Hiring a contractor in Belgium when you do not yet know the system

Every company active in Belgium carries a ten-digit enterprise number, written 0123.456.789 and beginning with 0 or 1. It is allocated on registration with the Crossroads Bank for Enterprises (KBO/BCE) and changes with neither the name nor the address.

The Belgian VAT number is that same number prefixed with "BE", but it only exists if the company is registered for VAT. A company can be active and perfectly in order without a valid VAT number: that is the commonest confusion for anyone arriving from a country where the two identifiers are one and the same.

These numbers appear on the quote, on the invoice and on the company's website — that is a legal obligation, not a courtesy. The trading name painted on a van, for its part, is not necessarily the legal name under which the entity appears in the registers.

The public search of the KBO/BCE is free, needs no account and exists in four languages: Dutch, French, German and English. You search by number, by name, by address or by NACE-BEL activity code; the entry gives the name, the legal form, the start date, the active or ceased status, the establishment units and the declared activities.

VIES, the European Commission service, answers a narrower question: is this VAT number valid today in the country that issued it? The answer is binary and dated, and its possible causes are the subject of the guide on the invalid VAT number.

Bankruptcies and judicial reorganisations, for their part, are published court decisions: in the Belgian Official Gazette, in the Central Solvency Register, and as a legal situation in the KBO/BCE data. A closed proceeding is over, and reading it as a current warning is the commonest mistake.

The opening document is the quote (devis, offerte): a description of the work and the supplies, a price, a date and a stated period of validity. Once signed, it fixes the scope — what is included in the price and, above all, what is not.

For the building or the purchase of a home to be built or under construction, the Breyne Act regulates the payments: the advance paid on conclusion of the contract may not exceed 5% of the total amount, and the payments that follow are made in instalments which may not exceed the value of the work already carried out.

The same Act imposes acceptance in two stages: a provisional acceptance, which records the completion of the work and the taking of possession, then a final acceptance at least one year later. Outside the scope of that Act, it is the contract that organises acceptance, but the principle stays the same — an acceptance is a written and dated finding, not a handshake on site.

On a renovation, the standard VAT rate is not the default rate. The FPS Finance provides for a rate of 6% on the conversion, renovation, improvement, repair or maintenance of a dwelling more than ten years old, used after the work more than 50% as private housing, and invoiced directly to the person occupying it in that capacity.

The age is counted between the date of first occupation of the dwelling and the date of the first invoice for the work. Since 1 July 2022, it is the contractor who has to set out on the invoice the elements justifying the reduced rate, and the customer has one month to object in writing.

The other rule is surprising in the opposite direction. Belgium has a withholding obligation on invoices where a company has social security or tax debts, set out in article 30bis; the NSSO and the FPS Finance expressly exclude from it the natural person having work carried out for strictly private purposes. A private individual renovating their home therefore has nothing to withhold, even though the official checking tool remains open to everyone.

A KBO/BCE entry contains no turnover, no headcount, no insurance, no dispute, no customer review. The annual accounts are looked up at the National Bank's Central Balance Sheet Office, and insurance certificates are asked of the company itself, before the work rather than after.

The declared activities are NACE codes entered by the company. They say what it says it does, not what it knows how to do, and access to the profession is a matter for the Regions: the rule is not the same in Brussels, in Flanders and in Wallonia.

Finally, the absence of an adverse signal is an absence, not a guarantee: it says that the registers consulted said nothing in particular on the dates shown. Keeping to a deadline and the quality of a screed are written down nowhere before they have happened, and that does not depend on the country you arrived from.