Cross-border commuters working from home two days a week: where does social security land?

There are two separate tests with different limits, which is why you are getting different answers. For social security, a framework agreement between a number of European states lets a commuter work from home for just under half their time while staying in the employer country's system, but both countries must have signed. For income tax, each pair of countries has its own treaty rules and the tolerance is generally lower.

We took advice per country pair and used the tighter limit for each. Tracking is through the time system: people record home or site each day, with a warning at 80% of the limit.

Also consider business travel and training days in the country of residence or third countries. They count towards time outside the employer country. We had a sales manager who was comfortably within the home-working cap and still went over because of customer visits in France.

On tracking, do not rely on self-declaration alone if the numbers are close. We reconcile the declared pattern against building access data once a year, with works council agreement, and found about 6% of commuters were materially over what they had recorded.

This cleared up the confusion. We will take advice per country pair as suggested and set the caps on the tighter limit. The point about customer visits counting is one I had missed completely.