Home-working allowance
As of 1 September 2021, you receive an allowance for working from home. It consists of three components: €2 per day working from home, €25 per month internet allowance and travel allowance in accordance with the university regulations.
New mobility policy
Our new mobility policy comes into effect on 1 November 2024 and this includes changes to the travel allowance. From then on, you will need to register your travel and homeworking days in Shuttel to receive your allowance. Information about the new policy and procedure will be published here from 1 November. See the Shuttel site for a first impression of the new policy.
Home-working allowance based on the travel timetable
To be eligible for the home-working allowance you can enter the days on which you travel to your work location (Leiden University) in the timetable in the Service Portal. You can also enter all your travel days going back to 1 September 2021. This will automatically calculate your home-working allowance. Once completed, the data in the timetable will continue to apply. If, on average, there are no changes to your travel days, you will only need to enter them in the timetable once.
How to fill in the timetable
To fill in the timetable please read the PSSC instructions which you can find in the Helpdesk portal. Depending on your personal Helpdesk Portal settings, these instructions are in English of Dutch.
Bear in mind the following:
- You must agree with your supervisor in advance which days you will work from home or at the university location, in accordance with the university’s working-from-home policy.
- Once you have entered your travel days in the Service Portal timetable, they will be approved by your supervisor.
- If you enter your travel days in the timetable before the 15th of the month, you will receive your home-working allowance in the same month. If the number of days you will work at the university location has not yet been confirmed, you can enter an average number of days.
For example: Suppose you fill in that you travel to the university two days a week. One week you might only travel to your location once, the following week you might work at the location on three days. In this case, you meet the average number of travel days that you filled in (two). The important thing is that you indicate how many days on average you travel to work each month so that the number of home-working days is more or less correct.
- For the home-working allowance, monthly calculations are made using an average deduction for public holidays and leave days. The amount can therefore vary slightly per month from exactly €2 per home working day. You don't have to change your travel schedule during your leave. A table with example amounts per month is available on the webpage 'Home-working allowance'.
- You shouldn’t be changing the number of travel days in the timetable on a weekly or monthly basis. As a rule, you will only need to fill in the timetable once. You should only change your entry in the timetable if the number of days you travel to your work location changes on a structural basis. You can make these changes yourself in the Service Portal. Once they have been approved by your supervisor, they will be processed in the system.
- To avoid having to make corrections, please enter your travel days as quickly as possible. If your travel/working-from-home days change on a structural basis in the future, please also update this information in the Service Portal as quickly as possible.
- The way the home-working allowance is currently set up is subject to any tax changes.
Questions about and conditions of the home-working allowance
- You are not entitled to both a travel allowance and a home-working allowance for the same day. If you work both from home and on location on the same day, you will receive only one of the two allowances.
- If you have not worked for a month due to full-time illness or incapacity for work or full-time extraordinary leave, the home-working allowance is automatically stopped at the end of that month. The internet allowance and travel allowence will also be halted. When you are no longer off sick/incapacitated on a full-time basis, the allowances will start again.
- Under the Collective Labour Agreement, on-call staff, student assistants, freelancers, PhD scholarship students without an employment contract and students are exempt from the home-working allowance of €2 per day and the internet allowance.
To be eligible for the commuting allowance you can enter the days on which you travel to your work location (Leiden University) in the timetable in the Service Portal. See commuting allowance.
If you work from home, you will continue to be eligible for the internet allowance. However, this is not the case if you work entirely on location. This is no different from the recent situation. The amount of the allowance also remains the same in the Collective Labour Agreement. One thing that has changed, however, is that the parties to the Collective Labour Agreement have excluded on-call staff, student assistants, freelancers, PhD scholarship students without an employment contract and students from the internet allowance.
Most Leiden University employees work in Leiden and/or The Hague and they live and work in the Netherlands. If other agreements been made with you previously and you live outside the Netherlands, the university’s working-from-home policy and the requirement to register the number of travel days to your work location in the Service Portal also apply to you. This means that you will need to consult your supervisor about the number of days you work from home and the number of days you work on location.
Note: Please continue to bear in mind any changes in your work and/or private situation that are relevant to applicable legislation in the context of working from abroad.
More information
If you have any questions about this, please submit your questions to the PSSC Servicedesk.