On 30 June 2026, Van Olmen & Wynant and the Belgian Institute of Company Lawyers (IJE-IBJ) hosted the latest edition of the Employment Forum at De Warande in Brussels. We welcomed more than 80 in-house counsel, HR specialists, academics, and other professionals for an in-depth session on one of the most significant shifts in Belgian employment law in recent years: the recent and upcoming reform of working time legislation.
A new era for working time in Belgium
The year 2026 has already brought a wave of legislative changes reshaping the rules on working time:
- Voluntary overtime — the expanded regime and its practical implications for employers and employees;
- Night work — the abolition of the longstanding prohibition and the new regulatory framework;
- Minimum working time — the lowered threshold for weekly working hours and its impact on flexible employment arrangements;
- Work schedule frameworks — the increased flexibility in structuring and amending work schedules within the internal work regulations.
Together, these measures represent a fundamental rebalancing of the Belgian working time framework. With the mandatory registration of working time and the annualisation of working hours still on the legislative agenda, more change is yet to come.
Against this backdrop, the Forum brought together practitioners and in-house experts to examine what these reforms mean in practice — the opportunities they create and the obligations they impose.
Speakers
The session featured a keynote by guest speaker Renaud Linguelet, Social Relations Expert at Equans and lecturer in employment law at the Université de Liège, who shared valuable insights from an in-house perspective on voluntary overtime.
Next, Van Olmen & Wynants’ own team members Gautier Busschaert, Pieter Pecinovsky and Uma Joris covered the other topics.
Looking ahead
As the Belgian legislator continues to modernise the working time framework, employers face both new opportunities for flexibility and new compliance requirements. Van Olmen & Wynant remains committed to guiding its clients through these developments.
For more information on the topics discussed or on the Employment Forum, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Some photos of the event: From top to bottom: Uma, Renaud, Pieter and Gautier.
