The director's minimum remuneration for assessment year 2027 is EUR 51,000 — not the EUR 50,000 in circulation

If your company pays the reduced corporate rate, one of your directors has to draw at least EUR 51,000 in this financial year. Not EUR 50,000 — that figure is in circulation and it is wrong.

The rule itself is old. To pay the reduced rate on the first bracket of its profit, a small Belgian company has to pay at least one of its directors a minimum remuneration. What changed this summer is how that minimum is set.

What changed

The old minimum was a fixed EUR 45,000 written into the law. It sat there, unmoved, while everything around it was indexed.

The reform published on 29 July 2026 replaced it with a base amount of EUR 25,000 that gets indexed every year and rounded to the nearest thousand. For assessment year 2027, that arithmetic gives EUR 51,000. Next year it will give a different number, and the year after that another one. There is no longer a threshold to memorise — only a mechanism to check annually.

Why the number you have heard is wrong

The explanatory memorandum that accompanied the draft law did the multiplication with the previous year's index and produced a figure that rounds to EUR 50,000. That number went out into the advisory press and stuck.

The official indexation notice published on 12 August 2026 settles it at EUR 51,000. If your accountant, your newsletter or your peer group told you EUR 50,000, they were reading the right law against the wrong table.

The gap is EUR 1,000. What sits behind it is not EUR 1,000. Miss the threshold and the company does not pay a EUR 1,000 penalty — it loses the reduced rate on its result and pays the standard rate instead. It is the cheapest thousand euros you will ever be asked to find, and the most expensive one to be short of.

Your deadline is your closing date, not 31 December

Every article you will read about this says "you have until 31 December 2026". That is right only if your financial year is the calendar year.

Assessment year 2027 covers the financial year closing on 31 December 2026 and every financial year closing on another date during 2027. If your year runs to 30 June, you are being tested on 1 July 2026 to 30 June 2027, and your deadline is 30 June 2027. You have more time — and also a period that has already been running since 1 July 2026, so the remuneration you have drawn since then already counts toward the total.

Check which one you are before you decide there is no rush.

What the fix costs

Suppose you are EUR 6,000 short. Raising the remuneration by EUR 6,000 is not a EUR 6,000 decision:

• It drags roughly 20.5 % in social contributions behind it, plus your social insurance fund's management fee.
• The extra remuneration is taxable in your own personal income tax at your marginal rate.
• The contribution is settled through a regularisation that does not arrive until 2028. The cash goes out in one year and the bill for it lands two years later.

None of that means don't do it. It means price it against what losing the reduced rate actually costs on this year's result, and get the comparison in writing before you sign anything. For a company with a thin profit, buying the reduced rate can cost more than the rate is worth.

The fallback almost nobody mentions

There is a relief inside the rule. If the remuneration you granted is below the threshold, the reduced rate still applies as long as the company's taxable income for the year does not exceed the remuneration you actually granted.

In plain terms: a low-profit year can qualify without any top-up at all. Ask for this to be tested before you approve a salary increase, not after. It is the single question most likely to save you the whole exercise.

The other trap, and it is not about the amount

There is a second 20 in this reform, and it has nothing to do with the tax rate.

A large part of what many directors receive is not cash. It is benefits valued at a flat statutory amount — the classic company car, free housing, free heating package. The reform added a separate rule: when those flat-valued benefits make up too large a share of everything granted to all the directors together, the company can lose the reduced rate on that ground alone, even if the EUR 51,000 is met in full.

Three things to hold on to:

• It is a ratio, not a cap on the EUR 51,000. The widely repeated line that "only EUR 10,000 of the EUR 51,000 may be benefits" is not what the law says.
• It is measured against everything granted to all your directors in the period, not per person and not against the minimum.
• Benefits valued at their actual cost rather than at a flat statutory amount are not part of that count.

If your package is heavy on benefits and light on cash, this is the part of the reform that is actually aimed at you. Topping up in cash improves the ratio. Topping up in benefits makes it worse.

If your company is young

There is no minimum remuneration for the first four taxable periods after incorporation — the condition starts to apply from the fifth. Recognised cooperatives are excluded from the condition entirely.

Know which period you are in. The fifth one arrives without an announcement, and a company that has never had to think about this rule is exactly the company that will not think about it in the year it starts to matter.

What to ask this week

1. Which assessment year is my current financial year in, and what is my actual deadline?
2. What has been granted to me so far in that period, cash and benefits together?
3. What is the shortfall against EUR 51,000, if any?
4. Does the income fallback apply — will taxable income stay below what I have already drawn?
5. What share of the total granted to our directors is made up of flat-valued benefits?

Five questions. The answers fit on one page, and that page is the whole decision.

One thing that may still move

The Council of State raised an equality objection to applying the benefits sanction only to small companies, and that objection was not resolved in the text as adopted. A correction or an administrative circular is possible.

It does not change what to do now: the rule applies from assessment year 2027 and the amount is EUR 51,000. It is a reason not to lock in a multi-year remuneration structure built purely around the benefits ratio, and to re-read the position next year rather than assume it held.