Who is the client when a freelancer works through a marketplace or work platform?

Having at least three clients is one condition of the proposal’s business test. Together with a separate test of the working relationship, it forms part of a safe harbour intended to give freelancers and clients greater certainty about working outside employment.

The proposed Zelfstandigenwet remains under consultation until 29 October 2026. It does not impose an existing three-client requirement on every freelancer. Nor would falling outside the safe harbour automatically make someone an employee: the relationship would still be assessed under the existing rules

Nevertheless, how clients are counted could affect access to that certainty. Someone completing several assignments through one intermediary therefore needs to understand whose assignments they are accepting.

The memorandum describes a freelancer working for an intermediary at that intermediary’s customers. In that arrangement, it treats the intermediary as one client, however many customers receive the work.

It also describes an intermediary bringing a freelancer and client together, with the assignment agreement made directly between them. Here, the freelancer can have several clients despite using the same intermediary.

Calling a business a broker or marketplace does not tell us which arrangement applies. The question is whether it purchases the freelancer’s services itself or helps other parties enter their own agreements.

In everyday language, both may be called platforms. Legally, the distinction is more specific.

The EU Platform Work Directive and the proposed Dutch Wet platformwerk cover services meeting several cumulative requirements. These include organising paid work as a necessary and essential part of the service and using automated monitoring or decision-making systems.

The Dutch explanatory memorandum distinguishes those services from a digital bulletin board that allows service providers to reach customers without organising their work. Such a bulletin board falls outside the digital labour platform definition.

The distinction concerns what the service actually does. Providing a place where parties can find each other differs from organising the work they perform. Neither “marketplace” nor “broker” is, by itself, a legal classification.

Its client-counting discussion recognises that an intermediary may be a digital labour platform. However, it does not expressly map its two arrangements onto the distinction between bulletin boards and work platforms.

Two questions therefore remain separate: who contracts for the freelancer’s services, and whether the service falls within platform-work legislation.

A direct client–freelancer agreement helps answer the first question, but cannot answer the second on its own. This matters particularly where a marketplace provides continuing support with contracts, timesheets and billing. Those functions need to be examined in context.

Older Dutch tax proceedings illustrate why the intermediary’s actual role deserves attention. A financial adviser worked at a bank through an intermediary. The 2019 court identified the bank as the ultimate client and found that the intermediary’s role did not extend beyond mediation and payment administration.

The 2021 appeal also referred to the bank as the client, although it reached a different conclusion about whether the adviser’s income qualified as business profits.

These proceedings did not concern the proposed Zelfstandigenwet or the Platform Work Directive. Their relevance is narrower: the presence of an intermediary does not remove the need to examine the relationships behind it.

On marketplaces supported by Zooly, the assignment service agreement is directly between the client and freelancer. The marketplace operator facilitates the engagement, while Zooly provides the operator with software and managed services. The client and freelancer agree the assignment price themselves.

Take Sanne, an installation professional who works for three independent businesses through one marketplace. Each business enters its own agreement with her and purchases her services. The marketplace administers those engagements, but that shared administration does not necessarily turn them into one client relationship.

An authorised agent may help Sanne negotiate or sign an agreement in her name. That representative role remains separate from her responsibility to provide the services. Likewise, the operator can prepare her invoice under a billing mandate and charge its own fee separately. Under the Direct Pay arrangement, the client pays Sanne’s account.

Keeping these relationships distinct makes it easier to see who purchases the work, who performs it and who supports the engagement. The legal assessment still depends on the agreements and actual working practices, including the marketplace’s functions.

Start with the service agreement. Is it directly between the freelancer and the business receiving the services, or does an intermediary purchase those services and supply them onwards?

Then examine representation and billing. The memorandum permits third-party invoicing where it is clearly on the freelancer’s behalf, in their business name, and the freelancer remains responsible for its accuracy. The organisation sending the invoice is therefore not necessarily the client.

Finally, compare the documents with what happens during the assignment. Clear agreements help identify the parties, but neither a marketplace label nor several clients can establish independent working by itself.

A freelancer may use one system and still have several clients. What matters is whether the agreements and everyday arrangements preserve those separate relationships.