Company cars: what do the Belgian parties propose?

What do the Belgian parties propose on company cars?

On company cars, Belgian politics does not split into the usual left-right camps. Ecolo, Groen, the PTB·PVDA, Vooruit, Les Engagés and the N-VA all want to phase out the tax scheme for salary cars. The MR, Open VLD and CD&V want to keep it while greening it. The PS accepts touching it, but only as part of a wider tax overhaul.

This is one of the rare Belgian files where a Flemish nationalist party and a green party reach the same conclusion from opposite reasoning. The N-VA talks about the cost to the budget and wants to shift the money into a general cut in labour charges. Groen talks about traffic jams and inequality between workers. Same destination, different motives.

By the numbers, the scale explains the heat of the debate. In the first quarter of 2025, roughly 627,000 company cars were made available to employees — 8.9% of the Belgian car fleet, against 4.7% in 2007. And the Federal Planning Bureau, in its June 2025 study, puts the tax revenue forgone at 3 to 6 billion euros a year.

What exactly is a salary car?

A company car is a vehicle bought or leased by the employer and made available to a worker, private trips included, at no cost to the worker. For tax purposes it is a benefit in kind: the employee is taxed on a flat-rate value, almost always well below the real cost of the vehicle.

The term "salary car" (salariswagen) is more precise than "company car": it means the car handed over instead of a pay rise, not the van a technician needs to do the job. The political debate is about the first category, not the second — a distinction campaign slogans on both sides tend to forget.

In practice, the benefit comes from a gap in treatment. A hundred euros of gross pay goes through social contributions and personal income tax; a hundred euros of car only attracts an employer CO2 contribution and a flat-rate benefit in kind. That gap, not the car itself, is what this file is really about.

How do you read these positions without taking sides?

Each party gets a sign per axis here: a green + when it clearly backs that direction, an amber ~ for an intermediate or conditional position, a red − when it opposes it. This system replaces stars or marks out of 5, which would suggest a moral ranking.

No column designates a "good" party. A party marked with a + on phasing out the scheme is often marked with a − on greening it as it stands, and vice versa: these are two answers to two different questions. The first is about who pays, the second about what drives.

The N-VA shows why a moral reading fails here. It gets a + on phasing out, like the PTB·PVDA — but the N-VA wants to hand the money back as a general cut in employer charges, while the PTB·PVDA wants it converted into gross pay. The same sign covers two opposite projects.

What do the parties that want to phase out the scheme propose?

Those in favour of phasing out are not banning the car: they are removing the tax advantage that makes it more attractive than pay. The PTB·PVDA wants the system to die out by withdrawing the tax benefits and replacing them with a wage increase. Groen argues for the same phase-out, explicitly targeting the congestion and the social inequality the system creates between employees. Vooruit follows the same line.

Les Engagés have set out the most detailed French-speaking version: "the end of salary cars but more net pay". Current beneficiaries would keep their scheme until the end of their employment contract, then switch to a reduced personal income tax and a "worker bonus" meant to offset the loss. The N-VA, for its part, wants to gradually wind down these preferential regimes by folding them into a broad cut in labour charges, citing the cost to the community and the unfairness between workers.

The headline figure comes from the Federal Planning Bureau: scrapping the scheme entirely and taxing these cars like private vehicles would raise around 4.7 billion euros in 2025, and up to 5.2 billion in 2028. The counter-argument, from the scheme's defenders, fits in one sentence: those billions do not fall from the sky, they come out of the pockets of employees who took a car instead of a raise, and nothing guarantees the promised compensation actually arrives.

What do the parties that want to green it rather than scrap it propose?

The MR is the most explicit on keeping the scheme. During the 2024 campaign it presented itself as the only French-speaking party committed to preserving this benefit for workers, and it now claims an agreement that, in its words, "durably secures the mechanism by gradually moving to a zero-emission fleet". The reasoning: the scheme exists, so use it as a lever for electrification rather than destroy it.

Open VLD wants to reserve the tax advantage for green cars only and pushes towards a zero-emission fleet. CD&V defends accelerated greening rather than abolition — and it was under a CD&V finance minister, Vincent Van Peteghem, that the law of 25 November 2021 set the current timetable. The PS sits in between: it is not opposed to reform in principle, but argues it belongs in a broader tax overhaul rather than being handled in isolation.

The underlying argument is that the scheme has produced a measurable effect. Since roughly 60% of new cars sold in Belgium are company cars, moving their taxation shifts the whole market far faster than a subsidy for private buyers. The criticism, from the green left, is that greening the fleet solves neither congestion nor the gap between an employee who gets a car and a colleague who gets fully taxed gross pay.

What actually changed on 1 January 2026?

The timetable in the law of 25 November 2021 has entered its toughest phase. For any petrol, diesel or plug-in hybrid car ordered from 1 January 2026, deductibility drops to 0% for companies — a narrow exception runs until 31 December 2026 for self-employed people taxed as individuals driving a plug-in hybrid under 50 g CO2/km.

Fully electric cars stay 100% deductible for an order placed in 2026. It is the last year at that rate: from 2027, deductibility on new electric cars falls to 95%, then 90% in 2028, 82.5% in 2029, 75% in 2030, and settles at 67.5% from 2031. Combustion cars ordered between July 2023 and end-2025 keep a tapering cap: 50% in 2026, 25% in 2027, 0% in 2028.

Alongside this, the CO2 contribution an employer pays each month to the NSSO for a combustion vehicle is multiplied year after year: the coefficient reached 4 in 2026 and will climb to 5.5 in 2027. In other words, the file is not waiting for the next election to move — much of the "greening" one camp demands and much of the "phase-out" the other demands is already written into law, voted under the previous government.

Is the system already dying out by itself?

Recent figures qualify both narratives. For the first time in nearly twenty years, the number of company cars in Belgium stopped growing: it stagnated between January 2024 and January 2025, after more than doubling in fifteen years. Payroll providers have also recorded a marked drop in new registrations in 2025.

That plateau complicates the reading. For those who want the scheme gone, it shows a tax signal works and the job should be finished. For its defenders, it shows the system is already reforming itself and that another cut would mainly break the electrification under way. Same figure, two readings — as so often.

One point both camps rarely raise: stagnation does not make the 627,000 cars already on the road disappear, nor the running contracts. Even a phase-out voted tomorrow would take years to show up in the fleet and in the budget, which makes one-year costings misleading on both sides.

Company cars: what do the votes say rather than the manifestos?

The record tells a slightly different story from the manifestos. The 2021 greening law was carried by the Vivaldi coalition, which contained both parties in favour of keeping the scheme (MR, Open VLD, CD&V) and parties in favour of phasing it out (Ecolo, Groen, Vooruit, PS). It greened the scheme without abolishing it — a compromise that proves the first camp right on method and the second right on direction.

Testing votes against promises remains the best antidote to electoral marketing. A party can denounce salary cars on the campaign trail and co-sign an agreement that extends them in electric form; another can defend the system and vote the law that kills its combustion version. It is the texts passed, not the leaflets, that decide.

To dig further, the comparator puts two parties side by side on mobility, the ranking sums up positions theme by theme, and the quiz starts from your priorities rather than a manifesto. Our mobility comparison places this file within the wider transport debate, and the methodology details how these positions are gathered — it remains open to challenge.

What this comparison does not settle

This table does not say whether scrapping the scheme would really bring in 4.7 billion euros. The Federal Planning Bureau itself gives a range of 3 to 6 billion, because the result depends on what employers and employees would do once the benefit is gone: negotiate gross pay, switch transport mode, or move the compensation elsewhere. No party knows the answer.

Nor does it factor in your own priorities. If you are among the 15% of employees concerned, the question is not the same as if you take the train every day. The right reflex is not to remember a winning camp, but to spot who pays in each scenario, what is promised in compensation, and on what horizon.