When you as an employee choose a company lease bike and also receive a tax-free travel allowance, it is important to properly record the agreements regarding the use of your bicycle. For this purpose, your employer can make use of the bicycle declaration. In this article, we explain to you how this works.
Combining the lease bike and your travel allowance
The tax-free travel allowance can be perfectly combined with a lease bike. The legal rule is that you are not entitled to a tax-free travel allowance for the specific days on which you travel to work using the lease bike. For the remaining days on which you travel with an alternative means of transport, such as your own car or public transport, you simply retain the right to the tax-free allowance.
What do you fill in on the bicycle declaration?
To arrange this easily from an administrative perspective, you fill in the declaration. In this, you indicate how many days per week you will use the lease bike on average for your commute. Based on this average, your tax-free travel allowance will be proportionally reduced.
However, the unpaid travel allowance is not lost. We reinvest this amount into your lease amount, which directly lowers your monthly gross lease costs.
A calculation example
Suppose you live 10 kilometers from your work and currently receive a travel allowance for 5 days a week. This amounts to approximately €68 per month. When you record in the bicycle declaration that you travel to work with the lease bike one day a week on average, the employer will no longer pay out a tax-free travel allowance for that single day. This is a reduction of €13.60 (€68 divided by 5 working days). You will then still receive €54.40 in net travel allowance. The withheld €13.60 is subsequently used to lower the gross lease amount of your bicycle.