TV licence fee in Belgium: do you still pay it?

Nobody will ask you to pay a licence fee for your television in Belgium, and that holds in all three regions. Flanders and Brussels scrapped it on 1 January 2002. Wallonia followed on 1 January 2018, after sixteen years on its own. Only Walloon tax periods that started before 2018 can still be owed, and they are now more than eight years old.

I still want to qualify the good news. Television did not get cheaper on the day the fee disappeared: the money it raised is now paid another way, and the VAT on your bundle weighs more on your annual budget than the old fee ever did.

Do you still have to pay a TV licence fee in Belgium?

No. No Belgian region levies a radio or television fee on households any more, whether for the living-room TV or for the car radio.

The fee became a regional matter in 2002, and each region then made its own choice. Two scrapped it straight away, the third kept it. Here is where you stand depending on your address, legal position checked on 27 October 2026 on the official Walloon pages and in the text of the Brussels ordinance:

The nine German-speaking municipalities fall under the Walloon Region for this tax: the 2018 abolition applies to them exactly as it does to Namur or Liège.

When did the TV licence fee disappear in each region?

In 2002 for Flanders and Brussels, in 2018 for Wallonia.

On the Flemish side, the Brussels daily La Libre put it in one sentence on 22 October 2003: no TV licence fee has been paid there since 1 January 2002. On the Brussels side, the ordinance of 21 February 2002 set the rate of the radio and television fees "at zero euros", backdated to 1 January 2002. Strictly speaking, the tax was never repealed. It still exists in the law of 13 July 1987, at an amount of zero.

Wallonia did exactly the same thing sixteen years later. Its tax portal states that the fee has been "abolished in Wallonia (its amount set to zero) since January 2018". Until then it cost 100.00 euros a year per household, not index-linked, according to the brochure of the SPW Finances, the Walloon tax administration. A single payment covered every television in the same household.

I remember the question very well. During my installation years in Namur, every time I fitted a second decoder in a bedroom, someone asked me whether they would now pay two licence fees. The answer was already no back then: 100.00 euros for the household, however many screens it had.

The Walloon payment calendar depended on your surname. Test-Achats, the Belgian consumer association, set it out on 24 October 2017: from 1 April to 31 March for surnames starting A to J, from 1 October to 30 September for surnames starting K to Z. Only the start date of the period counted. A household whose period began on 1 October 2017 therefore paid its 100.00 euros in full, even though eleven months of that period fell in 2018.

Why did Wallonia keep its licence fee for so long?

Because it raised a lot of money. In 2016, the Walloon administration collected 1,050,000 fees from private individuals and 25,000 from businesses, for 117.7 million euros, according to figures given to the RTBF, the French-language public broadcaster, on 3 May 2017. It also counted 350,000 exempt households: people on the revenu d'intégration (the basic welfare income), recipients of the GRAPA pension supplement or of BIM status (the increased healthcare reimbursement for low incomes), some disabled people, schools and care homes.

Giving up 117 million a year is not decided on the back of an envelope. Collection, meanwhile, was struggling. In September 2018, the Walloon Ombudsman relayed a figure that shows the scale of the problem: 190,000 households still in arrears, for 50.7 million euros, and an announcement that bailiffs would be sent to recover it.

Brussels, for its part, had replaced the licence fee with a broader flat-rate regional tax, according to La Libre in 2003. That tax has gone too: the Region states that it has not been due since the 2016 tax year, at an amount of 89.00 euros per household.

An interim conclusion, and I think a useful one: in 2026, nobody living in Belgium pays a tax for owning a screen. Funding for public broadcasting has not disappeared, though. The RTBF lives on a grant from the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, the French-speaking community government, paid out of general taxation whether you own a television or not.

What should you do with a letter demanding a TV licence fee?

Check the period before paying anything. A demand for a period starting in 2018 or later has no legal basis.

The Walloon tax portal says so itself: for periods before 2018 the tax still applies, and "it is therefore possible that you have still received an invitation to pay". The RTBF reported in 2017 that the limitation period was five years and that the administration could claim up to four periods at once. In October 2026, the last possible period, which opened on 1 October 2017, is more than nine years old. A legitimate claim is still conceivable if the limitation period was interrupted by a registered reminder, a formal demand or a bailiff. In every other case, I would not pay without calling the administration first.

The checks, in order:

• the period claimed: it must have started on 1 October 2017 at the latest;
• the sender: the SPW Finances in Namur, never a "licence fee department" with no address or file number;
• the channel: a text message or an email with a payment link was never used to collect the Walloon fee;
• the amount: 100.00 euros per period for a household, not a random rounded figure;
• whether you were exempt at the time: BIM status or the revenu d'intégration in 2017 cancelled the debt, provided the certificate was filed before the period began.

To check, Wallonia's free number is 1718, and the SPW Finances answers at fiscalite.wallonie@spw.wallonie.be if you give your national register number. A suspicious message can be forwarded to Safeonweb, the service of the Centre for Cybersecurity Belgium that collects phishing reports, at suspect@safeonweb.be.

Which taxes remain on a TV subscription bill?

Only one really counts: VAT at 21%, included in every price shown to private customers.

It has not always been at that rate. Digital television enjoyed reduced VAT at 12%, designed to push households off analogue, and it went back up to 21% on 1 January 2012, according to La Libre of 2 January 2012. Selectra, a Belgian comparison site, confirms on its telecom bills page, updated on 27 October 2026, that no reduced rate applies any more to internet, mobile, landline or television.

I ran the numbers on five bundles with a decoder, each at its non-promotional price and its survey date:

Four bundles out of five charge more VAT in a year than the 100.00 euros of the old Walloon fee. Only the Scarlet Trio stays below it.

The objection is a serious one, and I take it. This VAT is mostly on internet, not on television. Isolate VOO's TV component, 17.00 euros a month in a bundle on 17 October 2026: it contains 2.95 euros of VAT a month, or 35.40 euros a year. That is a third of the fee charged before 2018. On television alone, Walloon households did come out ahead.

The nuance comes from how operators sell. Nobody sells television on its own at a teaser price any more. It comes attached to an internet line paid at full rate, and the second-year price is the one that counts. Telenet Basic with TV rises from 51.00 to 76.00 euros from the seventh bill onwards, according to the survey of 11 October 2026. That 25.00 euro monthly increase comes to 300.00 euros a year. Three Walloon licence fees.

The rest of the bill is not tax. Activation fees, installation, renting an extra decoder, channel add-ons: all of that can be negotiated, compared and cancelled after six months without a penalty, as the BIPT, Belgium's telecom regulator, points out.

Does a French expat have to declare their television?

No, neither in Belgium nor in France.

The French contribution à l'audiovisuel public, 138.00 euros a year in mainland France, was abolished by the amending finance law of 16 August 2022. There is nothing left to tick on a French tax return for a television. In Belgium there is no declaration to make and no form to fill in on arrival: the municipality enters you in the population register, the operator bills you for the subscription, and the television question ends there.

The habit worth picking up, coming from a country where television was taxed, is to read the operator's bill with a dated price in front of you. That is where your television budget is decided now. To compare bundles on their second-year price, the TV subscription ranking orders them by the thirteenth bill, and the article on what a TV subscription really costs in Belgium details the gaps between promotional and full prices. If your income is modest, the social tariff for internet and TV also caps the bill.

Nothing to pay the Region, 94 to 158 euros of VAT a year to the State

The licence fee has gone everywhere in Belgium, for good in Wallonia since 1 January 2018. Keep an eye on two things all the same: an old Walloon reminder for a 2017 period, to be checked on 1718 before paying, and the price of your bundle in its second year, which now costs far more than the tax that was abolished.

Sources consulted on 27 October 2026: Wallonia, TV licence fee page; SPW Finances, television licence fee; Brussels ordinance of 21 February 2002; Brussels-Capital Region, flat-rate regional tax; CSA, is there a TV licence fee; RTBF, 3 May 2017; Test-Achats, 24 October 2017; BIPT, contract duration. Bundle prices: scarlet.be and base.be surveyed on 27 October 2026, other operators from the surveys behind our rankings.