Posting exposure and filing deadline

Six workers to Austria, no ZKO3 filed before the first hour of work: EUR 60000. That is the statutory ceiling a Slovak or Polish subcontracting firm is standing under the morning the crew starts, and the same six workers sent to Italy instead carry a ceiling of EUR 3600.

That gap is the whole problem with posting workers inside the EU. The duty is European - Directive 96/71/EC as amended by Directive (EU) 2018/957 - but the price of getting it wrong is national, and the national numbers are 16 times apart.

Austria fines under s26 LSD-BG, per affected employee, and the ceiling rises when the company has been caught before. Germany's AEntG s23 reaches EUR 30000 for a notification breach. France's Code du travail L.1264-3 sets EUR 4000 per posted worker, doubled to EUR 8000 on a repeat inside two years, with an overall cap of EUR 500000. The Netherlands works from WagwEU at EUR 12000. Italy, under D.Lgs 136/2016, is the outlier at the bottom - EUR 600 per worker, capped at EUR 150000 - and the outlier on timing too: the Cliclavoro UNI_Distacco_UE form is due the day before the start, not on the start.

A mobility coordinator with four jobs in the air cannot hold five articles in their head, and this is the question a general-purpose model answers badly: ask a chatbot what a missed posting notification costs and it returns one blended European figure, wrong in 5 out of 5 of these countries.

Posted Worker Fine Exposure 2026 is a browser extension, and the same calculation runs as a free web page. You type the host country, how many workers go, the first working day and the planned length. It returns the ceiling per posted worker under that country's own article, the ceiling for the job, the portal by name, the due date and the days left.

It also runs a clock most checklists skip. Under Directive (EU) 2018/957 Art 3(1a), once a posting passes twelve months the host country's labour law applies to that worker in full, and the extension to eighteen months needs a motivated notification. Enter a start of 2026-10-05 and a length of fourteen months and the tool returns 2027-10-05 and says the motivated notification is required before it; enter three months and it says the extension is not required.

A worked case, calculated on 2026-09-17: twenty-five workers to France, starting 2026-11-02, three months, company already sanctioned once. The repeat uplift applies, so the ceiling is EUR 8000 per worker rather than EUR 4000, the job reads EUR 200000 under the EUR 500000 cap, SIPSI is named, and 46 days are left to file. Move the start into the past and the status line stops counting down and says the ceiling is live.

All five country rules are free. There is no key, no watermark and no run limit on the calculation, in the extension or in the web page, because withholding the answer is not a business model. The $60 licence key adds a different axis - owning and repeating rather than more of the same: CSV export of every posting you have calculated, so the register can be handed to an auditor, and browser alarms scheduled before each filing date so a job does not start unnotified.

The filing itself is cheap. The 2019 EU posting administrative-cost study puts the employer admin cost of one A1 certificate at EUR 6.80 to EUR 10.28 depending on the country, while the Austrian ceiling for skipping the notification is EUR 20000 per posted worker. The paperwork was never the expensive part. Missing it is.

Ceilings are statutory maxima; what an inspectorate actually imposes is its own decision. Check the national article before you rely on a filing.