Zero-Hours Contract in Utrecht: Your Right to Fixed Hours After 12 Months

Why this comes up in Utrecht

Utrecht combines the largest student population density in the country with a hospitality, retail and events economy clustered around a national transport hub - the conditions under which on-call contracts multiply. It is also a city where a large share of on-call workers are international students and recent graduates, who are the least likely to know that a cancelled shift still has to be paid, and the most likely to be told that the arrangement is 'standard here'. The twelve-month rule bites hardest exactly where people stay in a job longer than they intended.

The four-day rule works in both directions

Your employer must call you in at least four days ahead, in writing or electronically. Called with less notice, you are not obliged to come.

The more valuable half is what happens when the employer changes its mind. If it cancels or alters a shift within that four-day window, you keep the right to be paid for the hours originally called. That is the rule most often broken and most rarely enforced - a shift cancelled the night before is still a shift you are owed.

A collective agreement can shorten the four days to one day, so check whether a CAO applies to your employer before concluding the notice was too short.

Three hours minimum, however short the shift

Where the agreed working time is under 15 hours a week and the hours are not fixed, each call-up must be paid for at least three hours - even if you were sent home after one. Two separate short call-outs in a day are two separate entitlements, not one.

After twelve months, the offer is mandatory

Once you have been on an on-call arrangement for twelve months, your employer must offer you a fixed number of hours at least equal to your average over the preceding twelve months. The offer must be made within a month, and it cannot be satisfied by handing you another on-call contract.

The consequence of silence is the useful part. If your employer simply does not make the offer, you are entitled to pay as if you were working the hours that should have been offered. So a missed offer is not merely an administrative lapse - it accrues.

You are free to decline and stay on call. But you should be the one deciding that, from a real offer with a number in it.

Work out your own average before you raise it

The average over twelve months is the whole argument, so do the arithmetic from your own records rather than accepting a figure from payroll. Collect twelve months of payslips or rosters and total the hours actually worked, including overtime and including the paid three-hour minimums.

Quiet periods drag the average down and busy ones pull it up - which is why employers sometimes propose a number based on a convenient recent stretch rather than the full year.

Zero-hours contracts are being abolished, eventually

The Wet meer zekerheid flexwerkers, which passed the Tweede Kamer in May 2026 and the Eerste Kamer in July 2026, abolishes zero-hours contracts and replaces them with bandwidth contracts - an agreed minimum and maximum number of hours, with the spread capped at 30 percent. An exception is preserved for school and university students with a side job.

Commencement is by royal decree and has not been fixed; reporting points to no earlier than 1 January 2028 for this part. Until it is in force, article 7:628a BW as described above is what governs your contract.

What this page is based on

• Article 7:628a BW - on-call agreements (oproepovereenkomst)
• Wet meer zekerheid flexwerkers - passed both chambers in 2026, not yet in force

Checked against wetten.overheid.nl and rechtspraak.nl in August 2026. Dutch employment law changes, and several reforms described here have passed parliament without yet being in force - where that is the case the page says so.

Common questions

Other employment situations

• AmstelveenSeconded from a foreign parent companyA foreign governing-law clause does not switch off Dutch dismissal protection. Rome I sets a floor beneath it.
• DelftDismissed during a probation periodProbation clauses are void, not shortened, when they exceed the limit. Check the contract length first.
• LeidenRetaliation after raising a concernReporting suspected wrongdoing is protected. Retaliation for it - including quiet non-renewal - is not lawful.