A practical planning platform for European work, pay and VAT questions

WorkDaten started in early 2025 as a private spreadsheet. I was working as a freelance software engineer based in Austria, taking on client work across Germany, the Netherlands, France and Italy, and I kept needing the same answers over and over: how many working days does this quarter contain in this country, when is the next public holiday in that one, what is the current Blue Card salary threshold this year, and how exactly do I invoice a German B2B client from Austria with reverse-charge VAT?

Every time I tried to find one of these answers I ended up bouncing between four government websites in three languages, a couple of expat forums of doubtful freshness and a handful of accountants' blogs that contradicted each other. I spent more hours triangulating data than I spent writing client code. After three months of this I started keeping a single private document, one tab per country, with the data and the source URLs.

By the middle of 2025 the spreadsheet had become useful enough that I rebuilt it as a small website for my own bookmarks. Friends and other freelancers asked for access. By late 2025 it became clear the site could be useful to anyone trying to plan working life across European borders — payroll teams scheduling quarter-end, HR planning leave, freelancers invoicing across countries, families thinking about a move. So I rebuilt it again properly, in twenty-five languages, and put it online.

Every piece of substantive information on WorkDaten is traced back to a primary source — a government website, an EU regulation, a published statistical release, or a parliamentary gazette. Aggregator sites, commercial blogs and AI summaries are not acceptable sources for us. When we cite a salary threshold or a visa requirement, we link to the exact decree that set it.

Translations into our twenty-five languages are produced by professional translators and human-reviewed before publication. We do not publish raw machine-translated text as final content; pages we have not yet been able to translate to that standard are held back from indexing rather than served as low-quality content. The same rule applies to substantive text: WorkDaten does not publish AI-generated articles.

Each visa, holiday calendar and salary page is reviewed end-to-end at least once per year, and again whenever a legislative change comes to our attention through official-gazette monitoring. The "Reviewed by the WorkDaten editorial team on …" date you see at the top of every content page is the date of the most recent review, not the date the data was first published.

WorkDaten is self-funded by its founder, runs on a small Vercel hosting bill, and accepts no outside investment. We do not represent any law firm, relocation agency, immigration consultancy, bank or accountant. We do not accept payment for editorial coverage and we do not amplify or hide a country, visa or city based on commercial interest.

If at some point we add affiliate links — for example to a recognised bank that offers expat-friendly accounts, or to a credentials-evaluation service — those links will carry a visible "Affiliate" tag and will appear only where the recommendation is genuinely useful to the reader, never on the data pages themselves. Until that day, every link on this site is editorial.

The next twelve months are about depth, not breadth. Immigration coverage will expand from the current six countries (Germany, Austria, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, France) to also include Portugal, Ireland, Belgium and Sweden, each with the same Austria-level depth — full visa pages with eligibility, salary thresholds, document checklists, family rules and PR pathways.

Working-days and public-holidays pages will gain seasonal context and bridge-day analysis for every month. The salary section will gain per-country take-home pay calculators that read directly from the tax-bracket data. We will add a visa-fee calculator and an EU residence-permit eligibility quiz before the end of the year.

If you spot a mistake, a stale figure or a missing visa, the Contact page reaches us directly. Reader corrections move faster than any of our internal review cycles, and we are grateful for every one.