Most fleet trend lists are safe bets dressed up as predictions. This one is deliberately narrower. Every item below has either a date in the calendar or a switch-off already scheduled, which is what separates a planning item from an interesting read. For Belgian fleet operators, 2026 is unusually dense with both, and several of the deadlines land on vehicles and processes that have never been in scope before.
If you run vehicles, trailers or plant in Belgium, this is the shortlist worth putting in front of a budget holder.
1. Zero-emission stopped being an ambition and became a tax deadline
The single largest change to Belgian fleet economics is fiscal, not technical. Petrol and diesel company cars ordered from 1 January 2026 no longer attract tax deductibility. Zero-emission cars acquired before 1 January 2027 keep 100% deductibility, and for zero-emission cars acquired after that date the percentage tapers down over the following years. Plug-in hybrids sit under a separate transitional regime rather than falling off the same cliff, with a deductibility floor for vehicles taken on before the end of 2027 and a more favourable cap for the lowest-emission models, and the treatment differs between companies and the self-employed. Because that interacts with the exact acquisition date and CO2 figure of each individual vehicle, it is worth confirming per vehicle with your accountant rather than applying a single fleet-wide rule. The current schedule is set out by Securex.
The practical effect is that 2026 is the last full year in which an electric company car can be brought in at the most favourable rate, and the last year in which a straight petrol or diesel order still looks defensible on paper.
For fleet managers this turns a replacement cycle into a sequencing problem. Which vehicles are due, in what order, and what does each one actually do all day? That last question is answered by trip data rather than by opinion. Real duty cycles, daily distances and idle patterns from GPS tracking tell you which vehicles are genuinely electrifiable now and which ones are not, before you commit to a lease.
2. Belgium’s low emission zones stopped moving as one country
For years the safe assumption was that Belgian low emission zones would tighten together, at roughly the same pace. That assumption broke.
Brussels went ahead. Since 1 January 2026, Euro 5 diesel and Euro 2 petrol vehicles no longer meet the access criteria for the Brussels LEZ, covering cars, vans, buses and lorries. Enforcement followed rather than accompanied the rule: fines started from March 2026, at EUR 350, and can recur. The official criteria and calendar are published at lez.brussels.
Flanders did the opposite. The planned tightening for Antwerp and Ghent was shelved, so the access rules already in force in both cities continue to apply, and vehicles that Brussels now refuses are still admitted in Flanders, in some categories against payment of a fee. Current rules per city are published by Antwerp and Ghent.
The operational consequence is the interesting part. A single national vehicle policy no longer produces a compliant fleet, because compliance now depends on which city a given vehicle enters. That is a routing and allocation problem: knowing which vehicle is approaching which zone, and whether that specific vehicle is allowed in. Zone-aware alerting through geofencing is a considerably cheaper control than a recurring EUR 350 fine. We covered the zone-by-zone picture in more detail in our guide to Belgium’s low emission zones in 2026.
3. Tachographs arrive in the van fleet on 1 July 2026
From 1 July 2026, vans between 2.5 and 3.5 tonnes used in international transport or cabotage fall within scope of the smart tachograph requirement under the EU Mobility Package. Purely domestic operations are not affected by this step.
This is the year’s most underestimated item, because it does not change an existing obligation, it creates one for a class of vehicle that never had it. Fleets running light commercial vehicles across the border are being brought into driving time and rest time rules, driver cards, and the record keeping that goes with them, often with no tachograph experience anywhere in the business. Two constraints follow. Workshop capacity for installation is finite and shared across Europe, so booking late is its own risk. And once the devices are fitted, someone has to download and retain the data, which is why remote tachograph download matters more for these operators than for anyone already used to the process. Our FAQ on CANbus and tacho download covers the mechanics. Belgian requirements for road transport operators are published by FPS Mobility and Transport.
4. The 2G sunset turns telematics from software into a hardware project
Connectivity trends usually appear on these lists as an upgrade opportunity. In Belgium it is now a countdown.
3G has been switched off since July 2025. 2G is still running, precisely because it carries so much machine-to-machine traffic, but Belgian operators have announced retirement of their 2G networks across 2028 and 2029, with the phase-out period generally framed as 2028 to 2030. The regulator, BIPT, publishes the current position.
Two or three years of notice sounds comfortable until you match it against a tracker refresh cycle. Any device still on 2G only has a defined end of service now, and a tracking unit that stops reporting takes the vehicle’s history, utilisation record and compliance trail with it. The honest way to treat this is as an asset inventory exercise in 2026: establish which units are 2G only, when each vehicle is next due off the road anyway, and align the two so the replacement costs a service visit rather than an emergency. This applies with particular force to asset and trailer tracking, where units are often fitted once, run on very little data, and are then left alone for years.
5. Freight paperwork moves to a digital default
The direction of travel on transport documents is settled, and the dates are worth stating carefully, because trade coverage tends to blur them.
Regulation (EU) 2020/1056 on electronic freight transport information, the eFTI Regulation, is in force and applies from 21 August 2024. It obliges Member State authorities to accept regulatory freight information supplied electronically through certified eFTI platforms, with that acceptance obligation phasing in towards 2027. Separately, and specifically for this region, the Benelux pilot for electronic consignment notes, eCMR, has been extended until 9 July 2027, which is why Belgian, Dutch and Luxembourg operators can already run digital consignment notes on cross-border trips within Benelux.
The trend to plan for is not the abolition of paper on a single date. It is that digital becomes the assumed format for a roadside check, and paper becomes the exception you have to produce. Fleets that already capture proof of delivery, timestamps and consignment data electronically will find this a formality. Those still reconciling paper against a separate tracking system will do the integration work twice.
6. Integration beats another dashboard
The measurable shift in fleet software over the past few years has been away from standalone systems that each own a screen, and towards data that lands where the work already happens: payroll, ERP, invoicing, planning, maintenance.
The reason is unglamorous. A dashboard nobody opens produces no decisions, whereas the same trip and driver data pushed into payroll or invoicing removes manual re-entry and the errors that come with it. Both the compliance items above reinforce this, because tachograph records and zone-access evidence are only useful if they can be produced on request rather than reconstructed. Suivo exposes this through API integrations, which is generally the difference between a system that gets adopted and one that gets tolerated.
7. AI and predictive maintenance, judged on the data underneath
Predictive maintenance and AI-assisted analysis are genuinely useful in fleets, most concretely in fuel and energy consumption, in driver behaviour coaching, and in spotting the failure patterns that turn into roadside breakdowns.
The caveat worth carrying into any 2026 evaluation is that these techniques are only as good as the vehicle data feeding them. A model built on patchy positions, missing CANbus values or trackers dropping off a retiring network will produce confident output built on gaps. This is the practical link between items four and seven: the connectivity refresh is not just a compliance chore, it is what makes the analytics worth having.
8. Vehicle data and workforce data stop living in separate systems
The last trend is the one most specific to Belgium. Working time registration is heading towards a general obligation for employers, and enforcement of driving and rest time in transport is tightening at the same moment. Those two lines are converging on a single question: when was this person working, and where.
Fleet and workforce data have historically been separate purchases. Increasingly they are one record, particularly for operators running mixed teams across sites and vehicles, as in transport and logistics and construction. Linking time tracking to vehicle movement makes hours verifiable rather than self-reported, which is exactly what an inspection asks for. We looked at how this plays out for hauliers in time registration in Belgian transport, and Van Moer is a worked example of the combined approach.
What to actually do in 2026
A short version, in the order the deadlines fall:
- Review pending vehicle orders against the 1 January 2026 deductibility change before any combustion order is confirmed.
- Check whether any vehicle enters the Brussels LEZ, and whether that specific vehicle still qualifies. Do this before March fines accumulate rather than after.
- List every van between 2.5 and 3.5 tonnes that crosses a border and book tachograph installation early, ahead of 1 July 2026.
- Inventory your trackers for 2G-only hardware and fold replacement into scheduled maintenance rather than waiting for the switch-off.
- Ask what your telematics data connects to. If the answer is only a dashboard, that is the gap.
Talk to Suivo
Suivo builds vehicle tracking, asset management and workforce solutions for Belgian operators, which means the deadlines above are the ones our customers are working to as well. If you would like to work through what applies to your own fleet, book a free demo and we will go through it with you.
