  We consider electro-weak Higgs plus three jets production at NLO QCD beyond
strict VBF acceptance cuts. We investigate, for the first time, how accurate
the VBF approximation is in these regions and within perturbative
uncertainties, by a detailed comparison of full and approximate calculations.
We find that a rapidity gap between the tagging jets guarantees a good
approximation, while an invariant mass cut alone is not sufficient, which needs
to be confronted with experimental choices. We also find that a significant
part of the QCD corrections can be attributed to Higgs-Strahlungs-type
topologies.
