Someone who will be working here on a temporary basis could perhaps be given a temporary employment contract with the University. There are various kinds of these:

Regular temporary employment contract

An employment contract where the worker is temporarily placed on the University payroll as an employee.

PhD candidate

An employment contract with a specific purpose (the PhD).

Casual employee

A casual employee performs work occasionally and at different times (also known as ‘on call’ or ‘zero-hours’ contracts).

If someone who is already a University employee is given a temporary placement in your department, this is known as ‘internal secondment’. An addendum may be added to their employment contract, and internal settlement of their salary may take place.

If you wish to bring in someone who works at another university, educational institution or public organisation, it is possible to enter into a secondment agreement that stipulates the remuneration. In nearly all cases, VAT will also be charged on this remuneration. You should contact the controller of your unit to find out whether a VAT exemption may apply.

If you bring in someone who works at another organisation (with the exception of a temp agency), it will be necessary to have a contract with that company.

If you need temporary staff for regular work, you should preferably hire them via JobMotion, the University’s own temp agency. Student assistants are always hired via JobMotion. If you wish to hire staff via another temp agency, you should always contact your HRM adviser first.

If you hire someone without going through an intermediary legal entity, you will be hiring an independent contractor or ‘freelancer’ (zelfstandige zonder personeel: ZZP). Since 1 May 2016, the hiring of freelancers has been subject to the Employment Relationships Deregulation Act (Wet DBA).

Leiden University and the contractor are required to enter into a ‘contract for services’ (overeenkomst van opdracht). The University has formulated various model contracts for this purpose, based on the contracts published by the Dutch tax administration (Belastingdienst). You are not permitted to modify these model contracts, which can be found in the LEI Hiring app.

If you want to hire someone to teach the regular curriculum, the Dutch tax administration defines this as an employer-employee relationship (‘relationship of authority’: gezagsverhouding), for which an employment contract is required. If you are looking for someone to teach as a replacement during sickness or leave, or to temporarily fill a job vacancy, your only options are a regular employment contract, secondment or hiring via a temp agency.

An exception is the hiring of guest lecturers, who give practical classes for a maximum of 40 hours and also have free interpretation of the teaching material. In this case, a ‘contract for services’ (model contract for ‘guest lecturer without employer’s authority’: geen werkgeversgezag gastdocent) is drawn up via the LEI Hiring app. However, if the work involves only an incidental guest lecture of a maximum of 3 hours, a model contract is not required. If no VAT is charged, the payment will have to be communicated to the Dutch tax administration.

If you are planning to work with volunteers, you have to ensure that you use a volunteer contract before making a payment to a volunteer and that you comply with the requirements of the Dutch tax administration’s volunteer procedure, which it can check for you. The volunteer is not permitted to ‘perform the work as a regular job’.

You are permitted to pay a ‘fee’ to a volunteer; the conditions for this ‘volunteer fee’ are that it is not at market level and the total amount must not be more than € 190 per month and € 1,900 per calendar year. Another important factor is that a fee may not be commensurate with the time spent and the nature of the work. If a fee per hour is paid within these maximum amounts per month and per year, then the Dutch tax administration defines a non-market-level remuneration as a maximum of € 5 per hour (or € 2.75 for a volunteer aged under 21 years). The same applies if the volunteer is paid per activity rather than per hour. The fee in these cases should be converted to an hourly fee to see whether it does not exceed the maximum hourly rate.

If all the conditions are fulfilled, the volunteer procedure can be used.

If the payment is more than the maximum amounts permitted by the Dutch tax administration, then the normal rules for the (notional) employment relationship will apply for assessing whether wage tax needs to be withheld and paid to the tax administration.

Please note: the amounts stated above are for 2023. The new amounts each year can be found on the Dutch tax administration’s website: www.belastingdienst.nl.