Buildings (INSPIRE Harmonized) — Kadaster / Netherlands

What This Dataset Is

All buildings in the Netherlands — 24.2 million footprint polygons — from the BAG (Basisregistratie Adressen en Gebouwen, the Dutch national building registry), harmonized to the EU INSPIRE Buildings schema by Kadaster and published via PDOK.

This is the authoritative Dutch building dataset. Every building that has ever been registered in the BAG is here, including historical versions. Construction dates range from before 1800 to present, with ~1 million "planned" entries dated 9999-01-01.

The dataset includes both current and historical building records. To get only current buildings, filter for endLifespanVersion IS NULL.

No building heights or floor counts. The INSPIRE Buildings 2D profile from PDOK only includes footprints, construction dates, and identifiers. For heights, use 3DBAG from TU Delft, which derives building heights from the AHN point cloud and includes fields like h_dak_50pct (median roof height).

Source: https://www.pdok.nl/introductie/-/article/gebouwen-inspire-geharmoniseerd- Provider: Kadaster (Netherlands Cadastre, Land Registry and Mapping Agency) License: CC0 (public domain)

How to Access

This is a GeoParquet 1.1.0 file with bbox covering columns and Hilbert spatial sorting, making it efficient for spatial range queries. Use DuckDB with the spatial extension.

The file is 2.1 GB. For large queries, DuckDB can stream it efficiently using HTTP range requests — you don't need to download the full file. The bbox covering columns and Hilbert sorting enable DuckDB to skip irrelevant row groups for spatial filters.

Schema — Field Meanings

Important Columns

The columns you'll actually use are:

• localId — BAG building ID (the key identifier)
• anyPoint — construction date
• endLifespanVersion — null means current, non-null means historical
• geometry — building footprint polygon

Everything else is either constant, unpopulated, or internal.

Geometry Notes

• CRS is EPSG:4258 (ETRS89) — this is the EU standard CRS, practically identical to WGS84 (EPSG:4326). The difference is sub-meter, so you can treat coordinates as WGS84 for most purposes.
• Geometry column is named geometry (WKB encoded)
• All geometries are simple Polygons (no MultiPolygon)
• Bounding box: longitude 3.16° to 7.23°, latitude 50.75° to 53.54° (all of Netherlands)
• The file has bbox covering columns and Hilbert spatial sorting — DuckDB can use these for efficient spatial filtering

Current vs Historical Records

The dataset contains 24.2M rows total:

• 12.6M current records (endLifespanVersion IS NULL)
• 11.5M superseded records (endLifespanVersion IS NOT NULL)

Multiple rows with the same localId represent the version history of a single building. Always filter for current records unless you specifically need the history.

Construction Date Distribution

Peak construction years: 2021 (486K), 2020 (479K), 2019 (446K). The 1950–1999 period dominates — post-war reconstruction and suburban expansion.

Useful Query Patterns

Get current buildings only (most common starting point)

Count current vs historical records

Construction year distribution

Find buildings in a specific area (DuckDB spatial)

This uses the bbox covering columns for fast filtering — DuckDB skips row groups whose bbox ranges don't overlap. Much faster than ST_Intersects for bounding-box queries.

Spatial intersection with a point (e.g., Amsterdam Centraal)

Buildings constructed before 1800 (still standing)

Version history of a specific building

Count buildings per municipality (using BAG ID prefix)

The first 4 digits of localId encode the municipality code (gemeentecode).

Compute building footprint area

Load into GeoPandas

INSPIRE Schema Context

This dataset follows the INSPIRE Buildings 2D profile (bu-core2d). The INSPIRE schema defines many more fields (currentUse, conditionOfConstruction, heightAboveGround, numberOfFloorsAboveGround, etc.) but the Dutch PDOK service only populates the core identity and lifecycle fields listed above. For richer building attributes (height, roof type, floor count, etc.), use the 3DBAG dataset from TU Delft (3dbag.nl) which uses native Dutch BAG field names instead of INSPIRE names.

Caveats

• Construction dates as strings: The anyPoint field is an ISO 8601 string, not a proper date type. Use LEFT(anyPoint, 4) to extract the year, or cast with CAST(LEFT(anyPoint, 4) AS INT) for numeric comparisons.
• 9999 dates: About 1 million records have anyPoint = '9999-01-01T00:00:00+01:00', meaning the construction date is unknown or the building is planned. Filter these out for historical analysis.
• 0001 dates: A small number of records have year 0001, likely data quality issues.
• Version history inflates row count: The 24.2M total includes 11.5M superseded records. If you just want current buildings, filter for endLifespanVersion IS NULL to get ~12.6M records.
• No building attributes beyond dates: This INSPIRE harmonization only includes construction dates and identifiers. There's no height, use type, or condition data. For those, see 3DBAG.
• Municipality code extraction: The localId encodes the gemeente code in its first 4 digits (e.g., localId 363100000000197 → gemeente 0363 = Amsterdam). But this requires knowing the digit structure: LPAD(CAST(localId / 10000000000 AS VARCHAR), 4, '0').

Visualization Styles

Two Mapbox GL v8 styles are available for interactive map visualization via the PMTiles file.

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 — Gray building footprints with darker outlines. Neutral monochrome rendering, visually distinct from the BAG light version.
• styles/by-construction-date.json — Construction era analysis. Parses year from the ISO 8601 anyPoint field and applies a brown-to-yellow age ramp. Same analytical purpose as the BAG by-age style but using INSPIRE-harmonized date fields.

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

Also Available As

• GML (INSPIRE format): buildings.gml.gz (2.7 GB compressed, ~45 GB uncompressed) — the original INSPIRE-harmonized GML from PDOK's ATOM download service.
• PMTiles (vector tiles): buildings.pmtiles — for web map visualization with MapLibre GL JS or similar. Features are dropped at lower zoom levels for performance.
• WFS: Live access via https://service.pdok.nl/kadaster/bu/wfs/v1_0 (slower, paginated).

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