Copyright Tax

What are IP Remunerations, and how can I benefit from them?

Unlock new opportunities for your business

Spotlight on Copyright Tax Are the activities carried out by your organisation creative and original? Then the Copyright Tax programme makes sense. This mechanism allows you to allocate to your creative collaborators (employees, freelancers and managers) a special indemnity for the transfer of their copyrights to the company, which benefits from advantageous taxation. Up to 25% of the gross salary can be paid as copyrights, allowing you to considerably increase the final net salary of your collaborators, at the same cost to the employer.

Copyright Tax

In addition to literary and artistic works, lawmakers have extended the scope of the Copyright Tax to creative works in a broader sense, in particular source code, interfaces and computer programming structures. This programme concerns income from work that is licensed or protected by copyright. For a work to be protected by copyright, it must meet both of two conditions: it must be original and must be expressed and supported by concrete elements. Creative functions include authors, journalists, and designers (artistic field). But they also include software developers, project managers, and data scientists (digital field). This plan can be applied to up to 25% of the employee’s salary envelope. It, therefore, provides for a 50% deduction on a first tranche up to EUR 16,320 (2019, tax year 2020) and then 25% on a second tranche from EUR 16,320 to 32,640 (2019, tax year 2020).

Three cornerstones to assist tax payers in this particular domain:

● Analysing your business and identifying the creative job categories
● Analysing and calculating the income tax benefits
● Requesting a tax ruling from the Belgian Tax Authorities (legal security)