WBSO Statement

What to report

Self-employed without employees

If you are an WBSO taxpayer (self-employed entrepreneur), you must only submit a WBSO statement if you have spent fewer than 500 hours on WBSO in a given year.

Company with employees

If you received an WBSO declaration as an WBSO withholding agent (employer) for your employees in a given year, you must report the WBSO hours your employees spent in that year.

Did your employees spend no hours on WBSO? And did your company not deduct the WBSO withholding tax credit? Then you must also submit a statement. 

If you opted for ’actual costs and expenditures’ (rather than a fixed amount), you must also report the costs and expenditures you incurred.

Business closure or bankruptcy

If you terminate your business because it has closed or you business has gone bankrupt, you must report the actual number of hours spent on allocated projects, plus any costs and expenditures. You need to do this within 1 month after terminating your business. To do this, please send us an e-mail via wbso@rvo.nl. We will then set up the required task (‘Indienen mededeling’) for you in the portal.

When and how to report

Please submit your statement via our portal. To submit you click on the button ‘WBSO Aanvragen en beheren’ and log in. In the portal you will find a task called ‘Indienen mededeling’ (submit statement). As soon as this task is available in the portal, you will receive an e-mail notification.

You submit 1 statement for all the WBSO declarations you received, ultimately on 31 March in the year after you received the WBSO declaration(s).

Focus points for calculating hours, costs and expenditures

Each WBSO declaration always relates to a period that runs until the end of the calendar year. When stating hours, costs and expenditures, please keep the following in mind:

• Please note that not all R&D-projects activities, companies, costs and expenditures are eligible for the WBSO. In the handbook we clarify the strict guidelines for the parts of R&D that qualify for WBSO.
• Any WBSO hours (plus costs and expenditures) that you spent (or incurred) before the start of the period covered by your WBSO declaration, do not qualify for WBSO.
• You may only state the costs and expenditures that:
  • you included in the application; and
  • we allocated in the WBSO declaration. 

This applies per project, not per application.

• You can only specify costs that exclusively serve the execution of - and are directly attributable to - the WBSO project. This means that:
  • you incur costs solely (100%) for the WBSO project;
  • there is a clear relationship between the costs specified and the WBSO activities carried out.
• The actual costs and expenditures you state, must be paid at the moment you submit your statement.
• In addition, the costs are incurred when you use them for your WBSO activities. This means you cannot include costs in the statement for purchased materials that you have paid for, but have not yet used for WBSO activities.
• If you partially include expenditures under the WBSO, you must show in your WBSO administrative records how you came to your calculations.

Prepare your statement

There are a number of handy tools that you can use to submit the information required. When you prepare your statement, please use:

• the WBSO Rekentool (in Dutch): a calculation tool to quickly and easily calculate your total actual hours and possible costs and expenditures. Use this tool if you have received 2 or more WBSO statements;
• the Manual WBSO 2025:

After the submission of your statement

You can find the confirmation of the submission of your statement in the portal. 

We will issue a revised WBSO declaration when the actual number of WBSO hours worked and/or any actual costs and expenditures are less than we allocated in the initial WBSO declaration. 

Please note that submitting a statement is mandatory, even if your company did not carry out any WBSO activities and did not deduct the WBSO withholding tax credit. If - after a reminder - you still have not submitted a statement, the number of WBSO hours worked will be set at 0. This will result in the full correction of your WBSO declaration and the imposition of a fine. 

We will also give a fine if you submit an incorrect statement.

More information?

• Read more about the WBSO administration.
• Read more about the process after your application.