The tax on stock lending and P2P lending in Belgium

Two kinds of lending, one tax family

Two things a Belgian investor increasingly runs into are lending in disguise. One is a broker's share-lending programme — you let the broker lend your shares to short-sellers and receive a fee. The other is peer-to-peer (P2P) or crowdlending — you lend cash through a platform and receive interest.

They look different, but Belgian tax files them in the same family: movable income (revenus mobiliers / roerende inkomsten), taxed at the standard 30% rate. And in both cases the party paying you is usually established abroad, which decides where the tax actually gets settled.

Lending your shares back to the broker

A share-lending programme pays you a fee for making your holdings available to borrow. That fee is movable income, taxable at 30%. A Belgian bank would withhold that tax at source; a foreign broker running the programme does not, so the gross fee is yours to carry to the annual return, where the 30% is applied.

Underneath the fee sits a subtler point, and it is the one worth slowing down for.

The dividend you no longer receive. While a share is out on loan across an ex-dividend date, the dividend goes to whoever holds the share at that moment — not to you. The programme makes you whole with a compensation payment, a "manufactured dividend". The catch is that this payment is a substitute, not the dividend. Taxed as movable income at 30%, yes — but the reliefs that attach to a real dividend do not obviously travel with it:

• the reclaim of the first €833 of dividends per person (the tranche you can recover on the return) is a relief for dividends, and a compensation is not plainly one;
• any foreign withholding already suffered on the underlying dividend, which a real dividend lets you set against Belgian tax, may not be creditable the same way once the payment reaches you as compensation.

None of that is settled here — it is flagged. The point is only that lending a dividend-paying share can quietly convert a partly-relieved dividend into fully-taxed substitute income, and that trade-off is worth seeing before enrolling, not after.

Lending your cash on a P2P platform

Interest from P2P and crowdlending — Mintos, PeerBerry and the like — is movable income, interest, taxed at 30%. These platforms are established outside Belgium and apply no Belgian withholding, so the mechanics mirror the lending fee: the gross interest goes in the movable-income section of the annual return (box VII on recent returns), and the 30% is computed there.

Two Belgian-specific wrinkles sit around that plain rule.

Incentives exist, but they are narrow and conditional. The regional friends-and-family lending schemes — the Flemish Winwinlening, the Walloon Prêt Coup de Pouce, the Brussels Proxi-lening — give the lender a tax credit calculated on the capital lent, plus a one-off credit if the borrower defaults. Note what that is and is not: it is a reduction tied to the capital, not an exemption of the interest, which remains movable income at 30%. There is also a federal regime for interest on loans to starting small companies through a licensed crowdfunding platform, where interest up to an indexed ceiling can be exempt for the first years. Both come with real conditions — the borrower, the platform, the holding period — and the amounts are indexed, so they are things to verify against the current rules, not to claim on the strength of a category.

A foreign platform can also be a foreign account. Where your money sits in a wallet or account held at the platform abroad, the separate duty to report a foreign account — registration with the National Bank's Central Point of Contact and the box XIII mention — can be triggered, quite apart from the tax on the interest. That obligation has its own guide.

Why both usually land on you

The thread running through both halves is the same one that runs through a foreign broker generally: nobody withholds Belgian tax for you. A share- lending fee from a foreign broker, and interest from a foreign lending platform, arrive gross. The 30% is not skipped — it is deferred to the return, where the gross amount is declared and the tax computed on it.

That makes each of these a line you assemble yourself, from the platform's own statements, rather than a figure that arrives already settled. Belfolio's part is to gather those amounts into one record and show how each was reached, rather than leave a lending fee or a tranche of P2P interest sitting unnoticed on a foreign statement until the return is due.

Always verify your figures

Belfolio computes and presents these amounts for information only. This is not tax advice. Verify them, and which reliefs apply to your situation, with the FPS Finance or your accountant before filing.