Marginal pressure on extra earnings (peak, single-earner family)

94%↗change: 1y 0 pts · 5y +8 pts · 10y —as of 2026A source confidenceborn

What this number says

In 2026, a single-earner family with two children lost 94 cents of every extra euro earned at the steepest point of the income range — the peak of the official marginal-pressure curve for that household type. Marginal pressure is how much of one extra euro of gross pay disappears through income tax plus the phase-out of income-dependent benefits (zorgtoeslag, huurtoeslag, kindgebonden budget). The Ministry of Finance publishes the curve every Prinsjesdag for fixed household archetypes; this series tracks the highest printed value for a single-earner couple with two children (6–11) in a rented home that claims every benefit it is entitled to. It is the peak for that archetype — most households, especially those without benefit entitlements, face far lower marginal pressure. Peak marginal pressure is the sharpest official measure of whether working more pays — the 90%+ peaks in the middle incomes are what the Dutch marginale-druk debate is about, and they are invisible in the OECD tax wedge, which ignores benefit withdrawal.

Read this first

One named archetype, not a population average: single-earner couple, two children 6–11, rented home at the reference rent, assumed to claim every toeslag they are entitled to (the ministry's own stated assumption — real take-up is lower, and households without toeslag rights face much lower marginal pressure). Values are printed whole-percent peaks on a discrete income grid — the true curve peak can sit between grid points. 2024 edition coarsened the grid (€1,000 → €2,500) and widened the range to €100k: peaks across that boundary are not strictly comparable. 2019 deliberately not shown: pre-reform huurtoeslag cliff (a printed 152% at one grid point where net income falls outright) and no stated household definition in that edition — see data-notes. OECD marginal tax wedge is NOT a substitute: it excludes means-tested benefit withdrawal, exactly what drives these peaks.

Peak marginal pressure — Netherlands

⌇ 2024: Bijlage redesign: income grid coarsened €1,000 → €2,500 and range widened to €100k — peaks across this boundary are not strictly comparable (a coarser grid can miss the true curve peak)

Source & method

Source	Ministerie van Financiën manual:D2
Licence	Rijksoverheid publication (public domain / CC0 per government open-data policy)
Trend method	OLS over last 8 annual observations, 5% significance (MBW convention)
Revisions	None recorded since 2026-07-17. Every retrieval is stored append-only; when the source restates history, the old and new values become comparable here.
Pipeline notes	Built 12 Jul 2026 from all seven Prinsjesdag editions (pakket Belastingplan 2020–2026), each read first-hand twice (research agent + independent re-verification from the same PDFs). Peak of the printed marginale-druk column, eenverdiener table; overlap years use the newer edition's recomputation (differences ≤1 pt; log in data-notes). Manual drop data/manual/D2.csv carries per-value page/URL provenance. Refresh each Prinsjesdag (~mid-September) from the new bijlage.

Raw snapshot (JSON) · every observation keeps its retrieval timestamp and revision history in the public database.

Data table — Peak marginal pressure (Netherlands)

Period	Value
2026	94
2025	94
2024	91
2023	86
2022	85
2021	86
2020	86