do trainees and on-call workers count towards the number of employees

Trainees and temporary workers count, but not always fully

When determining whether an employer reaches the threshold of one hundred, one hundred fifty or two hundred fifty employees, in principle all people who have an employment relationship with the employer count — and that is a broader concept than just the permanent employee with a full-time contract. Temporary workers fall under this: they have an employment agreement, even if it varies in scope from week to week. For trainees, it is less clear-cut, because a traineeship is not always an employment agreement — that depends on the nature of the agreement, not on the title "traineeship" on the contract.

This distinction is not just a theoretical matter. An employer who falls just below one hundred permanent employees can, by counting temporary workers, still cross the first threshold, with the obligations that come with it — think of the calculation of the pay gap per category once that number is reached. Temporary agency workers and payroll employees also play a role here, although the question of whether and with whom they count is different again — that topic is worked out separately under temporary agency workers and payroll under the law. For Dutch practice, there is the additional point that the precise counting method must emerge from the national implementation, which is not yet final at this moment — see whether the pay transparency law has already come into force.

Where the thresholds come from and what is still missing

Article 9 of Directive (EU) 2023/970 mentions the thresholds of one hundred, one hundred fifty and two hundred fifty employees, but the directive itself does not detail how trainees and temporary workers are precisely counted — that is up to the member states in implementation. For the Netherlands, that elaboration can be found in bill 36949, the Law implementing the Directive on pay transparency, which at the time of writing is still under consideration by the Second Chamber. Until that bill is adopted, the precise counting method for the Dutch situation is not fixed.