Administrative Areas (Bestuurlijke Gebieden) — Kadaster / Netherlands

What This Dataset Is

The official administrative boundaries of the Netherlands: 342 municipalities (gemeenten), 12 provinces (provincies), and 1 national territory (landgebied). This is the authoritative reference dataset for Dutch administrative divisions, maintained by Kadaster and published via PDOK.

The dataset is updated annually on January 1st to reflect municipal mergers (herindelingen). This is the 2026 edition. The number of municipalities has been declining through mergers: 355 (2020) → 352 (2021) → 345 (2022) → 342 (2023–2026).

CBS (Statistics Netherlands) assigns municipality codes that are used across all Dutch government datasets. This dataset is the fundamental reference for spatial joins with any Dutch dataset that uses municipality or province codes.

Source: https://www.pdok.nl/introductie/-/article/0c3b462c-0a5d-463f-b082-51ed7bdf7684 Provider: Kadaster (Netherlands Cadastre, Land Registry and Mapping Agency) License: CC BY 4.0 (attribution required)

How to Access

The collection contains three separate GeoParquet files (one per administrative level), all in EPSG:28992. The municipality file is the most commonly used.

Files are small: gemeentegebied ~8 MB, provinciegebied ~1.6 MB, landgebied ~0.4 MB.

Files

Schema — Gemeentegebied (Municipalities)

Schema — Provinciegebied (Provinces)

Schema — Landgebied (National Territory)

The 12 Provinces

Code System

CBS municipality codes are stable numeric codes that do not change. When municipalities merge, the new municipality gets a new code. The code field adds a prefix:

• GM for gemeenten (e.g., GM0363 = Amsterdam)
• PV for provincies (e.g., PV27 = Noord-Holland)
• LND for land (e.g., LND6030 = Nederland)

These coded identifiers are used across all Dutch government datasets (CBS statistics, BAG, BRP, Kadaster), making this dataset the fundamental reference for spatial joins.

Geometry Notes

• CRS is EPSG:28992 (Amersfoort / RD New). Reproject to EPSG:4326 for web maps.
• Covers European Netherlands only (not Caribbean municipalities Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, Saba).
• Bounding box (RD): X 10,425–278,026, Y 306,846–621,876.
• All geometries are MultiPolygon.

Useful Query Patterns

List all municipalities in a province

Count municipalities per province

Find which municipality a point falls in

Compute municipality areas

Note: Area computation in EPSG:28992 gives accurate results in square metres since it's a projected CRS.

Join with other datasets using gemeente code

Load into GeoPandas

Related Datasets

• CBS Gebiedsindelingen (also in this catalog, planned): Much broader — includes COROP regions, labor market regions, safety regions, water boards, and 20+ other regional classifications.
• CBS Wijken en Buurten (also in this catalog, planned): Demographic data at the neighborhood level, joinable via municipality code.
• BAG (Kadaster): Building and address registry, references municipality codes.

Caveats

• European Netherlands only — excludes Caribbean Netherlands (BES islands).
• The 2026 edition has 342 municipalities. If joining with older datasets, check for municipality mergers that may have changed codes.
• The ligt_in_provincie_code and ligt_in_provincie_naam fields are only present in gemeentegebied; ligt_in_land_code and ligt_in_land_naam only in provinciegebied.

Visualization Styles

One Mapbox GL v8 style is available for interactive map visualization.

Style files are Mapbox GL v8 JSON with relative PMTiles source paths. They can be used with MapLibre GL JS, OpenLayers (via ol-mapbox-style), or any Mapbox GL v8-compatible renderer.

• styles/default.json — Light peach municipality fills with red boundary lines and labeled names. Clean administrative reference map.

Style files are at: https://data.source.coop/cholmes/portolan-nl/kadaster/bestuurlijke_gebieden/styles/

Also Available As

• PMTiles (vector tiles): bestuurlijke_gebieden.pmtiles — municipality boundaries for web visualization.
• GeoPackage: All three layers in one file from PDOK Atom feed.
• OGC API Features: https://api.pdok.nl/kadaster/brk-bestuurlijke-gebieden/ogc/v1/.

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Hand-maintained agent guide (ported from this collection's llms.txt in August 2026). Update it alongside collection.json.