Aviation: Belgium to introduce a boarding tax

Published

Oct 12 2021

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As head of our Tax group in Brussels, my practice covers the full range of business tax matters, domestically and internationally, focusing on IP-related tax in life sciences, media and tech & comms.

Practices

A new “boarding tax” is one of the measures coming out of the Belgian government’s budget negotiations on 12 October 2021. The tax would require passengers to pay a fee on their ticket whenever they take the plane for a flight of fewer than 500 kilometres.

While the tax is intended to combat environmental pollution, it will clearly help curb the budgetary deficit Belgium is currently facing, as the new measure should raise €30 million. Newspapers report that this number is largely overstated considering the currently rumoured amount of the tax (around €5 to €6 per ticket). However, the intention is to tweak that amount at some point after the tax has been introduced.

About a dozen of airports would be concerned, depending on whether passengers embark from Zaventem, Charleroi or any of the smaller airports (like Ostend or Antwerp): Amsterdam, Birmingham, Frankfurt, Hamburg, London, Maastricht, Paris, Strasbourg, Stuttgart, and Zurich (Geneva would just fall outside).

The nitty gritty details are still to be worked out, so it is not clear whether short transfer flights to connect to a long-haul flight would be exempt from this boarding tax.