By publishing the "Tax Survey", the General Administration Strategic Expertise and Support of the Federal Public Service Finance aims at providing a regularly updated overview of the tax legislation in Belgium. The subject being particularly intricate, this brochure cannot of course cover every specific regulation: only the main features or the most frequently occurring cases will be described.

First part:  direct taxation

The first part of the Tax Survey deals with direct taxation: personal income tax, corporate income tax and legal entities income tax. The non-resident income tax is not dealt with; it is a specific domain one can only give a good perception of if the international agreements applicable to the bilateral situations are also dealt with.  The last chapters deal with withholding taxes and advance payments. This first part also deals with special corporate income tax regimes (advance ruling procedures, investment companies, etc.).

Second part:  indirect taxation

The second part of the Tax Survey deals with indirect taxation: VAT, registration duties, estate duties, miscellaneous duties and taxes, excise duties, etc.

This Tax Survey only describes the taxes which are or were the responsibility of the Federal Public Service Finance. A certain number of those taxes are now the responsibility of the Regions. As a result, the information relating to the last-mentioned taxes is purely indicative.

Generally speaking, the Tax Survey does not deal with procedures.

Information providers

The staff members of the Regulations Department and the Research Department of the General Administration Strategic Expertise and Support would like to thank their colleagues from the Federal and Regional Tax Administrations for the preliminary work, the observations and the translations made during the preparation of this Tax Survey. Gaby Dascotte is also thanked for her work regarding the design.

Although the authors have taken particular care to ensure the reliability of the information given in this publication, the latter must not be considered as an administrative circular. The Tax Survey was written for purely documentary purposes at a general and global level.  No rights can be founded on it. The General Administration Strategic Expertise and Support is not authorized to answer queries with regard to the application of tax legislation to individual cases. The circulars this Tax Survey refers to are available in the fiscal and legal database (Fisconetplus).

The Tax Survey is also available in Dutch, in French and in German.

August 2021

Tom Jansen

The Adviser-General tasked with leading the General Administration Strategic Expertise and Support.

Unless stated otherwise, the legislation described is the one which applies :

• to 2020 income (tax year 2021) in the matter of direct taxation, with the exception of withholding taxes (part I, chapters 1 to 4); 
• on 1 January 2021 as far as indirect taxation (part II) and withholding taxes (part I, chapters 5 to 7) are concerned.

As heretofore, the printed version of the Tax survey will be updated once a year. The Tax Survey can now also be referred to on our website, where it can be downloaded as a pdf-file. Where important modifications in the tax legislation may occur in between two issues of the printed version, these changes will be made in the electronic version as soon as possible.

Click on the reference in the table to download the pdf-version of the integral Tax Survey.

Tax Survey

Integral version (PDF, 3.37 MB)

The Tax Survey should not be considered as an administrative circular, no rights can be founded upon it.

You can order the printed version of the Tax Survey by sending an email to fedopress@minfin.fed.be.