In a recent Supreme Court judgement (S.24.0021.N), dated 29 June 2026, launched against a verdict of the Antwerp Labor Court of Appeal, the Belgian Court of Cassation ruled that Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), granted by a foreign company directly to the employees of its subsidiary, are to be considered as salary and should therefore be subject to social security contributions. The fact that the grant is framed in a retention policy, rather than purely as compensation for work performed, has been found irrelevant by the Supreme Court when assessing whether the grant qualifies as salary.
After a long – running discussion, this judgement seems now to have closed the final route to still exempt compensation granted/attributed by a (foreign) parent company to Belgium based employees from Belgian social security contributions.
The ruling and its antecedents
To define the notion of “salary”, the Belgian social security legislation refers to the Belgian Wage protection Act, which in its turn qualifies salary as “the remuneration in money and the benefits that can be valued in money to which the employee is entitled by virtue of his/her employment and which is payable by the employer.”
This has long been interpreted in a way that benefits granted to an employee by a third party (group) company would only qualify as remuneration when the legal employer would ultimately bear (financially or legally) the (cost of the) benefit.
More recent case law of the Court of Cassation, however, ruled that salary, as a counterpart for work performed (i.e. the labor law notion of salary), is to be considered as the inherent result of the employment relation (in other words, the employment rel ation is defined by the payment of salary). This reasoning would hence lead to the subjection of the salary to social security contributions regardless of the salary being at charge (financially or legally) of the legal employer.
One could therefrom conclude that only benefits/compensation granted outside of the labor relation could still be exempt from social security contributions; Creative minds already argued that benefits granted purely as a retention element would not compensate employees for work performed and could hence be exempt from Belgian social security contributions.
With the current verdict the Supreme Court now seems to have created its capstone in the saga by clearly indicating that benefits granted with the aim of retaining employees, encouraging their continued commitment or incentivizing them to perform their dut ies diligently are, by definition, consideration for work performed and therefore qualify as salary for social security purposes.
With this most recent verdict, the last possible argument to justify the exemption of direct parent company grants seems to have closed and social security contributions on such incentives may not be avoidable. Next to the obvious cost increase because of the social security contribution itself, HR professionals should consider the impact of additional holiday pay becoming due as a result of this changed social security treatment.
For a deeper discussion on the above, please reach out to your Vialto Partners point of contact, or alternatively:
Martijn De Meulemeester
Director
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