‘Tax Liberation Day’ puts Belgium at the top of the taxation scale

A study indicates that Belgium is the European country in which workers pay most tax, as today marks Belgium’s ‘tax Liberation Day’. For the fourth consecutive year, an EU wide calendar of so-called Tax Liberation Days for typical workers in each of the EU member countries has been released jointly by the New Direction Foundation for European Reform, based in Brussels, and Paris’s Institut Économique Molinari, using data provided by auditors Ernst & Young. Tax Liberation Day is the calendar day on which a worker theoretically stops working to pay taxes to the state and begins to keep his or her earnings. The data in the calendar reflect the reality experienced by real, working people in the European Union and the true cost of hiring employees in each state. While this year Tax Liberation Day fell on March 14 in Cyprus, on May 13 in the UK and July 13 in Germany, in Belgium it falls today – three days later than last year. The study uses OECD salary figures for typical workers as a baseline. Payroll tax calculations are made by Ernst & Young. The Tax Burden of Typical Workers in the EU 27 is the only EU-wide study using consistent methodology to calculate how long Europeans have to work before they can keep their earnings and stop paying the state.