Seventy-seven percent. That is the share of mobility-budget users who put part of their allowance toward housing costs — rent or mortgage repayments. The figure comes from SD Worx, and it is rising fast: 45% in 2021, 52% in 2022, 77% in 2023.
The number gets a reaction. Social partners see it as a misuse of the scheme. Part of the automotive sector wants it reined in. And the debate has crystallised around a single question: should there be a cap?
It is a legitimate question. It is not the right one.
What the percentage doesn’t tell you
On 29 April 2026, the Central Economic Council and the National Labour Council issued a unanimous opinion on the draft bill set to reform the mobility budget (opinion CCE 2026-1330 / CNT no. 2.485). Among their requests, one is unambiguous: cap the financing of housing costs at a maximum of 50% of the mobility budget, for new budgets granted from the law’s entry into force.
The reasoning is sound. The Councils fear two effects: salary optimisation that drifts from the scheme’s purpose, and upward pressure on the housing market if a large group of workers receive extra purchasing power channelled toward rent or mortgage. They point to documented precedents — the Belgian housing bonus, cuts to registration duties — where an incentive to access housing fed price rises wherever supply was constrained.
All of this is serious and holds up. But one element is missing from that reading — one I see consistently in the field, and it changes how the famous 77% should be interpreted.
The administrative artefact: the percentage also measures ease of encoding
In practice, on the ground, here is what I see in the companies I work with.
An employee who wants to put their mobility budget toward rent or a mortgage submits one document a year: a lease, a bank statement. The employer checks the residence condition. End of procedure.
That same employee who wants to use their budget for a public-transport pass, shared-scooter trips, a leased bike, EV charging or car-sharing has to encode every expense (or run it through a dedicated payment card), often via a third-party platform, with receipts, categorisation and monthly tracking. For the employer, it is a continuous administrative flow. For the employee, it is a monthly chore — especially when the individual amounts are modest.
The result is predictable. Faced with a once-a-year entry versus permanent tracking, many pick the simple option. Not because they have stopped commuting, but because the administrative effort is wildly out of proportion to the benefit. Nobody gave up the train because they paid their rent with their mobility budget. The 77% reflects an encoding reality at least as much as a mobility choice.
That doesn’t make the figure trivial. It makes it insufficient to conclude there is “misuse” — and it explains why capping it won’t fix the underlying problem.
There is even a useful side effect: when these expenses go through a private card rather than an unlimited fuel card, they tend to be more considered.
The real operational question: remote work
Current law allows housing costs to be financed under two alternative conditions: living within a 10 km radius of the usual place of work, or performing the majority of one’s working time from home. In the second case, an administrative tolerance treats the home as the usual place of work, whatever the distance to the office — so a remote worker living 25 km away qualifies.
The social partners targeted this exact point. In their opinion, they explicitly cite question 5.48 on the official lebudgetmobilite.be site, whose current wording, they write, “could not only lead to using the mobility budget for salary-optimisation purposes, but also encourage the use of the personal car for commuting.” Their example is plain: a worker who teleworks 60% of the time allocates their entire budget to housing, then drives their own car on the two days they go to the office. That said, a private car is generally not driven like a company car — the excess is smaller. This is not a judgement; it is what usage data show (consumption, kilometres driven).
That is where the real stake lies. And it is operational first.
With two to three remote days a week now standard in most office-based companies, the notion of a “principal place of work” becomes blurred. Does an employee who comes in three days a week work “mainly” at the office, or “mainly” from home? The answer depends on company policy, on the month, sometimes on the week. And that answer directly governs eligibility for housing costs.
For HR, fleet and facility managers, this is not a theoretical detail. Concrete questions arise today. An employee living 25 km away who teleworks three days out of five qualifies; but if the remote-work policy drops back to two days, does eligibility vanish mid-year? Do you recalculate? How do you handle fairness between a field worker — never remote, therefore never eligible for distance housing costs — and an office worker who is, via the exception? And how do you frame the rule in a policy, an addendum or a company-level CBA in a way that is both legally robust and humanly fair?
These are the questions employers have to settle. Not the percentage.
Three framing principles for employers
Before implementing the mobility budget with housing costs enabled in pillar 2 — which I recommend in the large majority of cases — the real question is: how do you frame remote work so the rule stays manageable and fair? Three principles from the field.
First: define the principal place of work, and write remote work into it explicitly. The definition cannot stay implicit. If your policy enables housing costs, you must set out — in a policy, an addendum or a CBA — what you treat as the principal place of work. For example: “the principal place of work is the address in the employment contract, unless the employee performs more than 50% of their working days from home on a monthly basis.” The wording must match the legal condition and remain verifiable without disproportionate effort.
Second: a written, uniform rule. The worst setup is one where some benefit from the remote-work exception and others don’t, with no objective justification. If your company allows two remote days a week (40%), nobody meets the threshold; at three days (60%), everyone does. The point is not the figure itself, but that the rule is the same for comparable roles, documented, and communicated up front — not discovered at encoding time.
Third: simple, regular monitoring. An annual residence check is enough for the 10 km condition. For the remote-work condition, a monthly or quarterly record of attendance days — often already available in the time-tracking system or HRIS — lets you verify the threshold without creating new burden. The aim is not to police people; it is to be able to justify the rule if the NSSO audits it.
What about the 50% cap?
The 29 April 2026 opinion therefore calls for capping housing costs at 50% of the mobility budget. If that recommendation makes it into law — which is not a given: the text is, to date, neither voted nor published in the Belgian Official Gazette — it would apply to new budgets granted after entry into force, not to existing ones, which would mean two regimes running in parallel for a while, and so an extra layer of administrative complexity.
For employers, this rebalances pillar 2 but does not settle the remote-work question. Even capped at 50%, housing financing remains possible, and the remote-work eligibility condition is unchanged. All the framing work described above still has to be done.
More fundamentally, this cap treats a symptom — a percentage judged too high — without touching the cause: a remote-work exception that makes any home address eligible, at any distance. Before capping the percentage, the real question is: should the remote-work condition remain a standalone eligibility criterion, or should it be combined with a maximum distance? This is not a matter of dogma; it is a matter of the scheme’s internal consistency.
What’s at stake for 2027
The announced timeline makes this pressing. Under the draft bill submitted to the Councils, the mobility budget would become mandatory on 1 January 2027 for companies with 50 or more employees, then on 1 January 2028 for those with 15 to 50 — only for employers that already provide company cars. A second phase would then extend the mobility budget to all employees, but with no timeline at this stage. These thresholds rest on a text still under discussion; they are not final.
Housing costs are not a peripheral matter within pillar 2: by far, they are the option employees choose most. And the option depends directly on your remote-work policy and its tax framing. Preparing a mobility budget without having answered this question means building your mobility policy on foundations you haven’t measured.
If you are preparing your mobility budget for 2027, framing remote work is one of the points to settle before you write the policy — not after. It is exactly the kind of subject we work through up front with employers, even under tight constraints. To talk it through: nicolas@nextmobility.be.
Sources
- Law of 17 March 2019 on the introduction of a mobility budget; Royal Decree of 10 September 2023 implementing articles 8, §5 and 12, §5 of that law.
- Opinion CCE 2026-1330 / CNT no. 2.485, 29 April 2026 — “Draft bill amending various provisions relating to the mobility budget” (referral of 26 January 2026; unanimous opinion).
- lebudgetmobilite.be — official FAQ, section 5 (budget allocation) and question 5.48 on remote work and housing costs.
- Housing-cost share: SD Worx — 45% (2021), 52% (2022), 77% (2023) of users allocate part of their mobility budget to housing (reported by link2fleet).
- 2027/2028 timeline and scope of the obligation: Securex, SD Worx (draft bill, not yet voted at the time of writing).
Nicolas Verstraete — Next Mobility · nicolas@nextmobility.be