Can your locum still be self-employed?.

For years, bringing in a self-employed professional was the easiest fix for a gap in the rota. That is still possible — but no longer a given. This is where you stand as a practice owner in 2026, and how five questions tell you whether your arrangement holds up.

Where we stand, in short

Since 1 January 2025 the Dutch tax authority has been fully enforcing false self-employment again; the years-long moratorium on enforcement is over. 2025 was a transition year with a “soft landing”: corrections and back-tax assessments were possible, fines were not. Since 1 January 2026 that landing is half-soft: anyone who should have known better and knowingly carried on now also risks a penalty for culpable conduct. The lighter administrative fines still do not apply in 2026; from 2027 the government wants to normalise further.

For the legislation behind this — the legal presumption at a low hourly rate, the new self-employment act — we keep a separate topic page. This article is about the question that comes first: what about that one locum in your practice?

The five questions

The tax authority looks at the whole picture, but in practice it comes down to a handful of points. Answer them honestly:

• 1. Are they a fixed part of the rota? Every Tuesday and Thursday, for months, among salaried colleagues doing the same work? That is the classic picture of being embedded — and the strongest signal.
• 2. Who sets the rate? A self-employed professional negotiates and invoices their own rate. Someone who simply gets “the practice percentage” looks like an employee with an invoice.
• 3. Is there any visible sign of running a business? Their own liability insurance, their own continuing education, investments, several clients a year.
• 4. Can a substitute step in? May the contractor send another qualified colleague in their place, or does it have to be this person?
• 5. Who carries the risk? In case of illness, an empty schedule or a complaint: does that sit with the contractor, or does the practice absorb it?

The more often the answer points towards “the practice”, the more the arrangement looks like employment — whatever the heading on the contract says.

Three routes when it doesn’t sit right

Route 1: make it genuine self-employment. Separate, defined assignments instead of a fixed rota, their own rate, room for other clients. This only works if that is how it actually goes — an amended contract without an amended practice changes nothing.

Route 2: offer employment. For someone who is effectively already part of the team, often the most honest route — and with the current shortages also an opportunity: offering security has become an argument.

Route 3: secondment. The clinician doesn’t want to join your payroll, and you don’t want the risk? Then they go on a secondment provider’s payroll and work in your practice. That is how we solve it for practices where self-employment no longer fits — here is how it works.

What you can do this month

Run your flexible workforce through the five questions. Record for each person what you assessed and why — in an audit, it counts that you looked at it seriously. And reassess annually: an arrangement that was fine in January can have drifted by December.

Are you the locum or self-employed professional yourself, unsure what is wise? The candidate side of this decision — the sums, the insurance, your pension — is in our guide to self-employment or salaried employment in dental care.

Sources

• KNMT — enforcement on self-employment in 2026: now a “half-soft” landing
• Salaris Vanmorgen — soft landing partly extended in 2026
• ZiPconomy — enforcement of false self-employment in 2026
• ZZP Nederland — the government on fines in 2026