The Brussels Times Paywall: How to Read Brussels Times Articles for Free

The Brussels Times is Belgium's English-language daily news site. It began as a print magazine in the 1960s and relaunched online as a daily, and it is now the first stop for the expatriate, EU and diplomatic communities in Brussels who want Belgian politics, property, transport, policing and culture covered in English rather than in French or Dutch. It also runs a quarterly print magazine of longer pieces. For most of its online life the site was free, but it has since introduced a metered paywall for non-subscribers, so a reader who follows more than a few links a month now meets the subscription prompt. This guide explains how the paywall works and how to read a full article.

How the Brussels Times paywall works

The Brussels Times runs a metered paywall built on the Piano platform, the same subscription system used by many European and American publishers. A non-subscriber can open a limited number of articles in a month before a box appears asking them to register or subscribe, and the count is kept in a browser cookie. As far as we can tell some articles are also marked for subscribers only and close from the first visit.

The gate is enforced in the browser. The article text is delivered in the page so that search engines can index it, and a script then checks whether you are a subscriber or over your limit and replaces the body with the subscription box. A reader that fetches the page without running that script receives the complete article. Our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls sets out why that distinction matters, and The Brussels Times sits firmly on the softer side of it.

Our tests on 22 October 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• A 693-word Brussels Times report on Brussels municipalities turning to taxes as transfers from the regional government dry up, based on a Belfius analysis of their finances, loaded in full, all 23 paragraphs.
• A 942-word Brussels Times property report on why Brussels homes are taking longer to sell, with sellers cutting prices as high interest rates and renovation costs push buyers elsewhere, loaded in full, all 30 paragraphs.
• A 1,569-word Brussels Times feature by Maïthé Chini on why Belgium is regulating sex work and removing prostitution from the criminal law, with interviews including the justice minister, loaded in full, all 30 paragraphs.

Read a Brussels Times article in full

• Copy the article link. Brussels Times links look like brusselstimes.com/ followed by a numeric id and a slug, for example brusselstimes.com/2364382/communes-in-brussels-turn-to-taxes.
• Paste it into the box on the home page and press Read Article.
• The story appears in a clean reader view with the headline, byline and full text.

Other approaches

• Newsletters. The Brussels Times sends free daily and weekly email bulletins that summarise the main stories and link to them.
• Private windows. The monthly meter lives in a cookie, so a private window resets it, though subscriber-only pieces stay closed.
• Related free sources. The Belgian federal and regional governments, the Brussels parliament and Statbel publish their documents free, and the European institutions' own press material is open, so much of what The Brussels Times reports can be checked at source.
• Other English coverage. The public broadcasters VRT and RTBF both publish free English-language news pages covering Belgium.

How it compares with other Belgian papers

The Brussels Times is one of only two Belgian titles that pass. The other is the Brussels tabloid DH, which works. La Libre, De Standaard, Het Laatste Nieuws, De Morgen and Gazet van Antwerpen all blocked the reader in our October 2026 tests, so there are no guides for them, and Politico Europe's Pro stories arrive as teasers. Across the border, the Dutch quality daily NRC does work. The full list of sites that work is kept current, and our guide to sites that cannot be bypassed explains what to do about the rest.

Subscribe if you read it regularly

The Brussels Times is a small newsroom covering a city and a country that the international press otherwise reports only through the EU institutions. If you read it every day for Belgian news in English, a digital subscription is the right way to keep that coverage going.