Almost a year after the tax office said it would begin enforcing rules aimed at ending sham self-employment, the expected mass exit of freelancers has not taken place, according to an analysis by the Volkskrant.

Despite warnings of “empty classrooms” and a “care infarction”, 94% of freelancers have continued working, the paper said.

Nevertheless, figures from the national statistics office CBS show that for the first time in more than 10 years, the number of freelancers has fallen. In the third quarter, the CBS counted 73,000 fewer freelancers than a year earlier, marking what chief economist Piet Hein van Mulligen said was “a clear break” with the previous decade of rapid growth.

The change follows years of policy aimed at stimulating entrepreneurship, including tax advantages that made freelance work attractive for both workers and employers.

The sharpest reductions are in healthcare, where 20,000 freelancers stopped working independently, followed by smaller declines in education, industry and the financial sector. The number of freelancers in the cultural sector has remained stable.

Those who left freelance work often shifted to payroll jobs, the Volkskrant said. On average, 30,000 former freelancers moved into employment each quarter this year. Smaller groups became agency or on-call workers, left the labour market or became unemployed.

Around 1.2 million people in the Netherlands currently work as freelancers. The social affairs ministry said in July it estimates that around 200,000 of the Netherlands’ registered freelancers should be employed on standard contracts.

Work is underway on new legislation which will give more clarity about who is a freelancer and who is not. That draft bill includes a €36 per hour minimum wage, with the aim of weeding out delivery drivers and other low-paid workers.

However, its future remains in doubt because of opposition in the lower house of parliament, and it will probably be up to the new government to draw up a new definition of what freelance work entails, the Volkskrant said.

Meanwhile, legal experts warn that enforcement will tighten again next year, when the tax office will start issuing fines to companies employing freelancers who, under current definitions, should actually be on ordinary contracts.

The current rules, which actually came into force in 2016 but have been ignored until now, state that someone is presumed to be self-employed if they carry financial risks, have their own tools and other equipment, have specific expertise that the company renting them does not have and present themselves as a freelancer while working.