Overtime in Belgium is tightly regulated, and the rules are layered in a way that catches many SME owners off guard. There is not just one threshold to watch: Belgian labour law imposes separate caps at the daily, weekly and annual level, each with its own consequences when breached. Managing all three manually, across a team of even five or ten people, quickly becomes error-prone. Tikkit handles the calculations automatically so that you stay compliant without having to run the numbers yourself.
The three Belgian overtime thresholds explained
Before looking at how automatic detection works, it helps to understand what exactly is being monitored.
- Daily cap: the standard maximum working time for a full-time employee is 9 hours per day. Sectoral collective agreements or specific work regimes can raise this to 10 or 11 hours, but 9 hours is the default reference point.
- Weekly cap: normal working time in Belgium is set at 38 hours per week. Any hour worked beyond that threshold qualifies as overtime and triggers additional entitlements for the employee, including a wage supplement or compensatory rest.
- Annual internal quota: on top of the weekly cap, each employee has an internal overtime bank of 143 hours per calendar year, unless a sectoral agreement sets a higher ceiling. Once that quota is exhausted, further overtime requires prior authorisation from the labour inspectorate.
Tracking all three of these simultaneously, for every employee, every week, is exactly the kind of task that breaks spreadsheet-based systems. It is also one of the clearest reasons why Belgian SMEs are moving away from spreadsheets for time tracking.
How Tikkit monitors each cap in real time
Every time an employee clocks in or out, Tikkit records the event with a server-stamped timestamp and immediately updates three running totals: the day counter, the week counter and the year counter. This happens in the background without any manual input, which means there is no opportunity for figures to be adjusted after the fact.
When a counter approaches a legal threshold, the responsible manager receives an alert in the Tikkit dashboard. The remaining allowance for each employee is visible at a glance, updated continuously as the working day progresses.
A few practical details worth knowing:
- Part-time contracts are handled correctly. Tikkit adjusts the reference duration based on each employee's contractual regime, so the 38-hour benchmark is applied proportionally where appropriate.
- Sectoral deviations can be configured within Tikkit, which matters for shift-work environments or companies covered by a joint committee that permits extended daily hours.
- All historical records are retained for audit purposes, which supports the kind of legal protection and audit readiness that proper time registration provides.
What happens when a threshold is crossed
When an employee exceeds a cap, Tikkit separates the overtime hours into a dedicated category and flags them clearly in reports. Those flagged hours are exportable directly to a social secretariat or accountant, which means payroll processing can happen accurately without any manual rekeying.
For on-site teams who clock in via a QR code or a kiosk terminal, the detection works in exactly the same way. The QR and kiosk clock-in setup feeds directly into the overtime module, so there is no gap between how hours are captured and how they are assessed against the legal caps.
Employees also benefit from this transparency. Each person can view their own running totals in their personal timeline within Tikkit, which tends to reduce disputes and last-minute surprises at the end of a pay period.
Building toward the 2027 mandatory registration deadline
Belgium is making working-time registration compulsory across all sectors by 2027. For SMEs that do not yet have a reliable system in place, the window for preparation is narrowing. Automatic overtime detection is not an optional extra in that context: the social inspectorate will want to see not only that hours were recorded, but that legal ceilings were actively monitored and respected.
Understanding what the 2027 deadline means in practice is a useful starting point for any business that is still assessing its options. The obligation is broad, but the preparation can be straightforward with the right tooling.
Tikkit is built with Belgian compliance requirements at its core. The overtime rules are not bolted on as an afterthought: they are embedded in the engine that processes every clock-in event, which means the system stays accurate as your team grows and as the regulatory framework continues to evolve.