Data sources & credits

PlanetExpat combines official statistics with our own scoring model. The underlying data is public and openly licensed; the scores, profile weights and rankings are our own work and are not endorsed by the sources below. Figures are indicative and can lag the latest release.

Neighbourhood and city statistics

CBS, Statistics Netherlands. Most figures on this site come from CBS open data, chiefly Kerncijfers wijken en buurten (key figures per district and neighbourhood) and related StatLine tables: population and households, average household size, the housing stock and the owner versus rental split, the average property (WOZ) value, the share of residents with a migration background, and the number of registered businesses.

Source: CBS, StatLine open data (cbs.nl). Licensed under CC BY 4.0. Year-on-year trends use the prior CBS release (2023 baseline) for the same indicators.

City figures versus neighbourhood figures

A figure for a whole city and a figure for a neighbourhood are not the same measurement here, and the difference is deliberate.

Our neighbourhood data counts residential areas only. An area qualifies when enough people actually live there; ports, business parks, cemeteries and large parks are left out, because a harbour with four residents should not shape what a city looks like to someone deciding where to live. City and district figures are then built up from those neighbourhoods, weighted by population, so a large neighbourhood counts for more than a small one.

Average home value is the exception: we combine it as a harmonic mean rather than a plain average. Affordability is about what a euro buys, and averaging the plain values would overstate it for cities where cheap and expensive neighbourhoods sit side by side.

The practical consequence: our figure for a city will usually sit below the official municipal figure published by Statistics Netherlands, and the gap is larger in cities with more non-residential ground. Neither number is wrong; they answer different questions. Our editorial articles quote the official municipal figures and say so, because they compare cities as cities.

Safety and registered crime

The safety metric is built from registered crime data (Dutch police, published via CBS StatLine table 47018NED). We count liveability-relevant offences such as violence, residential burglary, vandalism and nuisance, and deliberately exclude footfall-driven types like pickpocketing and bicycle theft so dense, busy areas are not unfairly penalised.

Source: Politie / CBS StatLine (47018NED). Licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Rent estimates

Per-city rent anchors use the Rent.nl Nationale Huurindex (free-market asking rent, in euro per square metre). We scale that city anchor down to district and neighbourhood level using the local WOZ value ratio, for a reference flat of about 60 m². Rent figures are therefore an indicative estimate, not a listing price.

Source: Rent.nl Nationale Huurindex. One consistent source is used across all cities so the comparison stays fair; note that an index based partly on small and furnished units reads slightly high in student cities.

Maps

Location maps are embedded via the Google MapsEmbed API and remain subject to Google’s terms.

Photography

City photos come from free stock libraries. Most are from Unsplash (Unsplash License) and Pexels (Pexels License), which do not require attribution; we credit the photographers as good practice. Some images come from Wikimedia Commons and are used under their stated licences (public domain / Creative Commons), with attribution where the licence requires it.

A full per-photo credit list is maintained alongside the images. To request a correction or removal of any photo, contact us.

Corrections

All sources here are public and openly licensed. If you believe a figure is out of date, a source is mis-attributed, or an image should be credited differently or removed, let us know via the contact page and we will fix it.