Travellers arrive at Brussels Airport as Belgium moves to tighten residency checks for EU jobseekers. Credit : Mounir Taha, Shutterstock
EU citizens who move to Belgium to look for work could soon face much tougher checks, under a new Belgian government proposal that would force jobseekers to prove from day one that they are actively applying for jobs and, six months later, that they still have a realistic chance of being hired. If they cannot show that, Belgium says it wants the power to withdraw their right to stay.
The proposal, backed at first reading by Belgium’s Council of Ministers, is part of a broader push by Migration Minister Anneleen Van Bossuyt to tighten migration rules and crack down on what she describes as abuse of the system. But for EU citizens thinking of moving to Belgium for work, simply arriving and saying you’re looking for a job may no longer be enough.
At the moment, EU nationals who want to stay in Belgium for more than three months while looking for work already have to provide some evidence that they are searching for a job. Under the new plan, that burden of proof would become heavier straight away and would not stop once the residence card has been issued.
In other words, Belgium is not just looking at whether someone arrives with the right paperwork. It also wants to know what happens afterwards.
Belgium wants two checks instead of one for EU citizens looking for work
The proposed system would work in two stages. The first hurdle comes when an EU citizen applies for a residence card to stay in Belgium for longer than three months as a jobseeker. Under the current rules, applicants only need to provide one form of proof, either evidence of job applications or proof that they are registered with the relevant employment service.
Belgium now wants both.
That means a person applying on the basis of looking for work would need to show that they have actually been applying for jobs and that they are registered with the appropriate employment service, such as Actiris in Brussels or another regional body depending on where they live.
That may sound like a technical tweak, but it matters because it raises the bar at the very start of the process. Instead of showing one sign of activity, applicants would have to build a fuller file from the beginning.
The second check would come after six months, and that is the part of the proposal that could have the biggest consequences.
At that stage, the person would not just need to prove that they had looked for work. They would also need to show that they had a realistic chance of actually finding a job. According to the Belgian government, that could include evidence such as training, qualifications, work experience or targeted job applications that show the search is serious and credible.
If they cannot demonstrate that, Belgium says it wants to be able to end their right of residence.
That is the point where the tone of the proposal becomes much sharper. This is not being sold as a simple administrative clean up. It is being presented as a political warning that the right to stay as an EU jobseeker should not become an open ended route into the Belgian welfare system.
The Belgian government says the right to stay is ‘not a free pass’
According to Van Bossuyt, Belgium has seen cases where EU citizens take a few initial steps to secure a residence permit, then stop making a genuine effort to find work and later apply for social assistance. Her argument is that freedom of movement should not be used as a back door into welfare.
In her words, the right to stay as a jobseeker is ‘no free pass’.
That line gives a good sense of where this proposal sits politically. Belgium is not challenging the principle that EU citizens can move to another member state to look for work. What it is trying to do is tighten the conditions around that right and make it easier to remove people who, in the government’s view, are not genuinely pursuing employment.
The government is also linking the reform directly to public money. Van Bossuyt has argued that the rules should be fair not only to people who come to Belgium to work, but also to Belgian taxpayers and public services. That language is likely to resonate with voters who support a tougher migration line, but it will also raise questions about how strictly Belgium can police the right of free movement without running into legal challenges.
That matters because EU citizens do have a recognised right to move to another member state to look for work. The real legal fight, if one comes, will be about where Belgium is drawing the line between legitimate checks and making that right harder to use in practice.
Family reunification rules are also being tightened
The draft law does not stop with jobseekers.
Belgium also wants to tighten the way family reunification applications involving EU citizens are handled. Under the proposal, applications would need to be complete from the start. If key documents are missing, the case could be declared inadmissible instead of being kept open while the applicant fills in the gaps later.
The government says that should reduce unnecessary paperwork for local authorities and speed up decision making. In practical terms, though, it also means less room for error. People applying through family reunification would be under more pressure to get the file right the first time.
The numbers help explain why the government is putting so much emphasis on this category. In 2025, Belgium issued 1,266 residence cards to EU citizens who said they were in the country to look for work. In the same category, there were 705 refusals and 202 terminations of residence. The government has also pointed to a high number of applications involving Romanian and Bulgarian nationals, while claiming that some further checks uncovered cases where applicants were in fact from non EU countries in the Western Balkans.
That is politically useful for a government arguing that the current system is too easy to manipulate.
The proposal is part of a wider hardening of Belgian migration policy
The tougher checks on EU jobseekers are not appearing in isolation. They are part of a broader migration package unveiled by Van Bossuyt, who also announced a fast track approach for asylum seekers considered unlikely to receive protection.
Under that separate plan, Belgium wants to accelerate asylum procedures for applicants from countries with a low protection rate, with the aim of reducing reception pressure and speeding up returns. The government says the full asylum procedure in those cases should ideally be completed within three months, compared with an average of around 16.5 months at present.
That is a different track from the EU jobseeker proposal, but the political logic behind both measures is the same. Belgium wants to show that it is making residence, asylum and migration rules stricter, faster and harder to exploit.
For EU citizens thinking of moving to Belgium to find work, the headline is straightforward enough. If this proposal becomes law, they will need to arrive with stronger proof, keep building that case after they arrive, and be ready six months later to show that the job hunt is still real and still going somewhere.
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