What is a counter-offer?
A counter-offer is an improved proposal from your current employer, made once you have resigned or made it clear you intend to. It usually arrives as more money, sometimes with a title or a change of scope attached.
It is a retention response, and it is triggered by your departure rather than by your performance. That timing is the most informative thing about it.
Why do counter-offers so often fail?
Because they answer the number, and the number is rarely the reason. People leave over the work, the manager, the trajectory or the absence of one, and a salary correction leaves all four exactly where they were.
There is a second effect that is easy to underestimate. Accepting a counter-offer changes how you are seen internally: you are now known to have looked, and to have been retained by an intervention. That does not always matter, but it never helps in the next round of decisions about who gets what.
Can you withdraw your resignation in Belgium?
Not on your own. A notice that has been validly served cannot be revoked unilaterally: undoing it requires the agreement of the other party. If your employer is offering to keep you, that agreement is presumably there, but it has to be explicit rather than assumed.
The same applies in reverse when an employer tries to take back a dismissal. The point is that resignation in Belgium is not a conversation you can reopen by yourself, which is a good reason not to serve notice until the new contract is signed.
How should you read a counter-offer?
Against the reason you started looking, not against the offer you already have. Write the reason down before the conversation, because it is remarkably easy to lose sight of it when someone is arguing to keep you.
Then ask what has changed structurally rather than financially, and why it needed a resignation to happen. If the honest answer is that nothing changed except the salary, the situation you wanted to leave is the situation you would be staying in. If you are weighing a move, gross vs net salary is the right basis for comparing the two figures, and you can see how each of the roles currently open is structured.
