UPTR has the (good) habit of having a parliamentary question every year to the Federal Minister of Finance about the excise duties on diesel and about the professional diesel. This year, MP Gilles Foret (MR) who appealed to Jan Jambon.
“Thanks to this annual exercise, the UPTR has objective data with which the (often bizarre) ideas can be tested against the current reality in terms of budget and mobility,” explains Michaël Reul, Secretary-General of the UPTR.
In total, all road users paid no less than 6.42 billion euros in excise duties to the Belgian state. That is an absolute record. The road transporters have contributed 28.1 % to the total amount, or 1.8 billion euros. “And then no account has not been taken of the quantities of diesel that are not eligible for a repayment of professional diesel. Vans used by carriers, for example, are not covered by this scheme,” explains Michaël Reul.
The majority of this amount (56 %) comes from foreign carriers. In 2024, Belgian carriers paid a total of 794 million euros in excise duties to the treasury and received 253 million euros in the context of the professional diesel. “These figures show in an extremely objective way that adjusting the professional diesel entails the risk of missing out on almost a billion euros in tax revenues,” concludes Michaël Reul. As a reminder: the current federal government has clearly decided to retain the professional diesel.
