was born I wasn't working, but the social contributions kept running: €1,980. Money that had to come out of my savings account."

Sofie Dejonghe, freelance social media expert: "From the very start I simply assumed I'd only keep 50% of my income. I didn't go into it naively."

And Thomas Bertrem, physiotherapist: "The stress around social contributions is the same as the stress around income tax. There's so much uncertainty. You can estimate your monthly income, but in the end it always swings by a few thousand. You have to be lucky enough to know it, or have someone tell you, and either way build up a reserve."

Three different professions, one shared feeling: the system isn't quite right. And we wanted to know whether the data confirms that feeling.

How much do you have to pay in social contributions as a self-employed person?

On paper, a self-employed person working full-time pays 20.5% of their net taxable professional income (profit before tax). But there's a legal minimum contribution of €890.42 per quarter in 2026, regardless of what you earn, including when you're running at a loss, plus a ceiling of around €5,100 per quarter.

That fixed floor creates a tipping point: it's only from €17,374 in annual profit that 20.5% of profit roughly matches the minimum contribution. Below that amount, you pay proportionally more than 20.5%. And the lower the profit, the higher that percentage. This is what makes the system regressive: those who earn the least pay proportionally the most.

💡More about social contributions in 2026.

The data shows that 58% contribute too much

Of all the self-employed workers in our sample, only 42% pay the expected rate of 20.5% or less, as the system intends. The rest:

• 22% ran at a loss, but still owed the legal minimum: contributions on money they hadn't earned.
• 24% pay more than expected: between 20.5% and 50% of their profit.
• 12% pay far more than expected: contributions swallow more than half of their profit.

The hair and beauty sector stands out in particular: three in four pay more than 20.5% in social contributions. But this pattern appears in virtually every sector at low income levels.

The heaviest burden falls on those who earn the least

Looking at it by profit bracket, the pattern becomes painfully clear: 29% of self-employed workers with less than €10,000 in profit pay more than 50% of that profit in social contributions. In the €10,000 to €20,000 bracket that drops to 5%, and above it falls quickly to almost zero.

And this isn't a marginal group: nearly half of the self-employed workers in our sample sit in that lowest profit bracket. Think of starters still looking for clients, artists with fluctuating incomes, self-employed workers coming off a bad year, or those who deliberately work part-time.

The paradox: those hit hardest barely fund the system

You might think these minimum contributions are needed to fund social security. The data says otherwise: burden and revenue are decoupled.

Self-employed workers with less than €10,000 in profit bear the greatest individual impact, yet together account for just 16% of total contributions. The three lowest profit brackets (under €30,000) contain almost everyone who gives up more than half of their profit. Yet together they fund only half of the total. In other words: the suffering is great, and the revenue small.

Why do so many self-employed workers pay too much in social contributions?

Two simple reasons.

1. The legal minimum contribution. Among self-employed workers with a profit below €20,000 a year, this flat minimum explains 50 to 60% of the cases where too much is paid.
   
2. A system that prevents real-time adjustment. Your provisional contributions are calculated on your income from three years ago. The actual reconciliation only follows 2 to 3 years later. Anyone who doesn't actively have their contributions adjusted ends up overpaying (or underpaying) in the meantime.

Social contributions as a sole trader vs a company

The calculation base also depends on your status, and that leads to a structural difference in contribution burden.

As a sole proprietor, social contributions are calculated on your entire profit. For a director of a private limited company (SRL/BV), they apply only to the salary they pay themselves, not to the profit that stays within the company.

The difference is considerable: with €100,000 in profit and a director's salary of €45,000, the director pays 51% less in social contributions than a sole proprietor with exactly the same profit. So anyone working through a company pays contributions, in practice, on a much smaller base: a lever that the smallest earners, precisely, don't have.

What if we approached it differently?

We simulated two reforms based on our data, scaled to national figures (€5.2 billion in contributions collected in 2023).

• Lowering the legal minimum for the lowest incomes turns out to be surprisingly cheap: only those currently caught by the floor, namely loss-makers and the smallest profits, would feel the difference, and it's precisely that group that generates little revenue. The impact on total revenue is limited.
• Levying contributions on the full profit of management companies, instead of only on the director's salary, could raise up to €2.92 billion in additional revenue across the roughly 300,000 management companies in Belgium: more than enough to fund the easing at the bottom end.

The figures all point in the same direction: ease the floor where the burden is heaviest, and apply the same logic to every status. Our simulations are illustrative scenarios, not policy forecasts. A real reform would bring behavioural responses and political trade-offs that a model can't capture. But the debate deserves to be held on the basis of these figures.

For many self-employed workers, "20.5%" is a figure that ought to provide certainty, but the reality is often less predictable. That's because the system assumes a classic, stable self-employed career, while in practice things are far more diverse today. With these figures we want to show that the debate isn't about "paying less", but about fair and predictable contributions, in proportion to what you actually earn.

Do you know how much you pay in social contributions?

See the figures for yourself. All the charts, filters by sector and status, and the simulations that let you adjust the minimum yourself can be found on our interactive data page.

About this study

The figures are built from 14,671 valid self-employed years in Accountable's anonymised Belgian data (sole proprietorships), with a complete record of income, costs and social contributions paid. Sector results are indicative, based on the composition of the dataset; companies are analysed separately where indicated. National context figures are based on publications from INASTI/RSVZ (1,327,994 self-employed people in 2024, of whom 820,978 full-time and 352,517 as a secondary occupation) and the FPS Economy (€5.234 billion in total contributions, 2023). Rates exclude management fees.

Based on anonymised user data, Accountable also publishes the Accountable Index each year; the next edition appears at the end of August 2026.

Author - Nicolas Quarré

Nicolas is co-founder and CEO at Accountable. His vision for the company has always been clear: free self-employed from administrative nightmares.

Who is Nicolas ?