Belgium is the first country to attach a full employment-contract regime to sex work. The law of 3 May 2024 took effect on 1 December 2024. From 1 December 2026 the government is due to evaluate it. That window is the reason the framework is still news: the experiment is no longer theoretical, and the official review is about to begin.
This reporting is part of the Sex Worker Visibility Project: coverage of the legal and labour systems that decide whether people can do this work with ordinary protections rather than permanent exception. If that work is useful to you, support it on Patreon or Buy Me a Coffee.
Belgium first removed adult consensual sex work from the criminal code in 2022. That step legalised the sale of sex but left workers outside the social-security and labour-law systems that cover other employees. Hiring someone for sex work still risked a pimping charge. The 2024 law closed that gap for one specific path: employment under a written contract with an accredited employer.
Under the statute, a sex worker who signs the special employment contract gains the ordinary package: health insurance, paid leave, maternity benefits, unemployment support and pension contributions. Working hours, pay and workplace safety rules apply. The worker has an explicit right to refuse a client, refuse a specific act, and stop an act at any moment. An employer cannot dismiss someone for exercising those refusals. Rooms must meet basic physical standards — minimum size, clean linen, condoms, showers, toiletries — and must be fitted with a panic button.
Employers are tightly controlled. Only legal persons (not natural persons) with an approved legal form can apply. They must hold prior state authorisation. Anyone with convictions for serious violent or sexual offences, or trafficking, is barred. Operating without accreditation keeps the old pimping exposure. The design is deliberate: open a legal employment channel while making unauthorised management of other people’s sex work still criminal.
The law does not cover everyone. Independent, self-employed sex workers remain outside the contract regime; they were already lawful after 2022 and are not the target of the 2024 statute. Home-based work and some adjacent activities such as striptease or pornography fall outside the specific employment-contract rules. Students and certain casual statuses are also excluded from this contract form. So the reform is real for those who enter the accredited-employer path, and incomplete for those who do not or cannot.
Human Rights Watch and Belgian sex-worker organisations described the package as the most comprehensive labour framework yet attached to sex work. The Belgian Union of Sex Workers and groups involved in drafting called it a structural break with the grey zone that followed decriminalisation. Critics have focused on residual stigma, the limited reach of the employee model, and the risk that accreditation becomes a new chokepoint. Both assessments can be true at once: the rights on paper are unusually strong, and the share of the workforce that actually holds those contracts will decide whether the law changes daily conditions or remains a narrow corridor.
That is why the evaluation starting in December 2026 matters. Official numbers on how many employers have been accredited, how many contracts are active, how often the right to refuse is invoked without retaliation, and whether safety and social-security take-up have moved will determine whether the Belgian model is portable or simply local. Other jurisdictions watching the experiment — including those still stuck in registration, Nordic-model or full-criminalisation systems — will read the review for evidence, not rhetoric.
For the Sex Worker Visibility Project, Belgium is the clearest current case of a state treating sex work as labour rather than as a permanent moral exception. The right to refuse, the right to maternity leave, the right to a pension contribution and the duty on the employer to provide a panic button are not abstractions. They are the ordinary tools of employment law, applied for the first time to this work under a named contract. The evaluation will show whether those tools are being used — and by whom.