DriveHub

Driving a company car privately in the Netherlands — the 500 kilometre line, and what crossing it costs

The registration has one job

The rittenregistratie is not a general trip log, and reading it as one is how people build a careful record that still fails. Its purpose is narrow and worth saying out loud: it exists to prove that a company car was driven no more than 500 private kilometres in a calendar year (Wet LB art. 13bis lid 3), and therefore that no bijtelling is due.

That is the whole point of the exercise. The requirements in Uitvoeringsregeling loonbelasting 2011, artikel 3.13 are strict because the document is evidence in a dispute about a threshold, not a diary.

If instead you use your own car and are reimbursed per kilometre, there is no prescribed form at all — only an administration that stands up.

What artikel 3.13 asks for

About the car: make, type and registration, and the period it was available to you.

And per trip:

The route condition catches people. It is not "record the route"; it is "record it when you did not take the usual one", which is exactly the trip you will not remember having taken differently.

What crossing the line costs

The bijtelling is imposed for the whole year, plus a naheffingsaanslag. Not for the month you went over, and not pro rata. Dutch case law on rejected rittenregistraties is extensive and unforgiving, which is the practical reason to treat the 500 km as a hard budget rather than a target.

The arithmetic nobody does

500 kilometres a year is under ten a week. A single weekend trip can be a fifth of the annual budget. If your honest expectation is that you will use the car privately at all beyond the occasional errand, the registration is not the thing to optimise — the bijtelling is a cost you are choosing, and choosing it deliberately is cheaper than discovering it in an assessment.

Why an app rather than a notebook

Nothing above requires software; a notebook with those fields is fine. What software changes is which failure you get. The number that goes missing is never the distance — it is the address you set off from, the fact that this particular Tuesday you took the ring road, and the private trip you did not think to write down because it was three kilometres.

DriveHub records every drive in the background and asks afterwards which were business, so the private ones are in the record whether or not you thought about them at the time. That is the half of a 500 km case that people lose.

What it does not yet print: the per-trip odometer, and the plate on the row. It holds the driven route as GPS geometry but does not currently render it on the report.

This page states what the regulation itself says, and names it so you can check. It is not tax advice and does not know your situation. Where money is involved, ask your accountant — and bring the administration.

The full rule for Netherlands, with the instruments it comes from: mileage log requirements in Netherlands.